155 | I'm Doubling Down on This Social Media Platform in 2024

There is one social media platform that I think is going to drive the most organic growth for podcasters in 2024. And you might be surprised which one that is. But this platform is currently in the stage where you get a disproportionate amount of organic reach and engagement based on the effort that you put in. And so today I'm going to share with you what that platform is. Why it works that way so I'm going to give a little bit of a history lesson on social media and that lesson is going to help you better understand social media so that you can use social media to get more listeners to your podcast way more easily. Let's do it. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast growth coach. And over the holidays, I published a 12-day series called the 12 Days of Podcast Growth. You probably have come across it here on the podcast feed because the episode that you're listening to now is the first episode that I'm publishing after the 12 days of podcast growth. Now I did that 12 day challenge for a couple of reasons. Number one, I just felt like I was overdue to provide you the Grow the Show listener with the 30,000 foot view of my methodology and the way that I think about how to grow a show. Number two, I really wanted to have an exercise where I was forced to simplify that 30,000 foot view and boil down what I teach into the true fundamentals. And then number three, I wanted to try out daily podcasting to see what it's like. And side note, much respect to you daily podcasters out there. Holy crap, it is very difficult. So those of you who have been podcasting every day for years don't know how you do it man respect. So I got a lot out of the 12 days of podcast growth exercise as a creator, but there was one thing that really surprised me and that was social media. You see every day I published an email version of the lesson and audio version of the lessons which you can find on this feed. And then I also adopted that day's lesson into a written version to share on several platforms. And so I shared each lesson on X slash Twitter. I shared it on threads which is met as new Twitter clone. I shared it on LinkedIn and I shared it in my Facebook group all in written form. Now historically my posts have had the most virality on X or Twitter. So I was expecting that to be the place where I got the most organic reach, but to my surprise that wasn't it. It was threads. And I know that because of number one, the engagement metrics on the posts. So the posts got more shares, likes, comments, but also because at the end of each post that I made on the platform, I had a CTA that said, Hey, if you want to get these lessons in your email inbox, just go to 12 days of podcast growth.com and enter your email. And I used what's called UTM tracking with those links. So every single place that I put that link, the URL was a little different. There was one for threads, one for X, one for the podcast. And so I can see when people basically opted in, gave me their email in exchange for the written lessons in their inbox, I could see where they came from. And much to my surprise, 87% of my opt-ins came from threads. I was blown away. But actually, if you think about it and you understand how social media works and the history of it, it's actually totally not a surprise that threads gave me the most organic reach. And here's why you see at any given moment, there is a hierarchy to the social media platforms that people use and each individual social media platform has a life cycle. So the life cycle is basically a social media platform is new. There's some early adopters on it. It's kind of this new thing that nobody's heard of. Then it starts to get hot. It starts to grow. It's the new kid in town. It's the new cool place where the young ians go. Then it becomes mature and it's on top and everybody uses the social platform. And then it kind of sunsets a little bit where it's not as cool and hit. So that's the life cycle of a social media platform. And there's also a hierarchy to the different social media platforms that are available based on their place in the life cycle. And so at any given moment, there's one or two social platforms that are the top dog. They're on top of the hierarchy. They are the cool place to be. They're the place where everybody wants to build an audience. And they're the place where we as social media consumers give most of our attention. So the top dog platform enjoys the most attention. It's the cool place to be. It's where all the eyes are. And because of that, because that platform has everybody's attention, it's actually way harder for a creator to get any reach on that platform. And that's for two reasons. Number one, it's because there's more competition. Every creator, person, company, organization wants to be known on the top dog platform. And so they're all putting all of their energy into creating content there. So naturally, your posts are up against more skilled and better funded creators. I would argue that right now, the top dog platforms are TikTok and Instagram. And basically with short form video, because that's where most of people's attention are. And all the creators are like, you got to do short form. It's been three years of you got to do short form. And so now everybody's doing short form. And so it's as hard as it has ever been to get organic reach with short form content. The second reason why it's harder to get organic reach on the top dog platforms is because those platforms know that they are the top dog. The top dog platform wants to cash in on that. So they intentionally lower the virality of organic reach so that companies are forced to pay for ads. Once they know that they have everybody's attention, they make it harder for you to get organic reach because they know that you want organic reach on that platform. And they're like, all right, you're going to have to pay up. Now I know that that can sound hopeless as a creator. So what can you do to grow your audience faster and more easily on social media? Well, the key is in focusing on the other platforms less so than the top dog platforms. Because like I said before, there is a hierarchy of social media platforms. There are multiple platforms at a given time. As you know, everybody wants to be on all platforms. And the easiest virality on organic reach happens on the platforms that are not the top dog. And there's two reasons why that true. And it's the opposite of the reasons why the top dog doesn't give you any reach. The first reason why the not top dog platforms give you tons of reach is because those platforms want to compete. They want to steal attention away from the top dog. And the way that they do that is by configuring their algorithms to give tons of virality and tons of reach to the creators on their platform. The second reason why it's easier to grow on the not top dog platforms is again, there are fewer creators on the lower platforms. There's just less competition. So it's easier for your content to get seen. Okay, so I know that that sounds pretty abstract. And it might be hard for you to understand what I mean by this and actually apply it to your own social media growth strategy. So let me give you a brief history lesson on social media to demonstrate this. And by the end of this, you're going to understand way better how this works. And you'll be able to make better decisions on what platform you should go to in order to grow your audience. So if you go way back to 2008, you might remember time between 2008 and 2012 where Facebook was the top dog. Every business had a sign that said like us on Facebook. And back then it was actually really easy to go viral on Facebook. All you had to do was create a Facebook page and people would become a fan of that Facebook page. And whenever that Facebook page made a post, the people who are fans would share it with their audience and more people would become fans. It was freezing and businesses would go crazy viral with their Facebook page. Everybody loved this. It was win-win all around. The businesses went viral and Facebook loved it because the businesses were driving people to go to Facebook. But then in 2012, everybody was using Facebook. There was no more growth to be had. And so what they did, what Facebook did was they introduced Facebook ads. It was time to cash in. And when they did that, they slashed organic reach one because they needed to show people ads that were being paid for so already there was less supply of attention for creators to get. But also they intentionally lowered organic reach that page is got because they want those business to buy ads instead of just trying to go viral. So that happened in 2012. But pretty soon, a new platform started to emerge as the cool one. It was earlier in the social media life cycle. And that was Instagram. So between 2012 and 2015, creators grew audiences super fast and way more easily on Instagram. It was way easier than it ever was to grow on Instagram. 2012 to 2015. There was less competition. So there were fewer people publishing there and Instagram did stuff to try to grow accounts. But pretty soon by 2015, Instagram was the top dog. Facebook bought Instagram. They added ads. And then pretty soon everybody was trying to be Instagram famous. It was obvious to be on Instagram. So it became extremely hard to grow on Instagram. Then a new app came along. That app was called Vine. For a hot second around 2013, 2014, Vine was where creators went viral because they offered crazy, disproportionate organic reach. And there are several movie stars and rock stars who got their start by going viral on Vine. But Vine was owned by Twitter. Twitter in its old form could never figure out how to make money. And so Twitter shut Vine down because they lost money on it. And so that kicks off what I call social media winter from 2015 to 2019. It was really hard to get organic reach anywhere because it was hard to get organic reach on the top dog platform, which was Instagram. And it was also hard to get reach on Facebook and Twitter because all of those platforms were fully mature. They were fully monetized with ads. And there was no reason for them to give anybody organic reach because they already had all the attention. And during that period of time, which was like four years, it was pretty hard to grow on social media. And you had to do it by gaming the algorithms and figuring out weird growth hacks. And that contributed to my podcast growth in 2018. I utilized an Instagram growth hack that worked really well then, doesn't work now. So don't try it. But it worked really well then to get more followers to an Instagram account. Basically, I created and coded a bot that would all day follow people on Instagram who lived in Philly. And back then, there was a convention where if an account followed you, it was expected that you would follow the account back. And so people would follow my podcast account back because I had followed them. And it worked really well. I got tons and tons of listeners to Philly who. But again, that's like a super growth hacky way that I grew my account. And honestly, today, I get a lot of clients who ask me for the algorithm hacks. And I think that the belief that you need to hack the algorithm and do these growth hacks is a bit of a relic from social media winter when that for a time that was the only way to grow. You had to have the right hashtags. You had to do these weird growth hacks in order to grow because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram were the three top dogs who just were sitting pretty. They didn't have to give any organic growth. You had to pay to reach new audiences. But then in 2019, a new platform emerged that platform would revolutionize social media for two reasons. And that platform was TikTok. First off, TikTok entered the scene. And in classic social media lifestyle fashion, TikTok was the new kid in town. And they wanted to take attention from the top dog platforms, which was Instagram and Facebook. And so what did they do? They offered disproportionate organic reach to creators on TikTok. So naturally, they said, put videos on TikTok, you will go viral. But there's one other thing that TikTok did that would change social media forever and make it way easier to get new audiences on every social media platform. You see up until TikTok, whenever you signed up for a new social media platform for the first time, if you remember, the first thing you saw was a totally empty feed. It would say, follow these famous accounts and connect your contacts to follow your friends. You wouldn't see any content on that social media platform until you first followed other accounts. It was empty until you told the platform who you wanted to get content from. On the creator side, if you wanted anybody to find your content and you started from zero followers, you had defined ways to get people to discover and follow your account. Otherwise, your content would never be seen. So up until TikTok changed this, content was shown to social media consumers via the network graph, meaning they only saw content from their network. So when you were scrolling on that platform, you only saw content from people that you already followed. So on the first degree, and sometimes you saw content on the second degree, which is content that the people you followed shared to their audiences. So retweets or shares on Facebook or an Instagram that became story shares. That was when if you saw something from an account that you follow, you could share that thing with everybody that follows you. That was for a while the best way to get reach. And so as a creator, in order to get new audiences, you needed your followers to share your content with their followers. It had to happen. Otherwise, nobody knew would discover your stuff. TikTok turned this on its head. So instead of primarily showing you content on the network graph, so you only saw content from accounts that you follow, TikTok flipped it and they made the default view the for you page. And so they showed you content that TikTok thought you were interested in over content from accounts that you follow. So they prioritized the interest graph stuff that you're interested in over the network graph. Now this was possible before. And if you think back in the day, Instagram had a discover tab where you could go and kind of poke around and you know, see content from accounts you didn't already follow. But in practice and behaviorally, people never went to the discover tab. They would just scroll their feed, consume the content of the people that they already follow. And then once they got through all of it, there was literally a message that said, you're all caught up. There's no more content here. And people would close the app. TikTok flipped it around to where when you're on TikTok, you mostly spend your time on the discover page, which TikTok calls the for you page instead of watching the videos from the people that you follow. Now the reason that TikTok was first in doing that is because it really wasn't possible before because the algorithms weren't advanced enough to instantly know what your content was about and who it was for. And so the platforms needed you to put hashtags on your posts so that the algorithm could know what your post was about. Now with AI, the algorithm doesn't need your hashtags. It already knows instantly what your content is, who's in the video, what was said, all that stuff. So TikTok can virtually instantly show your video to people who would probably be interested in it. And they know what videos those people are going to be interested in because they track that as well. They can see what videos people like. So because of this change, number one, because of the for you page and number two, because they gave tons and tons of organic reach, TikTok exploded in 2020 and 2021. It was in the massive growth phase of the cycle. But then TikTok matured. It advanced in the social media life cycle. And by 2022, TikTok was fully monetized with ads. And it was obvious to be on TikTok. Everybody was chopping it a bit to go viral on TikTok. And as soon as it becomes obvious to be on a given platform, that's when it becomes way harder to grow on that platform. And even today, if you want to see this in action, pull up the TikTok profile of any famous TikTok creator. And if you sort their profile by popular instead of the latest, you will see that the videos that they posted that got the most reach in most cases were in 2021 or maybe early 2022 or late 2020, but 2021 was the sweet spot. And so since TikTok is mature, it's as hard as ever to get reach on TikTok. It's extremely hard. It's not as viral as it was in 2021. And so it isn't that platform that you're thinking of where it's just how you just post a TikTok and it grows viral. But there's good news for us creators and podcasters who want to grow our audience more easily. You see, when TikTok started to explode in 2021, it started siphoning away attention from Instagram. Meta, the company that owns Instagram doesn't like that because that means they're making less money. The more time, the more attention we give that platform, the more money they make. So Instagram had to fight back. What did they do? Well, they did what Meta always does when a platform challenges them as the top dog. They buy or copy. So when Instagram came about and started taking attention away from Facebook, Facebook bought Instagram. Boom. Now it's the same company. Snapchat came around and started taking attention away from Instagram. So Facebook tried to buy Snapchat. The founder Evan Carmichael told them to f off. And so they said, fine. And so they copied and they copied the stories feature. And you might forget that Snapchat invented stories. Instagram copied it six month later. And now when you think of stories, you think of Instagram TikTok came around in 2019. Facebook couldn't buy it because TikTok is owned by China. And so what did they do? They copied it and they introduced reels. And so to get us to all go back to posting and consuming content on Instagram, they turned up the organic reach on Instagram and they started showing us content on the interest graph. So now when you go on Instagram and you scroll your feed, you see a mix of accounts that you follow, but also accounts that you don't. So as a creator, that means that growth on Instagram becomes easier because the algorithm is showing your content to people who haven't heard of you yet. That is what brings us to social media summer right now because of the chaos in the social media landscape and because the advent of the interest graph, meaning every platform now shows you content from creators you don't already follow, it's easier than ever to grow an audience on social media. So where does that put us today? And what the heck does this have to do with me posting on threads on Christmas? Or you growing your podcast? Well, you see last year Matt had decided to run its buy or copy playbook to steal attention from Twitter. Twitter for a long time was the top dog platform when it came to written content and for a long time Facebook kind of let Twitter be Facebook didn't try to buy or copy. But once Elon Musk bought Twitter and plunged Twitter now known as X into chaos, a lot of people and organizations left Twitter slash X because they don't like Elon Musk or they don't agree with what he was doing with the platform. And as the great little finger from Game of Thrones says chaos is a ladder and met us saw an opportunity to run their playbook. They didn't buy because Elon Musk just bought they copied enter threads. So remember from what I just told you how does a social media platform that's brand new get people to start using it? Well, they offer extremely easy viral growth for creators. They incentivize creators to go create on that platform. We creators love our audience to grow. We want it to be easy. And so the savvy creators will post more on platforms where audience growth is easier instead of fighting to the death on the top dog platform where everybody is scrambling for crumbs of attention. Eventually after two to four years that platform will mature and will become a top dog and it'll be harder to grow there. There will be ads. There will be more competition from other creators. But before that, there's massive organic reach and threads is currently just beginning to reach the massive organic reach stage. And that's going to continue to happen as more and more people start to use threads. And so that brings us to what I experienced in the 12 days of podcast growth to my abjects surprise 87% of my options for the 12 days of podcast growth came from threads. And I posted the same thing on each platform. I posted the same thing on threads and X and Facebook and LinkedIn and threads got a disproportionate amount of organic reach. But you might be asking yourself, okay, is it worth my time to start learning how to use threads? Well, I think so. There's a few reasons why. First of all, if the content that you're posting on other platforms is not getting you reach so it's not doing anything for you, you need to either change the content that you're posting or stop because posting content that gets 50 views every single week is not doing anything for you. It's at this point until you improve the content so that it gets reach or you go to a different platform that gets reach until then you're wasting your time. But here's why I think threads is absolutely going to be here to stay and why now is the time to hop in on it. In most cases, the social media platform that is challenging the top dog platform is a brand new company. That new company is inexperienced and there's a lot of risk that one of the top dog companies like Twitter or Google or Facebook or TikTok who already has way more users is going to just copy them. And that's why you often see flash in the pan new social media platforms that come and go. And the best example of that is Clubhouse. Clubhouse came around in early 2021. It had insane organic reach for like two months. But then Twitter copied it with spaces. Clubhouse faded away. Boom Clubhouse has gone. Now people do use spaces to get reach. But that's why Clubhouse went away. So the challenger social media platform was a small company came and went got copied by a big one. But in this case, the challenger social media company is meta the biggest social media company. They know what they're doing. They have the money. They have the team. They have the experience and here's the kicker. They have an integration with a top dog platform, meaning threads is directly integrated with Instagram. So growth on threads often directly translates to growth on Instagram. And I saw that as people were beginning to follow me on threads, they would then click the Instagram button in threads and go follow me on Instagram as well. So it's literally two for one. So for those reasons, threads, I believe will be here to stay. And so I think it would be a great use of time for you to start using that platform, take advantage of the organic growth there now. And then you'll be positioned to cash in as a creator with a large audience once threads is mature and it's obvious for everybody to be on threads. And I'll actually take it a step further. And if I may be so bold, I will make a prediction. So I think that in 2024 or 2025, TikTok is going to be completely banned in the US due to souring relations with China. Whether or not you agree that that should happen, I don't care. That's what I think is going to happen. Now, I have no idea what's going to happen with X, but it's clearly very precarious. Elon Musk is a very smart entrepreneur, but it just seems to be going. He seems to be flying by the seat of his pants. Who knows? But what I do know is that meta ain't going anywhere. So I think that there is a chance that we will have another social media winter around 2024 to 2026, where meta is once again completely in charge of our social media attention because we'll all be on Instagram threads and Facebook and TikTok and X will have either been banned and disappeared or faded away. Now, keep in mind, number one, I don't know what I'm talking about that may or may not be true, but I'm preparing for that to be a reality. So I'm actually going to be doubling down on the meta platforms in 2024 for that reason. I'm still going to be posting on X for sure. I don't really post on TikTok ever. Maybe I'll start to mess around with it, but where I'm going to be focusing my energy on growing is on the meta platforms and also keep in mind that I have not touched on LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube in this conversation today either. So YouTube is Google. It's the sleeping giant that is probably the biggest and most stable driver of audience growth. YouTube is the thing that has everything. It's got crazy organic reach. It's mature. It's got all the attention. It's got monetization. So it's kind of funny that I haven't mentioned YouTube at all in this conversation. But either way, LinkedIn also I'll note is kind of both a top dog and a challenger. LinkedIn is the top dog in the professional context. So it is the only place that people go for professional social media, but it also still needs to compete for the attention that we give the other platforms. So LinkedIn kind of has the best of both worlds where it does have some pretty crazy organic reach, but it's also super mature and it's going to stick around because it's owned by Microsoft. And finally, Facebook is probably the most slept on platform right now, but not for groups. So groups had a viral moment in 2020 where you could get great organic growth there, but that's not really the case anymore. I don't really see much reach in groups, but Facebook pages are back to having disproportionate organic reach. And thus the cycle continues. So this one, we got a little deeper. Hopefully you're still with me in conclusion. I was blown away by the amount of organic reach and engagement that I got on threads over December, but because I know the history and the patterns of social media, it made perfect sense. And it was a signal that, oh, here's an opportunity. So threads is likely, in my opinion, positioned like TikTok was in 2018 and 2019 where there's not too too many people using it and getting in there now would be really, really beneficial and you'll be able to ride the wave of new users on the platform. That said, I could be wrong. You know, threads may not get that big because it is a written platform, even though they do incorporate images and videos right now. We'll see not as many people read as they do watch videos, but either way, long story short, I believe it is worth your while to mess around with threads right now, especially those of you who like to write, see what kind of growth you can do there. Be sure to do your targeted daily engagement there. So it's not just about posting. It's also about engaging, but I really think that if you give it a shot, you're going to find some success. And either way, you understand now how to look at the different social media platforms and that it's all about identifying the patterns and cashing in on the social media platforms that are earlier in the lifecycle or at least are giving organic reach. And so that's going to do it for today. Hopefully this piece helps you with your social media strategy for this year for 2024. For Grow the Show, my name is Kevin Schmidland and I will see you in the next one.