Organic Social Marketing Strategy

Over 3,000 marketers are gathering in Anaheim this April for social media marketing world in 2026. They're not coming because it's trendy. They're coming because it works. Martha Kroemer told us, "I've been to conferences where I've only heard things I already knew. I learned so many new concepts at social media marketing world. I definitely got my money's worth." After a year, marketers credit social media marketing world with career advancements, business breakthroughs, and strategies their competitors haven't yet discovered. Mediang shared, "This year was my first time at social media marketing world. It exceeded every expectation I had. The value of the sessions and networking experiences cannot be overstated." While you're deciding whether to attend thousands of marketers have already secured their spots. Get your tickets now at socialmediamarketingworld.info. Welcome to the social media marketing podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello, thank you so much for joining me for the social media marketing podcast brought to you by social media examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Jenny Lee Fowler. She's the director of social media strategy at MIT University, and we're going to talk about organic social media strategy. I think you're going to find it absolutely fascinating. By the way, I'm @Stelzner on Instagram @Mike_Stelzner on Twitter/X. If you're new to this podcast, follow our show by clicking that little follow button on your favorite podcast app. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Jenny Lee Fowler. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide. Today I'm very excited to be joined by Jenny Lee Fowler. If you don't know who Jenny is, she's the director of social media strategy at MIT, author of the book Organic Social Media, how to build flourishing online communities, and her podcast is Confessions of a Social Media Manager. Jenny, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing okay. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have you here today. Jenny and I are going to explore organic social strategy. Now before we get into that, I would love to hear a little bit of your story, how do you get into social and marketing, and start wherever you want to start? Yeah. I made me a little bit by accident. I actually went to school to be a TV reporter, and I did that for almost 10 years. I was, you know, your local hometown gal doing the local hometown news. That was totally me. I was like going to corn festivals and covering court cases, doing everything in the community. So I actually thought that was going to be my only job for my life. But you know, things changed and I changed. And so I took a couple of left turns, really was lucky to figure out what I really liked and found sort of a passion again in the digital space and web editor space, and then kind of landed in higher ed and social media. Well, tell us a little bit more because I don't think I, well, I mean, I did mention that you work at MIT and stuff. But tell us a little bit about like when did you start working with social? When did you start working for MIT? I mean, feel free to go a little deeper into the story. Yeah. Okay. So when I left TV, I actually got hired on at a Fortune 15 company to do an internal newscast. They needed someone to produce an anchor, a local internal newscast. So it was kind of a perfect fit. But while I was doing that, I tried to take every opportunity I would get. And I started to learn more about content strategy and web editorial, digital blogging, just the social aspect of engaging people within the comments. And I just really took to it. I thought there's something here. I really like this. And then there was a job opportunity that opened up at Harvard Kennedy School where it was more of the web editorial side, but happened to also have a social media managing portion to it, which a lot of positions do. And as what happens in social is that it just kept on taking up more and more of my job. And so I thought, gosh, you know, if I can make social media 100% of my job, I think I would like that. Like that was the direction I wanted to go. And it just so happened that, you know, in 2015, this position opened up at MIT and at the time I got hired as a manager of social media strategy and then have been promoted to director since then. But it's just worked out. And it's been great. Like I am a lifelong learner and you really need to have like doing that in social media. It's kept me challenged. It's kept me interested. And yeah, it's been good. So Harvard Kennedy School, what is that? I'm assuming that's a division at Harvard or what is that exactly just for people that don't know that. And then once you went over to MIT, tell us a little bit about what it was like working for MIT and how that evolved. So Harvard Kennedy School is the graduate school of government at Harvard. So you were doing politics and stuff like that then with social media in particular? That was a lot of the content. I was in political myself. And yeah, there was a lot of policy making and democratic structure and things, things of that nature. It was very wonky but interesting. So then you moved over to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for those that are not in America. One of the more prestigious tech really universities in America, right? So what were you doing for them as far as like was there certain, was it the whole school that you were working for and tell us a little bit about how that worked? Yeah, so it was a good transition because I went from the communications team of a graduate school to the communications team of the Central University Communications team. And now I'm managing all of the flagship social media channels. I'm helping to strategize and execute all of the campaigns or announcements or anything that has a social media portion of it for the institute level and the presidential level. I helped you provide recommendations and strategy. So just out of curiosity, when it comes to MIT, talk to us about how a school that big might have a lot of different social objectives. Just to kind of help people understand because this is no small school, right? It's a very large school, right? Right. So we primarily use our flagship channels to support any institute level or presidential level messaging priorities. And within MIT, we have almost 300 department labs and centers. And yes, all of them have their own social media presence. And I do not manage them all, but I do provide consulting and advising. And I, you know, I'm their thought partner for all of those department labs and centers. So they manage their own channels. They can come up with their own goals, department level goals or how they want to go about doing it. So it's my job to, you know, try to make sure that the experience across all MIT affiliate channels are similar, you know, and that, you know, everyone is having a good experience when you're touching some part of the MIT social media community or digital community. So I like to say that I don't police anyone. I am here to advocate and amplify and help people. So I think that message has gotten across and I'd like to say people now seek me out for help or just to get started or for advice before anything happens or before they start a new channel. So yeah, just doing the best they can, right? So with MIT is the objective mostly to recruit students into the university with the social stuff or is it more advocating, tech innovation or is it advocating like political action, committee kind of stuff? Maybe that happens in governance. And I mean, just curious how that works. Yeah, it's the latter. So MIT, like you've mentioned, is a very strong global brand, but we also have a really, really great admissions department. And admissions takes care of all of sort of the recruiting or looking for prospects, you know, prospective students and trying to make sure that the best talent across the world. Like that's really their main priority. But my main priority is to make sure that our global reputation, our brand is top of mind, that we're sharing our top science and tech innovation with everyone in the entire world. So while future students are one of my audiences, it's not actually my primary audience, which I'm very thankful for because that is not an easy job. Well, and I would imagine from what little I know, there's a lot of inventions. I'm sure that have happened with MIT that are a license to bull technology that's kind of a business almost isn't there? There's so many startups. I feel like everyone has a startup. There's kind of a joke that's throughout my tea that if a student comes up to you and says, well, you invest $1,000 in your business, you should just say yes. Since it's our student, we'll make you a lot of money. You know, that's like our motto is men's at Manus. It's like if you think it, you should be able to build it with your hands. or do it. So there's a lot of that going on, like a lot of doing a lot of new innovations, new companies, new applications. >> Very cool. Well, thanks for allowing me to go down that rabbit row with you just because I want people to understand kind of like the complexities of such a large organization with all sorts of different divisions that are all got their different objectives and missions and stuff like that. So you wrote a book, obviously, and you've got a podcast. So you know, you've been doing this for a long time. So I want to ask strategy wise, you know, a lot of people that listen to this show, think they have a strategy. >> Right. But most of them probably don't really have an actual strategy when it comes to their organic social media. And I would love you to just kind of speak to those who maybe are aware enough that they know they don't really have a strategy. They're just doing something because they've always done it. Why is organic strategy so important as we're, you know, recording this in 2024? >> Yeah, it's completely important because that's where you're finding your true community. When you find the folks that come to you organically or just want to follow you because they love your brand or they love the work that's that you're doing or they just are really jazzed about just being a part of everything that you put out. Those are your base fans. That is your tried and true community. And I think it's really important to find them and to sort of like, you know, grow that community because from there, you really get an idea of what your fans like about you and what they're saying about you and what they expect from you. And that really can inform any future campaigns and decisions and content. And so I think it's more important now to find your real true fans because there's a lot of noise and a lot of fake stuff out there right now. >> Has it helped at MIT? You know, has there been any actual tangible benefits that have come from cultivating these really loyal followers on the socials? >> I see our fans interacting with each other. When we have questions asked on our social media channels, our fans chime in. Yeah, our fans point to resources to each other. You know, I just kind of feel like it is a community. You know, it's not just an empty follow. It's actual people that are proud to be a part or want to be a part of you. >> Very cool. Okay, we have a strategy that we're going to talk about today. And there's a whole bunch of steps to it. And it's some of the stuff that you cover in your book. But before we talk about your strategy, tactically, what is the benefit if people follow the strategy that we're about to talk about? Like what's the outcome they can achieve if they pay close attention to what we're going to talk about today? >> Yeah, after doing this for many, many years, I found that there are certain steps that I always go back to. And so I feel like that my framework, it just provides a really, really solid foundation for you to build your strategy, your campaign for you to start a new channel. And you know, anytime I'm looking at starting fresh with something, I always go back to this framework. And it's something that's repeatable. It's worked for me for years. And I really believe that it worked for everyone else in whatever industry that you're in. >> Perfect. So let's start with the very first part of your strategy. Let's define what it is and kind of give some examples. You know, my framework, I call them my 6M's of social media. And my first one is mission. And your mission are really your goals. The mission is why. Like it's really important to be able to answer why you're using the social media channels that you're using for the organization that you're using. You don't want to just be posting content to be posting content because you don't have a focus and that's not ideal. So I really believe like you need to have goals. And you need to know what your mission is. >> So let's talk about like, you know, for those that don't have missions because a lot of them don't. I mean, what's an example of a good mission? How are we composed such a mission? >> Sometimes you can just align with your company's goals. And sometimes your company has very, very specific goals. So it can be like, we're going to launch a new product. And we want to generate $50,000 in revenue in Q1. And so if that's your company's goal, then you can align with that. But what you want to do as a social media manager is you want to say how you're going to support that goal using social media tactics. So you can say, you know, this is our goal and we're going to support it using social media by posting one Instagram story a week by doing product review, you know, by doing early product reviews. I'm just sort of making this up. But, you know, yeah, you early product reviews, recording what our fans, right? This is how you know who your fans are recording what our fans say. And then posting a video on our active channels once a week. And then after launch, you can say, we're going to do a micro influencer campaign. And then we'll reevaluate everything at the end of Q1. So that can be a goal. If your company's goal is a little or mission or goal is a little bit more squishy, like I feel like a lot of people have the goal of, you know, we want to change the world, right? Exactly. I was just going to say we want to be better world or make the world a better place. So that's a little bit more squishy. But I think that there are things that you can do as a social media manager to find very specific things that your company is doing to kind of make a change in the world for the better. And how I advise people to do that is just go on a listening tour and talk either listen, you know, to your audience on social. If you have a built in audience, if not listen to the folks that you're working with, let's go, like talk to different people in the organization in different departments in different companies and ask them because they're loyal fans too. And they're, you know, there's some of the most bought in people to your brand. So ask them, like, what is it that the company is doing is that you really like in the community or what is the company doing that you think not a lot of people know of, but is really cool. And you'll find that things kind of bubble up like, you know, not a lot of people know that our company, you know, has a free breakfast for the community. I'm just again, I'm making this stuff up. But there's a lot of things that you'll find that aren't well known and then make those your goals. So we're going to support our company's mission of making the world a better place by spreading the word that, you know, we offer free breakfast for children under the age, you know, before school. And make it your mission to make sure that message gets out, you know, share that message. And there'll be others and then list out the tactics or you can just have departmental goals too, right. Like it doesn't have to be, but usually your department goals should be aligned. It should be somewhere aligned, you know, because you don't want to be totally way off, you know, doing your own thing. You know, that's totally way off. So I have a couple thoughts to like a mission could be to create very loyal evangelist for your products, right. Yeah. So that could be an example, right. Like we want our customers as a result, our social strategy will be to lift up our customers so that they actively promote our products and services. That could be a legit mission, right. Exactly. And then you'll list out the tactics, you know, we'll do a giveaway once a week or we'll amplify our, you know, customers and make them really love you, right. Like interact with them so that they're that becomes a real deep loyalty and love for your brand. Well, and another example of a mission could be let's say your company is specifically focused on some sort of problem that is solved by the, you know, by your product and service. You don't have to necessarily talk about your product and service, but your mission could be to educate people on a certain thing. So for example, 100% right like, like let's say in the tech world, maybe there's some challenges in the technology world, maybe there's not enough women, right. In leadership or whatever, right. So you could decide your mission is going to be to to lift up and elevate women leaders in the technology world. For example, right. I mean, that's the kind of thing that could inform the activities that you take, right. And obviously it sounds like you're going to want to get this mission approved by the relevant people inside the company. For smaller businesses, you know, just having a mission kind of gives you a direction and you can say, right, does this align or not align with what the mission is right helps you decide the activities you want to do in the future, right. Right. It becomes your north star. You know, right. So it keeps you focused and you know, and if you don't have any guard rails for what you're doing, I like to say you can go off the rails really easily. So when it becomes your north star and then someone comes up to you and asks you, oh, can you post this event that you know, then you could it's really easy for you to say no, that doesn't like align with our mission. Right. You know, if you don't have a mission and you start saying yes to all of these one off requests and your feed kind of becomes a hodgepodge like, you know, no one can really see or it clearly know what story you're telling. You know, so. Okay, there's six ms the first one is mission. What's the second one? So what I was talking about story telling you the second is message. So what story are you telling with your social media presence in your feeds. I think a lot of times the social media managers, we are so worried about the macro like each post. We're thinking about hitting send and how the post we forget to look at that one post as a part of a broader bigger picture that post is a part of a larger story that you're telling. So I think it's so important to go to your feed, to look at what you're posting, to view it as a follower or a consumer. So you can see what they're seeing. Are they seeing women? Are they seeing, for us, are they seeing students? Are they seeing the culture? Are they seeing fun? Are they seeing the labs? Like I want to make sure they see all of MIT, not just one portion of MIT. Like I have something I call a three-scroll rule, you know how people view social media, we scroll like this, right? And you might stop on someone and think they're kind of interesting. You might go to their feed or their profile page for the first and probably only time. And I believe you only get three scrolls. They're going to scroll your content three times before they decide whether they want to follow you or not. That's all you get. And I don't think you get second chances, right? So in those three scrolls, I'm always looking, like what am I showing? What story am I telling? You know, what are they viewing? Are they viewing all of us, you know, or is it just repetitive? And it's only one note. I think that's really important. - It's fascinating because there's so much to this and we have obviously four other M's to get to, but this is where it's got to be careful what you post, right? Because if it's true, you know that you want a unified message here really is what you're trying to say. Obviously you want to be careful about what you post. So if you're just constantly promoting your own stuff, like linking to your blog articles or whatever, right? It's going to send a signal that all you care about is yourself, right? But if you're posting engaging things, useful things, there's lots of conversation. I think as people scroll through that, they don't just look at your post, they look at the interactions inside that post as well. Don't you agree? - 100%. It's the value you're providing. It's not about you, it shouldn't be about you. Your followers are asking like, what are you going to provide for me? 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Secure your virtual ticket right now at socialmediamarketingworld.info. That's socialmediamarketingworld.info. So anything else about the message, any tips or whatever about, here's just a cool way to tell a story in a message. Do you really need to tell a story every time because then people's mind storytelling is not very easy for everyone? Or is this more like this is a unified story amongst all the things that you post? - Yeah, I think if you know what your mission is and sometimes you don't have just one goal. Sometimes you've got your Q1 goal, but then you might have your goal to show people that there are more women working for your company or you might have a handful of goals, not just one. And so you wanna make sure that your posts are representing and they're all aligned with all of your goals. And that it's entertaining to look at. For example, when I go to see my posts, like one time I accidentally posted three black and white pictures in a row, there was one story that was, the photo was black and white, and then the second story, it was an X-ray. So that was black and white. And then, but I didn't notice it when I was posting it, you think they're different topics. But then when you look, go to see the post as a viewer or a user, you're like, oh my gosh, like the last three things I posted are black and white. And then I'm like, I need color. I need color in my feet. When you go to look at your feed like a user, there's a lot of things you'll learn. And a lot of things you might not recognize when you're just looking at the macro or each individual post, just nice to step back. - Well, I love that. Okay, so the first one is mission. The second one is message. What's the third? - Management. So this is kind of, you know, the not fun side, maybe, but it's very, very important in your strategy because it helps you execute the strategy and make it consistent. So you should have steps. You should have steps that you can repeat over and over again from like ideation to after your post. Like where do you create the ideas? Where is that started? Then does it have to be approved? It's different for every team. You have to make it yours. But the important thing is that you have a process and a management system and you write it down 'cause there's real value in that. And so that example, I know, but if I get hit by a bus, you know, no one will, no one else will know in our social media channels 'cause, you know, our processes are written down and my, you know, I've got backups and backups to my back, that they can just step in and continue posting 'cause everything is written. Everyone has access to everything. Everyone knows where everything is. And the process is very clear, right? So it's just really important for your strategy, but it's good business continuity plan for you to just write something down, write it down and share it with everyone. 'Cause I think sometimes people think, you know, when they say, can you just post this real quick and I'm like, no, I just can't post this real quick. You know, I'm like, this, so if you have something to show them, you're like, look, this is my process and we'd like you to pitch stories at this time in the process. So it just makes things more professional and official and, you know, people, if they're trying to give you content, then, you know, you'll have to educate them and when it's ideal to pitch content or how you like it. So it's just, it's really helpful and important. - I love this whole concept of management and process and workflow and all these kind of things. Do you have any thoughts on frequency? How often we ought to be posting? - I think that's individual to everyone and what your goals are and really what your resources are. Like I consult and advise a lot of those within MIT that are literally one person communication teams and not only do they do the social media, they do the event, they do the, you know, they do everything, they help with the deans, they help with faculty. So it's just a portion of their job. So, you know, you have to take that into account because it's not just about quantity of posting, it's the quality of posting too. So I just always think, you know, do what you can manage, do what's sustainable. 'Cause that's what's really important 'cause these platforms don't ever shut off. So, you know, if you can post for five times a week or seven times a week, that's great. If you have the resources, if you have the content, it's all interesting, it's different. Yes, absolutely. But if you can manage three times a week, great, if you can only do one time a week and depending on the platform, that's great too. Like I just think it, there's no one size fits all. It's different for everyone. - Okay, so it's mission number one, message number two, management number three. What's the next step in your process? - Well, the fourth I call medium and I call it's medium based on which platforms will you choose. 'Cause I do not believe that you need to be in every single platform that pops up. If you're posting the same content, the same way in every single platform, then you're doing it wrong. Because every single platform has sort of a unique way that's content should be consumed. There's different ways that the audience goes to that specific platform because they like to consume content that specific way. So if you're doing the same, then you're just pushing out. You're not really taking, the quality isn't there, you're just pushing out. And I don't necessarily think, if they don't like your content in platform X, they're not gonna follow you in platform Alpha because it's all the same, right? I think really, really good social media managers are always reimagining their content for the different channels. It might be the same, but you have to present it in it. You have to optimize it and present it in the best way for every channel. So is it a fit? Is your content a fit? Can you even manage seven channel? Do you have the team to manage seven channels? If it's just you, just do one or two, but be great at them. I always say that if the content is good, then it has a way of jumping platforms. And what I mean by that is that, how many times have you seen tweets or X posts shared in Instagram? Or how many times have you seen TikToks and Reels? Or has anyone sent you a YouTube short, has anyone DM you a YouTube short? So if it's good, it's not gonna just stay on that channel. Your audience is gonna share it for you on their channels. They're gonna share it in Facebook, even though they saw it in LinkedIn. Or they're gonna email 10 people and share. So just, I think this is why, content is what you should be concentrating on and not being in every single channel. Well, it's fascinating at multiple dimensions here because medium can also be written word versus video, right, versus short form video versus long form video versus images, right? So I understand the way you're talking about it at the beginning here, which is medium is the platform, the social platform. But let's dig a little bit deeper. Isn't it true that if we have a good message, we could create a video out of it. We could create a written post out of it. We could create a carousel image with text in it, right? I mean, we could do all sorts of stuff with it. Good one. You can do all that. Yeah, absolutely. But sometimes we don't always have the resources. I have consulted or people have come up to me and said, I'd like to start an Instagram account. Or we're thinking about turning it. And I don't think great. What kind of pictures do you have in the thing? Well, we haven't gotten that far. But that's the most important thing. Think of the resource. Like if you have a steady library or a library of images that are beautiful or wonder an original, then yeah, Instagram is a fit. But if you don't, then that might not be the channel that is right for you, at least not now. I'm not saying never. But there's some things to think about before you hit create a new account. There are plenty of people listening right now that happen to have for lack of better words exposure on every platform you can imagine, right? They've got Instagram. They've got TikTok. They've got Pinterest. They've got X. They've got LinkedIn. They've got Facebook and they've got stuff. I'm not even mentioning. What do you want to say to those people that feel chained because their predecessor was posting on these platforms? You know what I mean? And they just feel compelled to have to post on these platforms. Yeah, I give you 100% permission to stop. I don't know why people have such a hard time like to not do or stop doing things. Especially if they're not working. Stop doing the things that are not working. Even in a platform that you're active on, if you're discovering there's a certain type of content or a certain way of writing things that isn't working, stop doing that and experiment and do something different. I will actually fully admit that when I first came to MIT, I did a cursory analysis of all of our active channels. And I was like, why are we on platform zero? And I'm like, this is not a good fit. And we're not going to do this anymore. And we didn't do it. We stopped doing it. No one asked me about it. No one mentioned it. No one ever said, oh, I really miss you on this platform. Like, what are you not? No one? Zero. Do you advise saying, hey, follow us over on Instagram or follow us over on YouTube? So they know. I mean, it depends. The example I've talked about, we didn't because there was hardly an audience to even say that to you. If there's something that you are fairly active in and maybe you're saying, you know, the resources have run out or something happened, then I would not delete it. I would never delete a platform that has years of content or, you know, content on there. And I would just say, we are now active on platform. Why follow us over here and just kind of move everyone over there. I love that. Okay. So what's the next your fifth M in your process? It's metrics. You know, everyone has their way of doing the things and, you know, analytics. But I always say it's really important to have an idea of what you want to track going into it, like at the start. Like, if you're looking for growth, maybe followers and impressions, if you're looking for maybe seeing how much content or which content gets the, you know, the most eyes or there's a certain campaign that you're trying to highlight, then maybe engagements. But really before you even start, you know, choose a metric and look at those metrics repeatedly over and over again. And as if you're finding the thing is it's like you're not married to it. If you're finding that you're like, wait, you know, this metric really isn't giving me what I need to know, then like dig more and look to see what is giving you the information you need. You know, and change it. You're constantly evolving. Like social media is constantly evolving. You should do, you know, well, I love metrics and I kind of am a data geek and some platforms give you a lot more data than other platforms. Yes. Right? Yes. You know, so YouTube, I think, gives you the best data out there because it's just ridiculous. You can look at retention graphs and see how long people are sticking around for your videos. They tell you how people are discovering it. I mean, it's like the gold standard really for metrics. But let's just say engagement is a metric that a lot of my audience really cares about. It's my most important one too. So give everybody like a tip or two on like what's the baseline? How do they even determine a baseline to know if they're being successful or not when it comes to engagement metrics? Yeah. I think the public interactions, you know, the ones that everyone can see. I think those are the most important ones because that tells you that not only did they, you know, the user see the content, they were moved enough to do something to, you know, to show you like I like it. What's the comments? Is that kind of what we're talking about? Yes. Like share. There's some that are even good like profile clicks. You can, you know, those are not public, but you usually can see them as a account holder. Like any sort of action that it is taken, that really gives you an idea of what type of content your audience is really wanting from you is hungry for. I always say like a like is a vote for that kind of content. And so the more votes, something gets, you know, repeat that sort of content over again, you know, give them what they're wanting, you know, it feels like a like would be like a one vote. A comment would be like five votes and a share would be like 10 votes. Don't you think? What's your thoughts on that? Depending on the quality of the comment, right? Right. Exactly. But also if the comments are like, you know, this product keeps on wearing out at this point. Like there's a lot of feedback. There's, it's like an instant feedback loop. There's a lot to be learned there. So they could be complaining, but it might be useful complaint. Like you can learn from it. And then sometimes if you have two likes, but like 2000 comments, then it's that that's usually that. That's a boss. Yeah. Something went wrong. What about reach? What's your thoughts on reach? It depends again on what the goal is, right? If you're really trying to grow the number of followers and reach new audiences, then reach is a little bit more important. But for me, it means that content reached a timeline, but it doesn't mean that person actually the user or human actually saw the content. So, you know, it might as well not have reached it. It's kind of like an empty metric for me. Like I've always found that if you stretch your engagements, then impressions and reach will follow, but the opposite is not true. Yeah. I think the one advantage to reach is a branding play, right? Because your logo is typically being seen by that audience, even if they don't engage with the content, which could bring you top of mind, right? So for example, oh, yeah, I forgot about MIT, you know, and maybe it plants a little seed inside the brain. It's kind of more of a branding thing than it is like, you know, anything else, but it's true that the reach, depending on what you're doing, could be the totally wrong audience to you, right? For example, you create a real on Instagram, you could be reaching completely wrong audience and that could send a signal that's totally incorrect to you thinking, oh, yeah, you've just reached your target audience, which may not be true at all, right? Right. Exactly. And it's the engagements that really show you who your people and your fans and your community are. Okay. So go through the M's real quick and then tell us what the sixth M is. Yeah, it's a mission, message, management, medium, metrics, and the sixth is monitoring. So it's interesting. So you said five, but then added the sixth because monitoring became so important. And it's not over. The process is not over once you hit send or post. It really is important to see how well the content does and to listen to your audience. Like your audience will tell you so much about what they're going through, what their pain points are, maybe what their pain points with the product is or just of a certain social media holiday. Like, for instance, you know, we used to really make a big to do of Mother's Day, but after a while, we would hear our audience say Mother's Day was tough for them, Mother's Day. Like HG was the word I heard a lot like Mother's Day is an HG holiday because they didn't have a good relationship with their or their mother passed. I mean, there's lots of different reasons, right? We all have, we don't have the same relationship with their mother. We all have different relationships with their parents. And so we took a look at that and we took a step back from that. Now we don't post on Mother's Day and Father's Day. You don't post on those days or you don't post about those days. We don't post about those days. Yeah, got it. So when we're monitoring, what exactly should we be looking for? Because maybe not everybody understands what that means because in their mind, monitoring and metrics might be the same, but I think you're saying it's something different, right? Yeah, it's more in the comments and in the quote tweets, I feel like those are, or I guess quote posts. I'm sorry, really. It's okay. I still call them tweets. I don't have a better word for it. Yeah, the quote post, it's like what people are saying about your brand, about you, about a product. Again, it's like an instant feedback loop. You learned so much about what they like, what they don't like, what they happen to be going through. Yeah, it's fascinating and you can learn a lot. And you'll know. You'll know when there's there's a comment that you read and you're like, oh, I'm seeing this a lot. Like, this is how our audience feels about, you know, our new menu item or our new product. Do you recommend using any kind of third party tools? Or do you recommend just going into the social platforms and actually just every once in a while looking at all the comments and reading them and really processing like, what do I see happening here? I think they're both helpful. If you have budget, like listening and monitoring platforms are immensely helpful. They're great. But I also know that, you know, I work with a lot of and advise a lot of people who don't have large budgets, but you can do it within platform and organically. It just takes a little bit more time, but it you just really dig in. You dig into a comment and then you notice someone replied to a comment and then you're like, who are you? You know, and then you go, you do go that direction and we'll see, oh, that's a student or that's a member of our campus community. And all of a sudden that comment will mean a little bit more to us. You just have to dig. You dig it, quote, tweets and then you look at the replies and you look at the responses and you can really kind of dig into a rabbit hole that way. You know, I've done that and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, two hours later, you know, I'm like, good thing this is my job. But you do. It can be, you could just discover a lot, you know, just don't forget about Reddit. You can learn so much in Reddit. You know, you forget to do Google searches. You know, like people, like people want to think of a new hashtag and I and I'm always surprisingly Google search it first to see if it doesn't mean something else before you claim you're staking it, right? But you can you learn a lot from what's out there. Jenny Lee Fowler, thank you for sharing all your insights with us. If people want to connect with you on the socials, do you have a preferred social platform? And if there's some other way you want them to connect with you and find out more about, by the way, everybody check out the book, organic social media, how to build flourishing online communities. But if they want to interact with you on the socials, do you have a preferred platform? Yeah, I'm really active on LinkedIn and X. My DMs are open. If you want to like see what I do not at work, if that's interesting to you, that's more of my Instagram. I think it's more of me just being a mom and being with my family. And they just just search for Jenny space, L.I., smash space, F O W L E R and they'll find you on all the platforms. Exactly. Yep. Jenny Lee Fowler, thank you so much for your time today. Michael, it was a pleasure. Thank you. If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaxameter.com/601. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow this show. And if you've been a long time listener with your friends know about this show, I'm @stellsneuronInstagram @Mike_Stellsneuron, Twitter/X. And do check out our other shows, the Marketing Agency Show and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of yet another episode of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host Michael Stellsneur, I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep you evolving. Catch you next time.