Coffees and Content: Social Media Is the Shop Front Now

This week's episode came out on a Tuesday ... and I promise it was worth the wait.

I've just come off the back of speaking at the Christchurch Winter NZ Gift Fairs (more on that very soon), and I'm recording this before heading into an Auckland content shoot — so we're keeping it sharp. Three updates that all connect to one bigger idea: the platforms are rewarding people who show up with a clear point of view, consistently, and every post needs to earn its place on its own.

This week we cover:

• LinkedIn's new Creator Marketplace - what it actually means for your personal brand and how TSC is already running it for clients
• Social commerce crossing $1 trillion, and why the behaviour behind that number matters more than the number itself for service-based businesses
• Instagram's grid reorder feature — and an honest take on whether it's actually worth your time
• A big announcement at the end of the episode you won't want to miss

Links:

• Join the IHEE WhatsApp community
• Follow on Instagram: @inhererampireerapod
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: inherempireera.com

Loved this episode? Leave a review - it would mean the world!!

If this episode gave you a breakthrough moment, share your key takeaway on Instagram and tag @inhererampireerapod. Your insights might just shape a future episode.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Happy Tuesday and welcome to this week's episode of Coffees and Content as part of the In Her Empire Era podcast brought to you by one of New Zealand's leading service-based digital marketing agencies, the Social Collective. Welcome everybody to today's episode. I'm gonna first of all start by pointing out the elephant in the room and apologizing that this is coming out on a Tuesday. I know this segment is normally a Monday segment. However, I have good reason. I was speaking at the Christchurch Winter New Zealand gift fairs over the weekend, and I had the absolute best time. It was so, so much fun. And even more exciting news is that I'm gonna be releasing that whole presentation. There's about half an hour of going through so many amazing things when it comes to how to really get your business visible and seen and also incorporating a little bit of AI. So stay tuned because that episode will be coming in your ears very, very shortly. And that is essentially half the reason why today's episode is getting recorded on Tuesday morning instead of over the weekend so that it comes out on a Monday. But the good thing is, I have some really exciting updates to share with you today. I'm gonna keep this episode as usual, very short and simple. Today we also have videos. So to those of you who are watching with your screens, hello, so nice to see you. I am shooting off to a content shoot very shortly in the Auckland CBD with one of our amazing restaurant clients. So of course, I had to do a little bit of makeup, feel like I want to sit in front of a camera and yeah, get ready to go out and see some clients. So before I do, we're gonna smash out this episode, give you the updates that you have been waiting for, share some incredibly exciting news at the end of this episode. So stay tuned. And yeah, let's just get into it. All right, so grab your morning coffee if you haven't had one yet, or if you're like me and you need honestly probably two or three to get through the day, grab that cup of coffee, get yourself comfortable, and let's dive in because today we are going to go through three really exciting updates that I am honestly the first one I'm fizzing for. So I'm not gonna waste any more time with an introduction. I'm just gonna dive into it. So, update number one. LinkedIn, and I'm also gonna talk to Meta on this too, but mostly LinkedIn, have launched finally a creator marketplace. And it is literally changing the game about why we should be posting. This is one of the things that we are currently trialing and testing within the social collective. So, our senior account manager, Morgan and I went to a really awesome meta-ads training last week with the most incredible team from Chain Social. I've probably spoken a little bit about Chain Social on this podcast previously, but they are one of Australia's leading marketing agencies. Shelby Vanswoll runs the agency, and Adele is also her digital lead or digital director, and they ran a meta-ads training last week. I love the chain team. I love everything that Shelby does. I think they are just incredible. And I'm really privileged that I've had the opportunity now to have spent three full days training with her. So I did a couple of agency training days over in Australia at the end of, I think it was end of February. And then I've been able to come back to New Zealand and implement so many amazing tactics into the social collective, which for those of you who are our current clients that are listening, you'll obviously know how things have really rammed up. And then obviously, for anyone that gets to work with the social collective moving forward, you are so, so lucky because there is so many more exciting things that we're now able to offer within the agency. And our meta-ads training was building on that last week. So Morgan and I went and spent an entire day learning about meta-ads training. And one of the biggest topics of conversation was the power of partnership ads. So we've been implementing this and working on trialing this and running this with some of our clients, which, for those of you who don't really understand what a paid partnership ad is, it's essentially the same as a collaborative post, but just with budget behind it. So it's when you can promote your stuff through somebody else's platform and push it out to your audience. And our LinkedIn have rolled out the same thing. Now, for those of you who don't do much in the LinkedIn space, you won't get why I'm geeking out over this so hard. But for those of you, and I know some of my clients listen to this podcast. So to those of you who are listening, this is going to be rolled out for you because we are rolling it out with TSC currently and then also working on rolling it out with our clients because I think this is going to be a game changer. Basically, what's happened in a nutshell on the LinkedIn side of things is they have created this space now called Create a Marketplace, which what that means is you can essentially tag a business page. So for the likes of me, I tag the Social Collective in any of my posts that I share. And then the Social Collective's page has the ability to request to utilize that post to then run ads through it. The reason this, the reason this is so exciting is because as you've heard me talk about on this podcast before, there is so much power in using personal pages on LinkedIn and so much power in having the people within the teams really showing up on the platform and posting about the business, what they do, what they're getting up to, some wins that they've had, all of that great stuff. And that's how we work with our clients is that we, for the most part, we run their business pages. We have some of our clients where we run their personal pages too. And then of course, we want to make sure that if we're running the business page, the founders and the senior leaders within those teams are, of course, posting on their own. So the exciting part here is that we can now take some of that content and you can do the same if you're running ads on LinkedIn. You can now take some of that content and run it as an ad, meaning that it still looks exactly the same as a personal post. The only difference is that underneath, when you visually see the post on your feed, underneath you've got your name and then you've got where the post was posted, like when it was posted, and underneath it, it will say promoted by insert business name here. So I've now got a couple of posts that are running on my through TSC that are my posts that appear on my feed to my audience and obviously to those people that we're targeting through our ads, saying Lauren Tomlinson posted on X particular day, promoted by the social collective. Now, the reason I love this feature is A, because obviously, like I said, personal pages do so, so much better than business pages. But I think the other thing is it's really allowing us to lean into that, it's really allowing us to lean into that credibility component. It's allowing us to build credibility using the founders of the businesses. I've also noticed a huge difference between the people that are connecting with me now versus the people that would just solely find me organically. So, yes, I could obviously go down the route of like doing like a boosted post kind of thing on Instagram. But to be honest, I want to be connecting with GMs. I want to be connecting with marketing managers, I want to be connecting with founders and CEOs and anyone else in the C-suite. Those are the kinds of people that I want to be getting my brand in front of and my page so that I can then advocate for my company. By being able to now do a collaborative post and boost it, well, not boosting it, but running an ad. It essentially means that I can increase that reach and I can make sure that it's not just company content that's being shared, it's also personal content. And I think that this really shows that this platform in particular is no longer just showing up as like a B2B channel in a business sense. It's really leaning into your personal brand and it's showcasing how important having a personal brand is. And I think especially with where things have gone now with AI being integrated into so much of what we do, having a founder that is show showing up for the brand, also having senior leaders in the team, hence why I've created in her empire era because I don't, I just found like there, I felt like there wasn't a space for just founders. And well, and that's the whole reason why I created in her empire era, because there are so many opportunities for founders and there are so many networking groups and and business opportunities. But I wanted to be able to have my senior leadership team show up as well. So I wanted Morgan, who's our senior account manager, to also be able to come to these kinds of things with us. And now this is a really cool way where I can run my content through TSC. We can also loop in Morgan's content through TSC. And then for our clients, we can not only advocate for their businesses, but we can start building the connections and the connection requests that come in on LinkedIn through their own personal content. So I think it's a great way, especially if you're wanting to grow the amount of connections that you have. I look at it very similarly to how I would look at Instagram with like, I guess boosting a post. Boosting's a bit old and we prefer to run ads these days, but boosting is a really great way just to get that kind of quick hit of followers. Obviously, you don't have as much freedom and flexibility in the targeting as you do if you run it through an ad. But I think when it comes to LinkedIn, this is a great way to be able to build up those connections so that you're really connecting with the right people. And I have certainly, in the last sort of week and a bit since we launched these ads, I have certainly seen a huge change on my page. So if you're thinking about running ads on LinkedIn, please, first and foremost, it's an expensive platform. So don't do it alone. Make sure that you're reaching out to somebody that can help you or flicking us a message at, well, I guess at the Social Collective. We have something really exciting that's coming up and it's called TSC Academy. And I'm very, very excited for this. I soft launched it at the Winter Gift Fairs over the weekend in Christchurch. And I'm really excited to be talking about it here because there is gonna be a lot more workshops that are coming up to do with marketing and AI. And there's a lot more marketing workshops and content and all of these great things, resources that we're gonna be sharing, because I don't believe that you have to either figure it out alone, download a whole bunch of free resources online and then realistically never look at them, or have to pay to outsource to an agency. So if you're not quite ready and you're that founder that's really like grinding away super hard and you're really excited about what's coming up and you've got the time and you've got the capacity, you just don't know where to start. TSC Academy is exactly built for you. It is built for founders and it's for senior leaders in amazing companies who are doing amazing things, but just don't necessarily need to outsource right here, right now, but you still want to stay ahead of the times and you want to figure out where to go next. So I will drop the link in the show notes below. Make sure you keep an eye on that because TSC Academy is coming. Alrighty, update number two is that social commerce has just crossed a trillion dollars. And here's the version of the story that I think is so valuable for service-based brands. When we think about social commerce, I think a lot of people instantly think it's like TikTok shop or Instagram shop, or if I'm running an ad and it's a commerce or like a conversion campaign, that's how I'm eventually going to get the sales. But I'm a service-based brand. So what's the point? What's the use? And I feel like with the the number of having a trillion dollars now sitting in the social commerce space, I think the thing that people are forgetting the most is that it's actually the behavior driving those numbers. It's not the sales per se, it is the behavior behind it. Think about using social media and how we use it these days to discover brands. It helps them build trust. It helps us make the decision as to who we're going to buy from without honestly sometimes ever visiting the website. And I think it's the exact same thing when it comes to service-based brands, is that marketing and digital marketing is now used as the opportunity to get you seen, heard, recognized, and then trusted. So it's not just about the end result. It's not those direct conversions. We've been talking about this a lot in-house recently because I think, especially after speaking to a lot of product-based businesses at the NZ Gift Fairs, there's a lot of service-based businesses who think that marketing and advertising and things like that would be no good for them because they don't make a direct sale. But I think what they're missing is that there's actually a lot that happens after you utilize digital marketing that also needs to be nurtured and supported. No, let's just update number two that I have for you today is that social commerce has just crossed a trillion dollars. I think that's just insane with how much money is going around like the global social commerce, so people that are buying directly through social media platforms has already crossed a trillion dollars this year, which is wild. And obviously the headlines that I'm seeing a lot are around TikTok shop and Instagram shopping and shopping campaigns and shopping ads. But I think there's a version of the story that a lot of service-based businesses are missing. And I think the the conversation that we need to be having around this is the behavior that actually drives that number. So when I think about shopping campaigns or I guess kind of any money that's being generated through marketing, yes, the trillion dollars is predominantly speaking to the sales that have come through, obviously, shopping campaigns, come through TikTok shop, come through Instagram shop. But there's so much work that digital marketing lends itself to pre-the sale coming to coming to fruition, right? There's the discovery that we need. So we need to discover new brands. We need to build trust with our audience before they want to buy. And then, of course, there's that final decision to actually buy, all happening with inside the platform. And a lot of this, like I said, it happens in the platform. You don't even have to go visit a website to actually buy a product these days, which I think is crazy. But it's the same thing with service-based businesses, where people could make an entire decision about working with you before they even leave the platform. If you think about it this way, with social media giving us the opportunity to discover new service providers, build trust with them, become educated by them, understand who they are and what they offer and if they're right for you, then making the decision to actually reach out to them. And then, of course, making that connection through social media. So whether that's sending a DM, that's filling out a form through like a lead magnet campaign, it's booking a direct call or anything along those lines. So you don't actually have to have left the platform and you also don't have to have been an e-commerce brand to benefit from it. And I think a lot of people are making decisions now through LinkedIn and Instagram and looking at the content that they're consuming before they make their decisions. Because if you allow people to find you through social media and start making those decisions, the way that I look at it is that it makes things like a discovery call so much easier because you've already allowed them to understand who you are. They've already built that trust. And then by the time they come to you, and this is what I see with clients coming to us, by the time they get to the social collective and they book in a discovery call with me, they already have a knowledge of who we are, what we do, they've had our pricing because my team have sent that through. And then by the time they get on the call, like I had an amazing discovery call yesterday with a really, really well-known New Zealand brand. And they were all set and ready to work with us because they just needed a couple more questions to ask before they go and speak to the GM to be like, hey, this is the company we want to work with. They'd done all their research digitally before they even spoke to me. And then they got into my inbox, asked me a couple of extra questions, jumped on a call just so we can meet face to face and so they can do a bit of a vibe check and make sure that we're aligned. And same from my end, we need to vibe check and make sure that we align with them. And I think that's something that so many people are gonna miss with hearing these headlines of this space being a trillion dollars with shopping campaigns. But it doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity for service-based brands to be able to utilize marketing because I've been talking about this for forever and I will continue to say it in this way that your social media is the shop from. It's the first impression that somebody will likely have of your business. And I think as well, we've talked to a lot of our clients about this recently. Sometimes people will never visit your website. And especially with where AI is going and the way that it's changing, there's so much that's happening in this space now that eventually it's going to get to the point where the only things that are actually visiting your website are bots. It's not gonna be humans. I think they're predicting that about 70% of our traffic to our website is going to be bots. It's gonna be platforms like ChatGPT and Claude. They're gonna be scraping the data off the internet to then be able to provide people with recommendations of what brands to be reaching out to, what places to be working with and things like that. So when I think about it in that sense, I think, well, the more content that I can share online to educate about who we are, what we do, why you'd work with us, the more that that's gonna help in the future when the internet is literally scraping itself for information because our information's already going to be out there. So just think about that the next time that you're thinking, is it even worth me posting online? And the last update that I want to share, it's not a biggie, but I do feel like it's really important to touch on, is that Instagram have finally done what I honestly think they've been talking about for almost five years now. And that's the ability to reorder your grid. It is finally a feature, and I think it is a chronic waste of time. I'm just gonna be really blunt and put it out there that I don't think it's the most exciting thing. So I think it was about the 8th of June that they finally announced that they were rolling out the long-awaited reorder grid feature. It has now been released globally. And I think it's a great feature if there's certain things that need to be pulled up to the top of your grid, but I also think it's going to be a massive time suck for so many people. When I talk about social media, and I guess if you take away nothing else from this little segment, the main thing I want to share with you is the importance of making sure that every single thing on your feed could be read as an individual post and has value. Gone are the days where we want to just put up a pretty picture and then like a teeny tiny caption that says basically nothing and then hoping that somebody's gonna buy it based off a picture. We need a bit more information. And especially going off the last point that I just touched on with AI starting to scrape the internet. We need to make sure we've given it enough context, enough keywords, enough information, enough data for it to be able to then understand what it is in this individual post that we're trying to communicate. The exact same thing goes with when you're actually reading a post. I always look back at every one of our posts that I post or that my team posts or that we post for our clients. And I look at every post as an individual thing and think, what is the value and what is the point? Because I think what's gonna happen is that a lot of people are gonna go back and find their like most viral moments or the most exciting things that have happened and then basically just kind of reorder them at the top of their page. But I think if it doesn't serve your page, A, you can archive it already. And B, if it's really, really valuable, yes, you could pin it to the top or you can reorganize it. But what I don't want to see is people wasting time reordering it for the sake of aesthetics. I think at the end of the day, it is still going to end up further and further and further down your feed. So rather than spending so much time reorganizing it to make things look quote unquote pretty, I actually think it's worth spending that time and investing that time just creating some new amazing pieces of content. So keep that in mind when you're starting to scroll through your feed and thinking, ooh, maybe I could reorder things. Yes, adjust it slightly if you need to, but also make sure that what you're adjusting is still relevant and timely. Don't move something up from like 2021 that's got no relevance to where you are at this point just because you thought it was a cool piece of content to post. And make sure that everything that you are sharing has a ton of value. So I think if I could wrap this up by sharing, I guess one main point is that if there's a thread that I feel like really connects everything that I've shared in this week's update, it's that the platforms are really starting to reward people who show up with a clear point of view and they stay really consistent about it. LinkedIn has literally built an entire marketplace around people who are doing that. And then a trillion dollars of social media content is proof that the platform is now allowing us to build trust. And then, of course, the grid and the reordering, as fun as it is, won't do the job that good content will do. So take away from today that you don't need a perfect profile. You just need to show up. Go out there, and as I think I say every week, go and advocate for your business. Tell the people what you're doing, make sure that they know. Shout it from the rooftops. And the final, final thing that I want to share on this episode is that we have a date for the next In Her Empire era event. I am so excited. It is called Cocktails and Conversations. It is going to be an evening event as we did last time. I'm super excited for this one. We are going to have a panel. It's called the New AI Era because I really feel like everyone is starting to stress and shake in their boots about what's happening with AI. And I don't want it to feel scary. I don't want it to feel stressful. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed. I also want to give you the confidence and the peace of mind that your industry is not going anywhere. Yes, AI is changing, but we are changing with it. So I've got an amazing guest list of panelists that are going to be joining me. We're going to have some really fantastic conversations and open up the floor for QA. And there's also going to be an opportunity to do a bit of networking. So for you and for your senior leaders and your teams, make sure that you get your tickets. I'm going to drop the link in the show notes below. It's on the 13th of August. So it is a Thursday evening. Doors are going to open at 5:30 and the panel will kick off about 6.30. And we're going to have some cocktails, good conversations, talk through all things marketing and AI, and do a live podcast with the panel. So cross your fingers and toes at all my tech works that day, but make sure you get your tickets. There's a few early bird tickets available at the moment, but they are selling super, super quick. I soft launched it to the In Her Empire Era community on WhatsApp last week, and we've already had some tickets snap up, which is amazing. Also, if you want to get a special discount code, I have dropped one for my impresses inside the In Her Empire Era WhatsApp community. So again, the link is in the show notes. Make sure you go grab that link, jump into the WhatsApp group, grab that discount code and get your tickets because there's only limited spaces. Once we are sold out, we cannot open any more seats. So that is everything that I have to share today. Go and finish that cup of coffee. Go slay the day. Smash your marketing content. And I will see you tomorrow with another episode. Bye.