Source:
https://www.podbean.com/eau/pb-m9vaw-13f45d6

The current state of the social media landscape is anything but stable. Twitter continues to devolve. TikTok is going strong, but will its use be banned in the United States? It’s a challenge to keep up with the changes in current channels and evaluate new options. In this episode, we discuss this uncertainty and how you can keep your focus on using the right channels at the right time for your clients.
 
Transcript
Michelle Kane:
Thank you for joining us for an episode of That Solo Life, the podcast for PR pros and marketers who work for themselves. People like me, Michelle Kane, with VoiceMatters, and my ever-steady co-host, Karen Swim, of Solo PR Pro. Hi, Karen. How are you today?
Karen Swim:
Hello. I am good. We got a little peek of sunshine this morning, and it was way overdue since we had lingering winter weather here in Michigan. I feel pretty good, because the sunshine definitely recharges me.
Michelle Kane:
It's so true. You don't realize until you haven't had it for a few days and you think, "Ugh, come on, sunshine." Yes, yes, definitely. We had a little taste of summer, but now we're back to actual spring. I don't know. It was sunny up until probably an hour ago.
Karen Swim:
Yeah.
Michelle Kane:
I've been kind of refusing, I'm like, "I'm not wearing a jacket. I don't care if I'm cold. I'm past that."
Karen Swim:
I've been stuck in winter clothes because I couldn't take it anymore, and I was freezing. It hasn't just been lack of sun, it's actually been ... it's just been winter here. Everybody's still in their winter gear, which kind of stinks considering it's the ...
Michelle Kane:
It does.
Karen Swim:
... end of April. Hopefully.
Michelle Kane:
Well, as the Great Purple One said, Sometimes It Snows in April. Sometimes, as we're going to talk about today, sometimes changes in social media and our landscape can also make you a bit bonkers. We're good. It's not just Twitter and the whole mess over there. It's, where are people spending their time now, and what components have changed? How does that impact how you find your audience?
It almost feels like the beginning of social media where I think, not that we've become complacent, but for a while, we kind of knew, all right, that's that, that's that, we know where to find everything. Suddenly, they moved our cheese all over the place.
Karen Swim:
Yeah.
Michelle Kane:
We'll just touch on that today, and talk about our experiences, and please do hit us up at SoloPRPro.com and share your experiences, because we really want to hear about it.
Karen Swim:
It's interesting. I saw yesterday someone talk about a reporter was discussing that Twitter in particular became part of our habits. It's pretty much ingrained. We, for the past decade, we would go to Twitter and we would use it for real time news and were accustomed to PR professionals developing relationships or maintaining relationships with journalists there, we would source queries there.
We would see what people were up to. It was built into our daily habits, much like Facebook was the place where we just learned to go to keep up with family and friends. Now there's so many revenge Twitter sites.
Michelle Kane:
I love that, revenge Twitter sites.
Karen Swim:
People are dispersed. Now, even [inaudible 00:03:26] has notes. People are communicating over there around posts that are authored, which is sort of a new old version of what the blog post used to be. The blog post would be the community gathering place. Everybody would go and comment on blogs every day. Then you have these algorithms that have changed everywhere. You've got ...
Michelle Kane:
Completely.
Karen Swim:
... Google changing, you've got even YouTube changing. YouTube is another social media site, and their ad revenue has dropped to 6.7 billion in the first quarter of this year. With their 2.6% year-over-year decline, people are really wondering, okay, creators, but then also enterprises. We have clients, we all have clients that have YouTube channels, and we've all been told for such a long period of time that it's a great way to have your own thought leadership platform and share information with your audience.
Well, if ad revenue is dropping and algorithms are changing, and TikTok shorts are becoming more popular than YouTube, we're faced with a lot of questions about where in the hack do we spend our time, and where do we tell our clients to spend their time?
Michelle Kane:
So true, so true. It also brings back the notion, or should I say, it's a core principle, always own your real estate, always have a website, always try to be building your email list, because then these questions aren't as potent. There's definitely a space for social to amplify your message. Yeah. There are a lot of question marks of where are your audiences spending your time? From the professional development side, where are our colleagues and our contacts spending their time? How can they be found?