Title: How to Run Social Media That Actually Works
Guest: Ivy Moore
Peter: Today my guest is Ivy Moore. She is a social media manager for a consumer brand. She’s also been a marketing quarter coordinator for a consumer packaged goods startup, and she’s also run Instagram and socials for a super high-end retail establishment in Southern California. So she’s got a lot of.
Social media experience. She also works with us as well. And today we are going to talk about how to successfully run social media for your business and specifically how to get started and why you should even do it. Thanks. Welcome to the show, Ivy.
Ivy: Thank you. Happy to be. Be in front of the camera instead of behind. So
Peter: Ivy does a lot of work on, uh, producing [00:01:00] social media for different brands, and she did mention she does work with a brand. Right now. We should probably describe that brand just a little bit for context of the conversation.
Ivy: So I work right now with Fat Cork, which is a champagne.
Importer and distributor, um, based in Seattle. And it has historically always been champagne, but recently they’re doing still wines from France, which is exciting. But I run their Instagram. That’s our primary choice of social media. And then we also active on LinkedIn, but primarily it’s Instagram. We’ll get in eventually to this podcast.
Why honing in on one. Platform is super important.
Peter: So that’s a great segue. So, you know, today we want to talk about getting started with social media, but listen, it’s 2025. We were talking before we got started here. You know, social media’s been [00:02:00] around for quite a while, probably as long as you’ve been alive, I’m guessing.
But why are we still questioning and talking about whether or not we should do social media in 2025?
Ivy: Yeah, this is something I think about a lot when I tell people I work with social media or run a social media account. I get a lot of negative thoughts because at least my generation, we, like you said, have grown up with it.
I’ve had Instagram since like middle school, and I think a lot of people feel the negative side of the space, and I totally agree. I think there’s a lot of. Negativity and toxic, toxic ness out there. But to me it’s so much different using it for a brand and building your brand and for sales purposes or community growth.
To me it’s pretty similar as having a landing page on a website. It’s a [00:03:00] place to curate your brand, and it’s where people come for the first time I think. The days of typing in like A URL and going to the website first. I think a lot of people do that secondary, but going to an Instagram page or a TikTok or a YouTube, that’s where discovery happens a lot of the time.
So it’s important to obtain at least one of those platforms so you can be discoverable and from there people will go to your website. But I just like to start by saying that I definitely acknowledge that social media isn’t. For everybody.
Peter: When we talk to businesses about the why you need a website, it’s the one thing you can control 100%, right?
That’s, but having said that, your socials are kind of a close second that you can control. It’s something that you can put out there. And like you said, they’re discoverable and when people refer, like word of mouth [00:04:00] is such an important. Method of people learning about a business. But when people hear about a new brand, they’re not just gonna like walk to the business and buy something, right?
They’re gonna grab their phone bin into whatever, into Instagram, into Google, into ai. They’re gonna type in the name of that brand and see what pops up to look and if, especially if it was. Somebody who’s referring to a brand, you know, via social media, then you know, somebody obviously is going to, you know, if I have a friend that says, Hey, you should check out so and so brand, you know, I’m gonna go search for them, and I may end up landing on their Instagram page, for example.
So it’s giving you a Yeah. Greater footprint. And I think generally speaking, social media is more timely. Like we think about a website, obviously you want it to be interactive and timely and up to date and all [00:05:00] that, but it’s hard to keep up to the pace that you can keep on social media where it’s just built for organizing, you know, putting a lot of information out there.
Ivy: Yeah. And I feel like it goes with that discoverability piece too. Like of course a website, there’s SEO and there’s ways for it to become discoverable for someone searching. But I think social media is way easier. There’s a lower barrier to entry to become Yeah. Discoverable, I guess. And I think that’s important to knowledge too.
Well, if you,
Peter: if you just go to Google and type in the name of a brand. The website will usually be the first reference, and if they are running social media, that will be the rest of the page of search results will be all their socials. If somebody searches for your brand, you wanna fill up the whole search results page with your brand any way you can.
This is one of those avenues to do that. So, and then obviously there’s a [00:06:00] community aspect with social, I mean, that’s sort of the core. That’s inherent in the name social media. So tell me a little bit about that aspect of it, that community piece.
Ivy: Yeah. When I’ve been running, merely it’s been Instagram accounts for brands.
That is a platform that is very community central because you have comments, dms, shares, reposts. There’s just lots of ways for people to interact with your brand on there. And I think. Curating a space for people to do so, and whether it’s calls to action or inviting people to engage with you, it’s inviting people in to feel like they’re a part of something than just your service or your brand, and you’re creating this environment that they wanna be a part of.
And I think that would later translate to if [00:07:00] they’re considering. Buying a sunscreen and you’re a sunscreen brand, or they need a service done for their house, if they feel engaged with you and like the kind of feeling they get from your content, I think you would be the first that they would think of.
And that kind of, to me, it creates a sense of mm-hmm. Community. Yeah. Around the brand.
Peter: I think one last thing you had talked about before we jumped on was sort of the, and we’ve sort of touched on this, the brand’s legitimacy, how you can use social media to build sort of legitimacy for your brand.
Ivy: Yeah.
For me, as a consumer too, I think if I ever want, or if I hear about a brand and I wanna know more, I’ll go to the social account before the website. Usually, like I said. Getting on a page and seeing that they’re active, they post once a week or multiple times a week, and they have visually appealing [00:08:00] photos and videos.
I think it just makes the brand feel more legit and like you wanna be a part of it and spend your money towards it, so. So
Peter: certain brands, yeah. Would you have a negative. Impression, if they had no socials or they had, or they had socials that were never tended to.
Ivy: Never tended to. I think that’s more what I’ve encountered before is maybe there’s a post from five years ago, so there was an effort there, but I feel like having something even go up once a month, so 12 times a year, that is a very low list, but like within a month of.
Yeah. Of me going on, if there’s something still posted mm-hmm. I think that’s better than nothing.
Peter: Or as Alan Dibb calls it, random acts of marketing. So, so some, some social media. We, we’ve been guilty of that. Okay. I like that. So, so. So we’re [00:09:00] talking sort of, it’s hard, yeah. You know, in theory here, but let’s talk about reality.
Can you give some examples of, you know, some campaigns you’ve run and how it’s, you know, been part of the business and, and you know what, what you do
Ivy: this summer was the 15 year anniversary of the whole business, which we do like a quarterly newspaper that goes out to all of our members who. Subscribe and get champagne shipments quarterly.
And it’s a beautiful newspaper from our creative team. Love the design. And it was all about the 15 year anniversary, but that is restricted to the group of people that already are customers and already know about the brand. Um, so what I did this summer was create kind of an adjacent campaign visually for Instagram where.
For a month, I posted photos from when the company first started and stories, and [00:10:00] that was a way to also engage with early growers and producers that the company had worked with back in 2010. And that was just. Great way to bring new people into the fold. I always think about how I would respond to things as a viewer and as a consumer, and I think seeing the early days of something, seeing behind the scenes content always resonates with me, and I’ve seen that to be true when I’m pulling analytics of our own fat work account is the content where it’s kind of raw and not super edited and just simple.
Like iPhone photos or digital photos from 2010, those do the best because people wanna know who’s behind the brand and people are curious, naturally curious about how businesses are run. So that was a really fun campaign. And then consistently, I also do something called [00:11:00] Grower Spotlight. On Instagram where I connect and work with different growers and producers, France, that we import their bottles and we’ll do like a whole kind of highlight on who they are, how they operate, how long they’ve been working for.
With champagne and producing. It’ll have photos of them and their family. A brand that is super pretty niche, like we only work with certain producers. I think it’s so important to show who’s making what you’re. Getting, and it could be the same for a fashion brand who’s making your clothing, which sometimes mm-hmm.
Brands obviously don’t wanna show you what’s happening there. But I think, yeah, in terms of fat quirk, I’ve just found people to really resonate. And also it taps into that community sense. People comment, people have questions, people send us dms, or people ask about it when they come into the tasting room too.
They want to know more [00:12:00] about who these. People are that are making the champagne. So just having any sort of content that shows behind the scenes is just really fun.
Peter: Cool, and helpful. Cool. So now that we’ve kind of talked about the why and little bit of, you know, your own experience, let’s talk about like how to get started.
You know, I am guessing most of the people listening to this podcast, if you have a business, you probably already have a Facebook business profile. You probably. Hopefully I already have an Instagram profile. Maybe you have a LinkedIn profile, and I’m talking about for your business. I’m not talking about your personal.
And by the way, never, never, never take your personal profile and try to turn it into a business profile. That’s just, that can be a disaster. So don’t do that. So you should always set up a separate profile. It’s linked to your personal, but it is separate from your personal and for your business brand. Do that.
But anyway, let’s talk about how to [00:13:00] get started. We talk, we met ahead of time and came through, you know, came up with some notes on that. And so based on your experience, like where do you think we should get started? Yeah, what’s your advice?
Ivy: The first. Step should be to think about who your customer is and define them in terms of where they might be on social media.
What type of accounts do they have? Are they native on Instagram or are they on X or YouTube? And these are also questions you can ask people too. I, something that is a little bit more in the weeds that I’ve done at a past CPG brand is we spent multiple days defining. For specific profiles of our customer and who we’ve found them to be.
And these are all fake families or fake customers with fake pictures of them. But it helped us tune into who we were [00:14:00] kind of targeting and who we were creating content for. So we went as far as putting down their household income, the grocery stores they shopped at, because we were selling like food brands.
What social media platforms they’re on, and I think starting there will give you a better sense of what platform to even download and start for your own business.
Peter: Got it. So defining the customer, let’s just take a hypothetical. Let’s say that you are looking for, this kind of hits home to me, empt nest couples, for example.
You know, so let’s just take us as my wife and I as a target audience. Well, specifically probably the person who does most of the acquiring or suggesting, which would be my wife. So that would be like Instagram for example. So now we’ve, we’ve, yeah, identified the person in the platform. So we’ve got somebody in [00:15:00] their middle years, so to speak, a woman who’s on Instagram who likes the finer things of life, and.
Likes to entertain and celebrate others still is working professionally. So is, you know, has to dress professionally at least part of the week and all that. So you kind of have a, a profile of this person, what’s kind of, what’s the next step?
Ivy: That’s good. And of course a brand will have different types of people, but knowing her, you can guess there’ll be other people similar.
But what’s next is. Finding the purpose of posting why you’re on social. And there’s lots of different reasons and it can be multiple at the same time, there’s awareness, community sales, storytelling goes with awareness. Um, or it could be entertainment,
Peter: for example. Just creating like awareness is [00:16:00] obviously one, right?
One thing. And I think everybody thinks about social media. They think about going viral.
Ivy: And if you’re a local business, going viral isn’t gonna help your sales likely, unless everyone lives in that area. If you are an in-person business that washes windows. Yeah. Just in one city. If someone in England sees the video, they’re gonna like it and comment and share it.
But that’s not gonna give you Yeah. Much community it like locally. So. Tuning into the analytics of it all. And I feel like a lot of people along the lines of wanting to go viral think you need to have a ton of followers to have a successful account. But at least in the early stages, and when I’m running accounts, I don’t care about followers as much.
Of course, that’s nice and important, but not the goal. The goal for me is the engagement. So that’s like likes, comments and [00:17:00] shares and reposts and tags. That is way more meaningful to me than having followers.
Peter: Yeah, I was just thinking of a, something that happened a couple years ago where I went viral. I don’t know if you remember the story.
So my daughter, grace, I think you might know her. She shot a video of me in Italy. And we were in the car leaving the parking lot and we were at this little mount, this little town in Tuscany, and we’re in this tiny little parking lot and we’re in this BMW and it’s got all these bells and whistles, literally like beeps and all this stuff.
So we’re leaving the parking lot to go to this farm. And I realize as we’re driving down the hill that I’m going the wrong way. I’m go on the, on the one way road, I’m going the wrong way, and there’s a car coming up towards me and he is not slowing down. And I’m like, oh, crap. So, so [00:18:00] I, I put the car in reverse.
I turn around and I look behind me, and Grace is filming the whole event on her phone. She’s like, and I say. Do not make a video of this. And then I back up and then as we’re backing up all the beeping in the da, it’s like, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. You know, like we’re too close to all the other cars and you know, all these sensors are going off.
And it’s just this crazy racket. And then we finally get, you know, I finally get it, the car positioned in the right direction, and all these Italians are standing around in the parking lot looking at me, and I’m like, Hey, okay, got it. You know, just trying to be nonchalant about it. So Grace Post. Yeah, I definitely remember that.
So it ended up on TikTok. And you know, I, I remember later that day, she’s like, wow, dad looks like 20,000 people liked our video. And, and then [00:19:00] the next morning she’s like, dad, 250,000 people liked the video. And then later that day it was like a million people liked it and I think we, or viewed it, I think we ended up with 4 million views and like.
Half a million likes or something, and there was people just like, oh my God, that’s my dad. I can’t believe it. People just totally, you know, it resonated with him and I was, I was like,
Ivy: that’s crazier. Well,
Peter: grace, hey, we went viral. I mean, what’s in it for me? Like, you know, of course there was no money. That changed hands.
It was just kind of a one hit wonder, but you can go viral. You know? It didn’t really build my brand, but, but again, it’s not a sustainable model unless you’re like, you’ve got a whole team of creatives or you’ve just got a, you know, just some, some folks just with an amazing eye. I mean, obviously you can go viral, but trying to link it to [00:20:00] your brand and get benefit out of it for your brand, but that, that’s not necessarily.
What I would recommend as a strategy for using social media. We were talking about starting with the why. You know, and why, why you’re doing it, and then what was, what’s next?
Ivy: Yeah, so next after purpose. Yeah. Finding the why I think is deciding how often and which platform and what content types, so those kind of all go together.
Once you. Decide if you’re gonna be on Instagram or YouTube shorts or threads or whatever.
Peter: Could you
Ivy: Medium. Could you kind of give us on a really
Peter: quick Reader’s Digest version of which platform is best for which audience?
Ivy: Yes. I think standard across the board. Instagram, I. I have advocated for, and that’s what I primarily mm-hmm.
Peter: Yeah,
Ivy: do. I’ve also ran tiktoks in the [00:21:00] past for consumer brands, and those are really fun too, but that’s just a different audience. I’m honestly not as familiar with TikTok anymore just because I think TikTok Instagram and YouTube shorts. All that content just cycles through and it’s the same, and you’ll see the same thing on the same feed.
So I think having Instagram, that could be for any business. It doesn’t have to be so short.
Peter: From video.
Ivy: For From video, yeah. But on Instagram, it’s also important to prioritize the still photos too, and have a grid that is an equal mix ish. Probably leaning more towards reels, but reels doesn’t have to be you in front of the camera as like a business.
Mm-hmm. Founder or owner. It could be graphics too. It could be photos that are in a real format. It could be videos of your staff or a job site or whatever. It doesn’t have to be talking. So which platform is
Peter: reels?
Ivy: Okay. Reels is Instagram
Peter: and, [00:22:00]
Ivy: but TikTok, for example, is all reels, all videos. No pictures, but I think what a lot of people do is once you get set up and post on Instagram reels, then you can just post the exact same video on other platforms if you wanted.
Peter: Mm-hmm. And I think Facebook has a similar, they have like, I can’t remember what it’s called, but I get sucked into it daily.
Ivy: True. Yeah. Yeah. I think all of these platforms are doing the same thing. I think that goes back to the earlier point of, well, like where does your customer hang out at?
Peter: Right? Yeah.
It doesn’t hurt to post to multiple, but you should really focus on one platform to be your primary,
Ivy: especially if you don’t have a dedicated social media person on your team. I think it’s easier just to choose one and get good at it post like once a week, once a month, whatever you can. [00:23:00]
Peter: I think that’s a major problem that a lot of businesses have is they make it somebody’s side thing that doesn’t really wanna do it.
And, and that true if you don’t, I mean, I, to me that seems it is to a point now in sort of mainstream business, you know. It’s, it’s a thing now, social media, depending on the size of your business, you should definitely have somebody on your staff who, it’s not just like, oh, and by the way, you get to do this, right.
It needs to be something that’s part of a job description. You know, if even that, that’s not what they do 100% of the time. You know, it needs to be respected and not just, okay, you get to go play with social media. Right, because it, I’ve seen businesses, you know, I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I’ve seen businesses just, you know, do that and then that person leaves and then it just disappears or, or there’s other [00:24:00] priorities.
Ivy: Mm-hmm.
Peter: And the first thing to stop doing is social media.
Ivy: Yeah. No, that’s a really good point too. And I think too, if there’s no one on your team that wants to take that on, or if it’s not something in someone’s job description that. You have. I think even just having someone do it one day a week or have someone freelance do it, it could be someone in college or someone that’s just familiar with social media.
’cause for them it’ll take super fast and be so hire an expert.
Peter: So, so TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, shorts. And then we’ve also got, you know, kind of the other stuff that I really stay away from. X threads, blue sky, kinda all these, you know, sort of text, well, I mean, they do everything now. I mean, you can also do video content on X and seems to me like some of those.
Platforms though, really [00:25:00] require a massive amount of commitment and dedication.
Ivy: Yeah, and that something else I was gonna say too is Substack to me goes in the back of that line too. ’cause that takes a lot of time. But I’ve been seeing a ton of brands recently where the founder starts a substack and.
It’s all dedicated to promoting their brand. So that’s something to think about too, if like longer form content makes sense for your business or product. Like I’ve thought about that for Fat Cork because we do longer form like written stories and blogs and that would do well on Substack, but mm-hmm.
That’s a newer platform for people to with. Yeah. So there’s
Peter: Substack. Where, yeah, it’s longer form written content. There’s, I guess, to some degree Reddit also. It’s definitely a social platform, although using it to promote a [00:26:00] business is, could be dangerous on Reddit. I don’t know if I would do that, but there are so many platforms to choose from, like, like we said early in the conversation, pick one, get good at it.
You know, pick one. Don’t, don’t be overwhelmed by the choices. You know, like I, I don’t think you can go wrong if you just pick Instagram for example, or even Facebook. What I’m blown away by with Facebook, ’cause we run a lot of Facebook ad campaigns that, or meta ad campaigns that run on Facebook and Instagram, is that for the audiences that we’re targeting most with the ads, most of the leads are generated through Facebook and not Instagram.
But that’s, that’s advertising. So that that’s a whole different, which obviously we’re talking today, we’re talking about organic, using the platforms, but Facebook is still used by a ton of people.
Ivy: So these are things we came up with that are [00:27:00] not needed to get started, but they’re interesting and they’re helpful for when you’re more in the weeds of creating content.
But the first one I always think is important is having a content calendar and. If that’s what I use right now, I plan like a month out what I’m gonna post. Mm-hmm. And of course it can change, but it’s just really helpful to not be in there day of thinking what you’re gonna post. So something like notion is really helpful and simple.
Or even something like Google Calendar, very easy or there are like subscription. Systems that you can pay for, like Sprout social and that’s what I used a past CPG brand where we were running three brands at once. So that’s helpful to organize it. And you can also post directly from the platform too.
Peter: We use a tool kinda like that right now, don’t we?
For posting at Biz Marketing for our clients. [00:28:00]
Ivy: Oh yeah. Called One Up.
Peter: So it’s a way to load content. Put a date, time, and date that it’s actually gonna post, and then it’ll post then. So it really, I mean this is kind of basic blocking and tackling tips here, but if you’re just getting started, you can just post natively in the app.
But if you want to do something like you’re talking about where you’ve got like, you know, one post a day, there’s no way you’re gonna sit down once a day and post something. It just makes more sense to go in once a week or once a month and load it in.
Ivy: Definitely. Another thing is not getting caught up in the quality of it.
I think iPhone videos and pictures are great and resonate more with people than like a studio professional shot. And I think for the brand I work with now, it’s important to have both. But if you’re just starting, I don’t think you need to have. A dedicated photo shoot or [00:29:00] camera, just use your iPhone.
Another thing that is important to do if you’re getting more into this, is doing a competitive analysis, which would be going to different businesses that are maybe in your field or similar, and seeing what they’re doing, what they’re posting, how often they’re doing it, what type of content. Is it video?
Is it picture? What’s the engagement like on all those things? ’cause that could be helpful to inform what would work for your brand.
Peter: Ivy, this has been a great conversation. I know we’re just scratching the surface on using social media to grow your business and engage with your customers. So what, what, what would you recommend folks do next?
Like, you know, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. Where do I get started?
Ivy: Yes, we touched on this before, but asking your customers how they use social media as a business owner, that’s a [00:30:00] very easy thing to do if you’re already in communication and ask if there’s businesses they follow, that they think do a good job and that they like following and that they engage with.
This will just give you more insight and intel when you’re doing it yourself and executing it. Start investigating the platform before. Creating anything, just poke around and find different businesses that are like yours. This kind of goes with the competitive analysis piece, but not as intense. You don’t have to make a whole document about it, but just for your own sake and own curiosity.
Just see what’s out there.
Peter: Yeah, like let’s say you’re a dentist and you’re interested, go find dentists. They don’t, I mean, see what’s going on in your local market. But also look around in other areas. You know, you could say, look, you know, go search for, like, we’re in the Seattle area. Go look for Dennis in Chicago and see what they’re doing, you know, for their [00:31:00] social.
So it, so there’s no, it’s not necessarily a direct competitive comparison.
Ivy: Yeah, that’s a good distinction.
Peter: Obviously the most important thing to do is to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. If you are looking for our Instagram, we are at Go Biz Marketing, and that’s just all spelled out. Go Biz Marketing and Facebook, the same thing.
Just look for at. Go biz marketing and you can follow us and kind of see what we’re up to. And we’re not perfect. Don’t judge us too much. But you know, do as we say, not as we do. And if you have any questions, you can leave it in the comments on this, on the YouTube comments, or you can DM us on our socials and we will get back to you with some answers.
So Ivy, thanks very much for joining me today, and this has been great.
Ivy: Thank you for having me on chat.
