Episode 28: Using Social Media to Build Community with Elana Leoni

With our world expanding through the use of the internet and social media, this can cause some challenges and uncertainty to business owners. However, by looking at it as a way to build community only benefits you and your growing business. To help us learn more about how to use social media towards your advantage is guest Elana Leoni. 

Elana, who has her own consulting group, has always wanted her career to be a mix of passion and making an impact, while having profitable income. She’s been able to have a curious mind, which has resulted in various job types, but eventually landed working in a social media management role for educational brands and organizations. She describes what her work is like and advice on how to use social media to start your own business. 

Social media is a form of community and a way to connect and build relationships with a whole world of people. Particularly when working for educational brands, it can help organizations know what their buyers want and need. If interested in how to incorporate social media into your business, this episode and Elana’s knowledge is just for you!

 

Topics Discussed:

  • Elana shares how a non-educator now supports and works with educational groups and brands

  • How education played a big role in her life and provided opportunities she didn’t know was possible

  • Ways to elevate teacher voice in product creation

  • How the culture of a work environment can be completely different and how to adapt 

  • Elana’s advice on how to use social media to start your own business and the 3 key factors

Resources mentioned:

Related episodes and blog posts:

 

Meet Elana Leoni

Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K-12 education. Prior to founding Leoni Consulting Group, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation where she grew Edutopia’s social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education change-makers every month.

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Read the transcript for this episode:

Lily

Elana Leoni has dedicated the majority of her career to improving K through 12 education. Prior to founding Leonie Consulting Group, she spent eight years leading the marketing and community strategy for the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she grew Edutopia social media presence exponentially to reach over 20 million education changemakers every month.

Lily

Hello, Elana, so glad to have you here with us.

Elana

Yeah, I'm so glad to be here. I was just saying with you a little earlier, you were one of my first ever podcast guests. So the tables have turned and I'm so excited.

Lily

Yay, me too. And I've loved being on your podcast and listening to your podcast as well. And I would love for you to to start by sharing with us about your professional journey. I know it's a big question.

Elana

I guess I don't take myself very seriously too so there is no, like, no one's career journey is done. But I don't know.

Lily

But you've done so much. I mean, I think, just take us through.

Elana

I started out and got my undergraduate degree in business. And I just knew all I knew is I needed to make money because I came from a very poor family. And I recently came across one of my like, second grade school pieces of work. And it said, like, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Elana

Like all those questions, and I remember looking at it, and it said, in my like little second grade handwriting, it said, I want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or anything that makes a lot of money. So my family isn't poor anymore. And so like, one, I can't believe I said that and my poor second grade teacher had to, like, listen to that and have her heartbreak.

Elana

But I just feel like that's a little bit been a bit of my guiding light of, I want to do something that marries my passion for making an impact in this world. But I've always been trying to figure, with the lens of, I need to be somewhat profitable, because I support people and things like that. So I so I just went to, like I said, Okay, I'm gonna be a business major, they make money, right? It's called business, or lending to business.

Elana

But then I realized that like, there weren't a lot of people like me there in business, like I wasn't going into finance, accounting, I liked when it got, like, super creative, but not in the illegal way. But like, there's so many cool aspects of like, high level accounting I liked, but I guess I'm rambling. But I just didn't feel like there was a place for me in business very much. Because it didn't marry like my, my need for making an impact.

Elana

Like, if you think about what we do every day, we spend so much time and if we're not making a difference, I don't feel like you're spending your life very well. I certainly have best friends that say, Hey, just make an income so you can play and make an impact on your side. But that's never been my philosophy.

Elana

So long story short, I graduated, didn't know what I was going to do. Got a job at a startup in actually the town I live in now Sausalito, and they were doing really cool things with corporate volunteerism.

Elana

And I said, wow, you know, if a company like GE or Bank of America or Citigroup, just motivated 1% of their workforce, like if you think about globally, how many employees they have, and those 1% of people around the world, dedicated their time and volunteerism, you can make a huge impact.

Elana

So I spent five years really in this like what they call corporate social responsibility world, and just became fascinated by the people and they were so selfless and giving and they ran big volunteer programs globally for big companies, like, you know, AAA and you know, all of the financial institutions. And then I just figured, startup life was a little stressful.

Elana

After startup life, decided to go in the one with nature and become an oyster shucker. At the time, I lived in Bolinas, which is West Marin in California and are known for our oysters. I came from a background of being a restaurant server and catering so I had family friends that owned an oyster bar, and I said, Can I just escape from this noise in this politics? And just have this beautiful simple task of shucking oysters on Tomales Bay?

Elana

So, I did that for like three or four months, had an amazing time brought my dog to work, surfed, and my goal was to apply to one job a week. Yeah, I love that. Right. My first ever job I applied to was at Edutopia, the George Lucas Educational Foundation. So I applied, that was my one job I applied to. And it was the first job I applied to.

Elana

And I got an interview. And it was for a membership coordinator at the time Edutopia was launching this big membership for their magazine and trying to figure out how to create community and leverage online events. This is like circa 2005, no, 2008. Sorry. So it's like the time where social media wasn't huge yet, people were still trying to leverage like video and webinars like webinars were super like AI is now,

Elana

I spent eight years there. And during that time they transitioned I help them transition from a magazine oriented environment to what is the world of social media, and what is community and what is user generated content with blogs and, and all of those beautiful things. And I realized that educators are super selfless, amazing humans, just like those people I worked with in the corporate social responsibility world.

Elana

Like they will do anything to help their students to help their other colleagues to help their community. And I just fell in love with the space. And so I guess, you know, very long story, not so long, short, whatever, I now run an agency.

Elana

And it's been about six years called Leoni Consulting Group, short for LCG. And we just partner with education brands, and we do the things that I did at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, social media, building community, creating content that really elevates educator voices, and so on and so forth.

Lily

Yeah, that's so awesome. I love the oyster phase too, that I feel like it's something that everybody could take forward as a transition. Like, you could just take something on in a transition, right? That feels like the right thing right then, and set some mellow goals, like one job a week, like you did that feels like some cool advice that we could take forward with us.

Elana

I felt like I just needed to like decompress. Yeah, like, time to decompress. And also, and I think your audience would really like this, too, is like you need to have time to really understand what fuels you and what doesn't fuel you and set those boundaries. So you don't make the same mistakes again.

Lily

Yes, absolutely. So many teachers, me included, when I left the classroom, take a lot of that pace and stress of being a teacher to the next chapter. Because that's just what we know. So being more intentional about that, and saying, Hey, I'm going to have the mental space and emotional capacity to be able to think about what I need next. This is a part that we often forget or miss, because it's so go, go go. So I appreciate that reflection.

Lily

And then thinking about, I'm curious always about how people learn things. And it seems like when you came into the world of Edutopia, which I honestly forgot that they were a magazine.

Elana

Before they were a magazine, they were a DVD, before they were a DVD, they were VHS, before their VHS they were physical books. They're old school, you know, they've been around over 20 years.

Elana

And what I loved about, you know, learning from George, George Lucas, is that he would go with the medium that educators consumed most of the time. And was able to quickly make decisions when he saw shifts in the market when he saw Okay, people are online, you know, magazines are not the way of the future.

Lily

Yes, no, I appreciate that. For sure. The adaptability. So thinking about you, it seems like when you worked at Edutopia, you didn't have necessarily a ton of social media experience or community experience. And so how did you learn that?

Elana

I absolutely knew nothing about education either, to be honest, besides I was in education. The reason why I wanted to do something in education is just a personal note is education feels like it equalized me, it saved me in some way.

Elana

I, I come from a background where my dad was incarcerated most of my childhood. And my dad was super smart. He, but he graduated high school didn't didn't have the education to do other things. And I just education saved me otherwise, I think I would have limited myself and it, it inspired me to do things that I didn't even know were possible.

Elana

You know, and I'm going to college and not even knowing what a college was and not even planning for it. There's just there's this beauty that inspired me. And if I thought if a teacher can change my world and education can change my world, it can do that for so many.

Elana

And unfortunately we see a lot of inequity in education. But there are those moments like for me, I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be doing what I do. I wouldn't be having as a fulfilling life as I do now, if it wasn't for education.

Lily

Yes, absolutely. I absolutely appreciate that. And I think that at its best education really is the great equalizer, you know, that can give people so many opportunities and really help, you know, so many people in different ways.

Elana

I mean, like, it also put a fuel in me too, though, because I said, Well, what if what if a child doesn't have like I had a fourth grade teacher, that one of the first adults that said, I believe you can do so much more. And like, you know, someone who really sees you and looks you in the eye and like just says, you are made for great things, you can do things I believe in you.

Elana

And having that belief instilled in you can, like, even if you just have one little bit of it the rest of your life, it can change the trajectory of your life. But I said, Well, think about all the kids that never get that. Hmm. That kind of fueled me with Edutopia and fueled me with my work at the agency.

Elana

But your question did not answer about like that, like, how do you begin to learn all this stuff, social media, how do you begin to learn like community and like blogging, and all of the things around that? And I think you just need to approach it with a curious mindset and say, Well, what are the skills I have? And how can they translate?

Elana

Because I work with a lot of educators that have transitioned into edtech. And I always say, you have so many more skills than you realize that translate into the world of ed tech businesses wherever you want to go. So I just thought, like, well, they hired me for like skills like email marketing, and I had a little bit of that. And I knew Salesforce, and I knew some of the technology. But I had no idea how to like, do all of the things.

Elana

But I just started with listening. And I know that feels overly simplistic, but I was scared of Twitter just like everyone else. So I was scared of all of the things and I just like got on there and like lurked, but not like creepy lurked, but like, lurk, doing cool things.

Elana

And I started to emulate what they did. I started asking questions, and just being authentic. And it just kind of built, I think, I also looked and identified people in the workplace that could help me and we're also growing because this whole field was new.

Elana

So I happened to sit next to the person who was in charge of community and blogs. And I said, Hey, you want to hear me want to see what I'm doing over here on Twitter? And then she's like, Hey, you want to see what I'm doing over here? And it turns out, because we were sitting next to each other, we created our whole entire blog strategy in the beginning, just based on Ed chat on Twitter. Yeah.

Elana

So no, I think you just have to be open, you have to listen, you have to not be hard on yourself. And you have to bring people on your journey with you. Like I was in lockstep with my boss to say, hey, here's what I'm doing. Are you okay with this? Here's what I think it could be. But I'm not sure because everything's so new. And she fully supported that, but it's just bringing everyone along with you. So you're not on your own island.

Elana

Sometimes I see educators and other people come in, and they're like, I'm doing the thing. I'm going, but no one's going with you. And so if you can't make the case, or if they're not with you, you're siloed, and you won't get funding or it won't continue. I guess I just like, learn a lot and learn by doing on the ground, but listening, collaborating and bringing people on the journey.

Lily

Absolutely, yeah, when I was teaching, I always called that phase of exploring a new concept mucking about. We're gonna muck about and learn about the rainforest by looking at all these different books about the rain forest, and see what it feels like and looking at pictures. And I think that some of what you described, I would also describe as mucking about like that lurking, and kind of just playing around and talking to people.

Lily

Like, it honestly kind of parallels the oyster story again, you know, of having this not just like, I'm gonna hit the ground running, and I'm gonna go, I'm gonna know all the things like, there has to be a phase where we're kind of figuring it out. And I think labeling that can kind of make it easier.

Elana

Yeah, I would add is in situations that are always unknown. And we're coming across so many unknowns in education and Edtech in the world of business. Now, you have to have a belief in yourself, too. Because if you don't have that belief, no one's gonna say, okay, Lily, you go muck about over here. They're gonna have to say, well, if anyone can do it, you can do it. And you know, and you need to instill that confidence in yourself.

Elana

Of like, I don't know, I didn't know what I didn't know. And I think sometimes, I wasn't as humble that I was like, I'll figure it out. You know? You got to have a little bit of that, lots of curiosity, but you have to have some confidency. You can do some things there and get people to believe in you.

Lily

Yes. And that you can figure things out. You know, you don't have to know everything, but that if you have the confidence that you can figure things out, then I think that really propels you forward.

Elana

And that's 100% how I would describe almost any educator I've ever met.

Lily

Right, right. It's always an unknown situation.

Elana

There's a book called Everything is Figureoutable. Oh, yeah. Who is Amy Porterfield's friend Marie Forleo. Yeah, and I haven't read it but it's like it totally aligns with just where we're at is like everything is figureoutable, we just need to bring people on our journey, and potentially have some hypothesis of what we're trying to get out of this too.

Elana

Yeah, how about intention because I could spend my entire life on social media and not make goals or targets if I didn't know, like, here's what I'm trying to do. Here's what I think. And I can be wrong. And I'm wrong all the time.

Lily

Yeah and it's that balance of like, the focus and the goals, and also some flexibility of taking in data and trying new things and seeing how they go. And so that kind of leads us to your work now, which you do amazing work with lots of different education brands and organizations. Can you tell us a little bit about just what that work is like?

Elana

So we just partner with education organizations, but in the world of education, it can be a little mucky to use your words. You can work in education organizations that are nonprofits, you can work with more business to consumer type of E Learning brands, like where we met at education.com, where anything where it's forward facing, the consumers were learning maybe like parents want to buy stuff for their children type of brands.

Elana

We also work in like the pure ed tech space where it's like, b2b business to business or b2c. And they have a tech product or professional service that they use to sell to teachers. They used to sell to administrators, they used to sell to parents and things like that, too.

Elana

So we work with all sorts of like education brands, in addition to that we work with higher education brands. So it's like, and they're all very different. But if they're making a difference in education, we want to work with them. And that gives us a unique vantage point and also fuels our passion.

Elana

So what we do is a lot of the stuff I did at Edutopia, and I realized that there's other people that are very passionate about these services, as well, is organic social media. So people go, what's organic? Organic is the stuff you don't pay for. And it's, it's the most pure, authentic form of social media. It's the posts that you see every day that a brand is posting.

Elana

And hopefully they're posting with the goal of how can I provide value in a consistent way to my audience, and my audience might be my buyers, they might be my users. But how can I do that? And how can I have fun with the platform, and look at what the platform wants, and all of that. So we do that for education brands.

Elana

And we also teach education brands how to do it themselves. So lots of stuff around organic social media management, I believe it's one of the most authentic ways to connect and create relationships with your target audience, whether they be buyers or users.

Lily

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's so cool to think about, you know, social media as being community and as a way to really connect and get that feedback and build relationships that way. I really want to elevate that you have been such an advocate for teachers.

Lily

And even though you might not have had classroom experience yourself, you know, I think that through your experience, you have gained this unique vantage point of the work that educators do and I know that you do so much to elevate teacher voice in all the different things that you do. So can you talk a little bit more about how you help brands and organizations include teacher voice?

Elana

Sure. The other things I think we do at LCG, that kind of tie into that is we build communities of educators and kind of using the words of one of my colleague Porter, she always says the greatest resource for educators is other educators.

Elana

And that really reminds me of I was early ed camp for anyone who all the educators that know the ED camp unconference model, we always said the smartest person in the room is the room and community is that and it builds and it's joyful, and it can support that isolated profession of educators.

Elana

In terms of educator voice, the thing I love doing is creating content that elevates educator voice. And that's the other service that LCG does. We create blog posts, ebooks, podcasts, anything that helps elevate and incorporate educator voice.

Elana

I think something that still fuels me and makes me mad at the same time and that's why I'd like to continue this work is I've never been in an industry I've ever granted I've only been in two but the the primary like stakeholder, the person that has a lot of responsibility on the learning outcomes, is generally not listened to or uplifted or supported in a way that helps them grow on a regular basis. So that makes me mad. Yeah.

Elana

And I want to make sure that educator voices are uplifted all of the time. And in fact, like they're more important than, you know, maybe some executive that came from Google, like the sure they might know their realm and what a business can do to succeed. But educators know what they want. And if your product doesn't resonate with either your end user or your buyer, it's not going to succeed.

Elana

And it's not going to make those efficacy things that we're seeing right now. In the world of ed tech, you know, there is a bit of a tech bloat, and people are going to start consolidating. And the one thing they're going to look at is impact and say what products are actually making an impact.

Elana

And I don't care what relationships you have with districts, if you can't prove that you're going to be gone. And the way you ensure that you're making an impact is you're constantly elevating and integrating educator voice.

Lily

Absolutely. And I think that you can tell, you know, products and services that don't have teacher voice in them or, you know, any teacher input at the beginning, when they get to teachers in the classroom, teachers can tell, and vice versa.

Lily

Like you can tell when you are using a product that teachers have worked on, because generally it resonates more. So I think it's good for everybody, like you have to have it.

Elana

And like thinking of practical ways, like Edtech companies do it and how we do it. But we always like help with things like focus groups, or what we call stakeholder interviews, where we go one on one with educators and go deep and say, What do you want? What do you don't want? What do you like?

Elana

It could be product oriented, it could be topic oriented, about the topics, the brand cares about. Focus groups are great. So you can kind of compare Do you like this or that you can do a lot of user testing, that's on a high scale, like usertesting.com. But you can also use educator focus stuff. So we go really deep, you can do surveys.

Elana

Like there's lots of ways to integrate educator voice and product building and development, and even marketing, like testing your marketing messages. But I also applaud companies that hire educators, you have to make sure you do it well. And there's like, I think you were on my podcast talking a little bit about that, too.

Elana

But you got to make sure that you're ready to support an educator that has completely different culture, a completely different dynamic, they don't know all the ebbs and flows and the little things about how like a ed tech or a for profit company work.

Elana

I remember there was an educator, I think it was Serena that was on my podcast from Soundtrap. And she said, the first thing I had to remember is that like, oh, I can, I can use the bathroom whenever I want. So like there's like little things like there's like so much more freedom. But then with freedom becomes there's some ambiguity a little bit too, right.

Elana

So you don't want to hire educators just for hiring educators sake, you want to make sure that they're fundamentally integrated either in product development, I've seen educators do very good in terms of customer service, community roles, customer success, partnership type of roles, marketing, events, all of the things around that, because they're so close to the end user, right?

Elana

So I know we can talk a lot about like, what what roles we see in ed tech and stuff. But I would say on both sides, from the educator side, just go in knowing that you're entering a world that's fundamentally different. Give yourself some grace. Ask questions, like the more questions, the better.

Elana

Because, you know, on the tech side, or the business side, they actually don't know how to support you best, because they have never been an educator. So hey, you know, is it okay if I like take five minutes to do this are like in there? Like, oh, my God, yes, you actually are legally required to blah, blah, blah.

Lily

Yes, I remember my first role out of the classroom was working with teaching channel, which was mostly I did it from home. But occasionally I would come into the office. And I remember being just so confused by the culture. I would just like people just roll in at certain times, you know, people come sometime between like nine and 11.

Lily

And that was so weird to me, just like we're not all here, right at nine, you know, like, the bell is not ringing. It's not that sense of urgency. And I also remember being like, oh, I can have like hot tea whenever I want, like, Okay, I'm just gonna have a snack like great in a meeting. Sure. It is like a culture shift to have just being in a new place.

Lily

And so it's important for both teachers and those organizations to kind of have that in mind, too. It's totally something that you can adapt to. But just knowing that it's not going to be necessarily just the skills that you're developing, you know, are the new things that you're doing, but also a new culture you're stepping into.

Elana

Yeah, and I think one of the things that both parties can do that will almost always set them up for success is understand what the expectations are in the role, and have some clear, like scaffold type of goals to get you there, right.

Elana

So a lot of companies do 90 Day goals. So it's not like your quarterly or your h1 h2 goals. But it's something small that you every month, you check in and say here's here's what we agreed to. And they could be small, like technical things, like a lot of the times educators need to learn new technology. And so a lot of time you're building up and onboarding.

Elana

But if, if you are an educator searching for a job in the world of tech or ed tech, ask them about what they're onboard. thing looks like. Ask them about their plans there. Because if they don't have a process or have a place to support you, you're probably not going to succeed in that environment. And that goes for pretty much all employees, not just educators.

Elana

But you got to make sure that they're like, here's how we will onboard you here like for the tech that you don't know, we're going to give you tired, we're not going to just throw everything at you. And you're going to freak out, you know, like, we're going to, here's how we're going to support you, and be on the same page of what you are expected to do in your role.

Lily

Yeah, so important. So you are a wealth of knowledge of all things, education and social media. And I'm curious for those people out there who are educators hoping to start their own businesses, if you have any social media advice for them.

Elana

Yes, I would like I would love to talk to your audience for like 10 years about this. Yes, I will say, Don't be afraid of making mistakes on social media, and start soon and do it often. You obviously have 10 million things you are doing. When you're starting a business, it's very scary. But tell your journey and use social media to tell your journey and your authentic story. I think that's so powerful.

Elana

And you know, because your time is limited, pick one or two platforms, you don't need to be on all of them. We will be releasing soon some content around how do you know what channels you should be on and prioritize. But I would say just in a nutshell, look at where your target audience is, and see if they're there. And if you have the expertise and personal joy to be on that platform.

Elana

So take maybe you're like an energetic teacher, and you like being camera forward, and you're fun, and you like to tell jokes, maybe you want to think of TikTok, but start earlier than you think don't don't wait to do social media until you're ready, or you have like help with an intern or stuff.

Elana

Like start soon pick one channel and use it to tell your story. Your authentic why? Why did you start this? What are you doing? What did you learn? Tell your successes. It's not being narcissistic. It's how you get people to connect with you as like a human going through this.

Elana

So there are so many tips and tricks around how to do this, I would say make sure you're consistent. So that means putting it on your calendar and saying I don't care if it's just one hour, the entire workweek, put it on your calendar, you know, put one hour every Wednesday at 8am. I go in, and I create X amount of posts. And I create X amount of time just to engage with people.

Elana

But if you are consistent, you're going to be ahead of the game of all of your competitors and everything else. Because usually when people start businesses, they don't prioritize it. And that's a bummer. Because that's where you can start building relationships, you can start getting testimonials from people using your product or using your services.

Elana

We sometimes just partner with brands and their number one goal is just to get case studies and testimonials and get get other people speaking on their behalf at webinars and the way we find them is them talking about the product on social media. That might take some time when you're starting out your business, but know it's there. Like there's so many benefits.

Elana

So tell your story. Be okay to know you're gonna make mistakes. I tell a story about a superintendent of schools, I taught her how to use Twitter. And she embraced it. And I loved it. And she like didn't know all the things. But she was like, I'm using Twitter a lot. I'm like, okay, for some fundamentals, but again, you kind of need to learn by doing and make mistakes to understand the platform.

Elana

And so, you know, inevitably she got hacked, and I got some like, like she was telling me to buy some Ray Ban sunglasses. But that didn't stop her, you know, and she was elevated. She was a superintendent of schools and like she could have been so embarrassed and just stopped. But she didn't. She was like, oh, yeah, this happens, you know, let's just keep going. And she learned from it.

Elana

So you're gonna make mistakes, keep going, make sure you're consistent, and you're learning what your audience wants as well.

Lily

Yes, absolutely. I mean, I think that part of the personal journey is so key because if I think about people that I like to follow, you know, or things that stand out to me, it is like kind of like behind the scenes a personal journey, like the connection of knowing that there are humans on the other side of certain accounts.

Lily

And I think teachers are particular sometimes that feels really uncomfortable, because we aren't generally going out there and like sharing about our personal journeys and like sharing about who we are. And sometimes we see ourselves as like, quote unquote, just teachers.

Lily

You know, so I think it can sometimes be a mindset shift of feeling like your story is important enough to share, but it is like it totally, totally is. And I think it's what will bring that connection in.

Elana

And I think if teachers have this entire conversation is making you uncomfortable, like find your moment like your area of comfort level. You're never going to be fully comfortable on social media, but what you can do is say okay, I don't want them like people seeing my backyard or, or like my family or anything like that.

Elana

But what I can do is talk about my love for whatever service you're offering on your new business. And you can you know, every, every day you show up and you just have one one thought, like, that's it's a professional world, we're not asking you to dance, but to think about your comfort level within all of that.

Elana

And then if you don't even want to create, because creating can be hard and intimidating, start, just listen, listen, comment, like, retweet all of the things around that and show that you are listening and sharing and curating great resources. And if you just did that, in the beginning, you would start gaining followers.

Lily

Absolutely. And just like those scaffolded, baby steps, it doesn't have to be at the beginning, or posting every day, multiple times a day, like it can be, you know, baby steps that are consistent.

Elana

Agreed, I think like consistency, listening, and just have that grace for yourself in case you do make mistakes, just just keep going. We all make mistakes. And in fact, like I do this for a living, we make mistakes a lot, you know, you just happen to not see them because people don't see everything you post on social media. If they did, I would be a millionaire, right? Or a billionaire.

Elana

Because the algorithms limit you, right? So I think that it's not about you, even though you're talking about yourself know that people at most probably see about 5% of what you post. So if something flops, it's okay, go look at anybody's TikTok. And one out of every 20 If they're lucky, is the one that goes viral. Everything else a flop.

Elana

So these are people every day, creating stuff that flops, yeah.

Lily

And then it's like a numbers game, right? Like, it's like, alright, if most of the things I create are not going to be super successful, and most people aren't gonna see them like I better be creating more, right? Like, then really like the consistency comes in too.

Elana

It does. And a lot of the times it's very design thinking like it reminds me of is like what you emotionally get attached to is never the stuff that actually works. And I'm saying that you're like, oh, people like that. Yes. But you really have to go like audience centered and say, What are they like? Okay, it looks like they like me kind of making jokes. And, you know, talking about, I don't know, random things.

Lily

Yeah, I just did a reel where I was walking the dog. So I was like, Oh, I just have to do a reel and then I was like, I'm walking the dog. It's so random. Like, I was like, this is not going to be great. Like, will people get dizzy? And then it's totally the most popular reel. I'm like, Okay, people like me walking the dog, like talking while I'm walking.

Elana

Yeah. And if you're somebody that needs to make sense out of life, and like, say you're a math teacher, and like there's an answer to everything. You might not like social media, because there's never, and what we're walking your dog, the next day will never work. Because the algorithms are changing, the audience is changing, the world is changing.

Elana

So social media is the race for attention. And what you're trying to do is compete with some of the biggest brands in the world and creators, most entertaining creators in the world for attention.

Elana

And if there happens to be something like a pandemic, or unfortunately, a school shooting that we just recently experienced, like those things people are going to be talking about, they're not going to be listening to you regardless of how awesome your dog walking is.

Lily

Absolutely. I mean, it's like that adaptability and like feedback cycle and awareness, like all of that it's like a pulse on our society, right? Like of all the things that are going on.

Lily

Well, I appreciate you sharing all of your wonderful expertise and your experience with us. Can you share where people can find out more about you and your agency?

Elana

Sure they can find me at @elanaleoni and I know it's people just call me Leona sometimes which is funny listing of the name. I think you'll have it in show notes, but it's E L A N A Leoni, L E O N I so you can find me on all social with that.

Elana

I am the CEO of Leoni Consulting Group, so leoniconsultinggroup.com and at @leonigroup on Twitter and and all of the socials for pretty much for LCG. We are on Twitter, and we are on LinkedIn. And we also have a beautiful foundation if you're interested in how we're giving back to the world of education we didn't talk about you can find our work at LCGfound.org.

Lily

Yes, I love that foundation work too. Thanks for sharing that. And thank you so much again for coming on the podcast.

Elana

Oh my gosh, it's a dream, Lily, and you're gonna have to come on mine later. So I'm such a fan of you and what you do and how you empower educators to kind of think differently and figure out what their Why is and their Why might be lots of things.

Lily

Yeah, and it might change. Thank you.

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