#103 | Lacey Faught, Part 2 | Humanize Social Media Through Digital Literacy
Episode #103 | Lacey Faught, Part 2 | Humanize Social Media Through Digital Literacy
On this episode of Business Over Beer, we welcome back Lacey Faught for part 2 of her interview. Lacey is the owner of Spry, a Social Media Marketing Agency in Vancouver, WA.
Not just another Social Media Marketing Agency, Spry is working from their Social Media For Good ethos by serving clients who have a cause and working to bring good into the world. Spry believes that the true ROI for social media is not measured in dollars and cents, but in building a strong community and injecting humanity back into Social Media.
For so many us, there is a real love hate relationship with Social Media. And especially as small business owners, it is next to impossible to ignore Social Media as part of the overall marketing strategy.
So how do you reconcile that? Well, Lacey explains to us that if you are going to be on Social Media, that it can’t be a chore, it can’t just be about checking a box. At Spry, they prioritize human connection through Social Media
Measuring ROI for Social Media
How do you measure ROI for social media? It’s a difficult question to answer for all of us, even experts like Lacey who work in the space. She admits that even now she struggles to answer that question for companies who want to know the monetary return.
Instead, she focus ROI for social media on size of community and making sure it is consistently growing. Lacey stresses that you don’t have to have 20,000 followers in order to be successful on social media. The return comes from the relationships you are building and through the conversations you are having with your customers.
“How do you put a monetary price on human connection,” she says. “When you’re showing up and building relationships, those leads come over time, and they build your business’ reputation, they build you referral network, but there’s no perfect equation or statistic that you can put to human connection.”
How To Humanize Social Media
Social Media For Good is certainly a catchy mission and a noble cause, but is there actually a practical way to make that happen in today’s world?
From someone like Lacey, whose core values are optimism, determination, and snacks, she admits her lens is probably more utopian than most. So when we posed that question to her, we were expecting something a bit more fluffy and spiritual. We were a bit taken aback when she responded that Digital Literacy is the practical way to inject humanity into Social Media.
Every action you take on social media impacts what you see on your feed. And not just clicking and liking and commenting. Merely stopping your scroll to read a post, to look at a picture or to review comments will also contribute to what you see. The inhuman algorithm thinks that because you have taken this action you want to see more content like this from these same people. We need to realize that if there are things we don’t want to see, there are actions we can take to minimize that type of content.
Social Media companies are profit centered and we need to understand that these platforms are set up are on purpose. Most of us only see what is on the surface instead of understanding the background and how our actions impact our experience on social media.
Another way Spry injects an element of humanism into their work for their clients is through presence management. Instead of just firing off a response to a negative comment, the team will roundtable before responding, reviewing together what was posted, what platform it was on, what time it was posted, and thinking about what the commenters mindset might have been. This allows the team to have more understanding of the context of a post or comment and responding appropriately instead of emotionally. Come on, couldn’t we all benefit from a little presence management on our own pages?
In the end, Lacey reminds us that most people are not getting on social media to be sold to, but rather to be entertained and to learn about the people they care about.
The Business Over Beer Passages To Success Membership will help you become a better business leader, be more connected to the community, and to ultimately run a more successful business.
