In this episode, Jenny sits down with Chris Boyer, senior digital health strategist and principal of @chrisboyer LLC, to discuss the shifting (and somewhat messy) state of social media in 2025. With the undecided future of TikTok and Meta reshaping its content and advertising rules and regulations, it’s time for organizations to rethink their social media strategies.
They explore the impacts of Meta’s content moderation changes, how the tightening of ad restrictions affects campaigns, and why social media should be seen as “leased land.” Plus, they discuss the challenges of fighting misinformation and creating valuable content in today’s polarized digital environment.
Connect with Chris:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisboyer/
Connect with Jenny:
•Email: jenny@hedyandhopp.com
•LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennybristow/
If you enjoyed this episode we’d love to hear your feedback! Please consider leaving us a review on your preferred listening platform and sharing it with others.
Jenny: [00:00:00] Hi friends. Welcome to today’s episode of We Are, Marketing Happy, a healthcare marketing podcast. I am your host, Jenny Bristow. I’m the CEO and founder at Hedy & Hopp a full service healthcare marketing agency. And I am so excited to have my dear friend, Chris Boyer on. Chris is the principal @chrisboyer LLC, but he’s a senior digital health and experience strategist, and he’s a fellow podcaster.
So yeah, I’m so excited to have you on today.
Chris Boyer: I’m excited to be on your show. I’ve been a fan of your show since I found out about it. And I’ve been listening diligently ever since. And I mean, us podcasters, we have to stick together, you know.
Jenny: We do, we do. And Chris and I also are very lucky to share an absolutely amazing client.
And so we’ve been able to collaborate really closely on work for that client. And as a result, I’ve just really grown to respect the work that you do and the POV that you bring to your clients. So I’m excited to chat with you today. Today we’re going to be [00:01:00] talking about the state of social media, mostly around the trends of organic, but we’re going to do a little sprinkle on paid as well.
And for all of those healthcare marketers that are trying to decide what you should be doing as far as what platforms you should be investing time and energy on, where you should be pulling back and maybe removing your brand. Hopefully this conversation will give you a really great state of the state of what’s going on and our different perspectives of it.
We’re also doing this as a dual podcast. It will be on Chris’s platform as well as on mine. And so that’s a really fun experiment. I’ve never done it before. So I’m excited for both of our audiences to share this content.
Chris Boyer: First time for me as well. This’ll be a lot of fun to do.
So you actually set that up, Jenny, as having me do an intro on the state of social.
Jenny: I know I’m excited about it. Tell us, Chris.
Chris Boyer: Well, you know, I mean, I could really be snarky and shorthand and say it, that it’s right now a hot mess. I mean, there are a lot of [00:02:00] things happening. We’re recording this in early January of 2025.
There are a lot of things happening on social media that are reflective, I think, of a lot of the high tech space that’s going on, as well as sort of a shift to where things are going. But most significantly right now, I think that hospitals and health systems that are involved in social media have to really take a serious stop and reflection on what they’re doing and how they’re doing it now.
I’m not young to social media. I’ve been actually around the space. About 15 years ago I was part of the Mayo Clinic social center for social media. What we were was a think tank of hospitals and health systems using social media and advocating a way back when, health systems were blocking social media at that point in time.
And it almost feels like we’re in another state of genuflection about what we’re going to be doing. And it feels like we almost need to bring the band back together to talk about this, because certainly [00:03:00] things have changed. But it’s, it’s ever more important for us to take a step back and and assess where we’re at.
So let’s talk a little bit about where we’re at Jenny right with social media. This is coming on what I think it’s about a week ago that Mark Zuckerberg came out and said that content moderation on all meta channels is going to go in a different direction and the direction he’s taking it is the way that Elon Musk took X or Twitter to which is basically having the community moderate misinformation on these channels.
This also comes three weeks after Meta made some significant announcements about how they’re going to be advertising restrictions for health systems. In using social media, I think this is sort of a fallout from, you know, a year or 2 ago when they had the pixel issue. You recall the pixel issue, [00:04:00] all the compliance things that we’ve been dealing with where they’re now setting up some guidelines and restrictions as well around how to use paid advertising on the social channels.
So everything is evolving and changing. Oh, and yeah, by the way, as of today, the Supreme Court is listening to arguments about whether TikTok could operate in the United States. Now, we don’t know yet what their outcome is going to be, but the leaning is towards they’re going to completely disband TikTok, at least the way we know it, in the United States.
It’s crazy, right?
Jenny: It is crazy. Most creators on TikTok have been posting about diversification, how to go find them on Instagram, how to find them on YouTube. I mean, everybody is planning for the shutdown to happen less than one week from today. So from a marketer’s perspective we’re moving forward as though it’s shutting down.
I feel like we have two separate [00:05:00] you know, trains moving forward out of the station, right? We have the political perspective of the lack of moderation content moderation and trying to keep it a like say, not safe space, but an accurate space, right. Through some people’s definition of accuracy, which as of right now, I feel like if you ask two different people, what definition of accurate information is, they’re going to say different things.
So it’s a really weird state of the country. That’s one thing we have going on, but then the other one is all the stuff with the HHS and the privacy. And we saw Google try to respond to it last year and basically say, hey, not our fault, not our problem. If you get in trouble, it’s not us. That is really Meta’s way by trying to have the conversion data restrictions. It’s just their way to basically say, hey, it’s not our fault. Y’all have to figure it out on your own. The both of those are coming together at the same time and it’s chaos. I feel like just a couple of years ago, it was expected for us from a marketer’s [00:06:00] perspective for all of these healthcare organizations to be on all of these channels.
And it’s time to rethink it. It’s time to think about each channel individually, kind of think about the potential harm being on that platform could cause to your brand from an organic and a paid perspective, and then decide if it’s worth your if it’s a worthwhile investment. Endeavor or not. It’s not just about, can you put the effort forth to maintain that channel?
That’s what the conversation was a couple of years ago. Now it’s, will it cause your brand harm by being on that channel from a perspective you know, angle.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s really an interesting thing too. Right. If I participate in this channel, is that going to cause damage to my brand, you know, and what does that, what does that reflect?
I think social media always has been intended to be the voice of the community, right? Social media. That’s the kind of the whole impetus behind this let’s, let’s eliminate the original reasons why Facebook was created and all of that. We won’t get into that, [00:07:00] but I think the spirit of all of this was that we, that participants in these social channels could create community guidelines, could create the way we actually communicate and interact with one another. And to a certain extent, we are now getting coming full circle by saying, and you could also indicate what works and what doesn’t work on these channels in terms of moderation of content. But we’re doing this in a, in a society, not only the U.S. society, but a worldwide society that is rapidly becoming diverse. I would even call them siloed. Polarize. Yeah.
Jenny: Yes.
Chris Boyer: And so what does that mean for us, right? If we can’t, if we can’t understand, if we can’t even understand where you know, what is good and what is bad in terms of content, how can we be expected to moderate that ourselves as users?
And that’s a question that I have that I think that many of us that own brands and participate in social channels worry about at this point in time. Yeah. What can we do? How can we, how [00:08:00] can we participate in a meaningful way?
Jenny: I completely agree.
Chris Boyer: Yes, you know, way back when we used to say that you remember there was like paid owned and earned media.
And then when social media came around, they said it was least. Yes. Do you ever recall that? Right?
Jenny: Yeah. Whenever so I’ve been doing, you know, content strategies and audience driving strategies, you know, for the entire 10 years of heading up for healthcare, but then before that as well.
But the entire concept was, okay, we can, you know, build a platform on YouTube, but it’s not your channel. It’s not yours. It has your brand name on it, but at any time YouTube can delete the entire thing, Facebook, same thing. It used to be that you would put the content on there. And if you hit post, all of your followers would see it.
Then it was not that way anymore. The algorithm shifted drastically. It was who Facebook wanted to see your content. And then you had to begin paying [00:09:00] for people to be able to see your content. As you know, at the same level of visibility that just a couple of months previously, you were able to get for free.
So that really shifted marketer’s perspective of what these channels were and kind of created this idea of creating a content hub or a platform that you own your own website where the content of in one format lived. And then you view the social media channels more as a distribution channel, a way to reach these different audiences, maybe have paid campaigns.
Maybe have some sort of like a community discussion forum on some, however you want it to structure it. Right. But you cannot depend on any of these channels to actually be an asset for your brand long term or something that you had complete control over, like an email distribution list, for example. And not only are we back there, but now some of this leased land is on fire.
And so we have to decide if we want to continue the lease.
Chris Boyer: Right. Exactly. Meanwhile too, there’s always these new and upcoming social channels that You know, being tested, etc. I hear, you know, with the [00:10:00] X debacle, where there was a lot of people that just left X after, you know, the last six months, and they’ve been moving over to either BlueSky or Threads or what Threads, a Meta channel, by the way, right?
It’s Meta, but they’ve been moving over to these other channels. It’s like, where, where is the next channel? I think I’ve had a lot of health systems ask me, where do I go next? Like, what should I be keeping an eye on? Way back when we would say, you know, when, in the early days, when it was all the Twitter, Facebook and, you know, YouTube, really, we would say, claim your name.
At least someone, no one could take your name away, right? You don’t want anyone posting on your name’s behalf. So go ahead and just claim your, your username and then maybe monitor those channels you know, and at a certain point, if you had the analytics to start to understand, hey, maybe this is something we want to go and participate in now, there’s so many other parameters that we have to take into account, like, you know. You mentioned like the algorithm will the algorithm deliver my content to the right [00:11:00] people or do I have to pay to distribute my content to those people?
And when I do distribute that content to those people, is the information that they’re going to give back to me about performance? Is that accurate? Is that inflated? Right? There was a lot of lawsuits and fallouts around Facebook, Meta Overinflating their video views, for example, or whatever. So those are things you want to think about.
And then, you know, is it a black box? If we post there, are we going to actually be able to ever come out of that channel again? If we start doing community management on Twitter or X. Right. Are we going to ever be able to take that information and bring it back into our own patient experience management or whatever it might be.
These are now factors that we have to take into account with every new social channel that’s out there. It’s a, it’s a headache. I would say it’s a real headache for health systems right now.
Jenny: So I’d love to hear Chris, how you are guiding your clients. Then let’s say you have a client and they’re on [00:12:00] Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube right now with a content strategy where they have different variations of the content to fit the platforms appropriately.
They have a whole team creating content and they come to you and say, Chris. Do I need to jump ship for some of these? Do I need to make modifications? Do I need to add other ones? What are some key things you’d want them to think about?
Chris Boyer: Well, I think you brought this up earlier too, right? Jenny is that you, you mentioned, right?
You want to create your own website or your own content on something that you own. Yeah. We still have to do that. We still have to maintain that. So many people have kind of outsourced their video delivery network. To YouTube, I would, I would say to them, first of all, invest in something that can host your own videos on your own website and act as YouTube does with your content library.
And you could, you could distribute it and, you know, segment your content everywhere you want to on your own web properties. First, using taxonomy, using, you know, SEO, using whatever those properties that you need [00:13:00] to in order to, to ensure that it’s being seen by the right people. That same content you can then duplicate on YouTube, because I would say don’t go away from YouTube because YouTube is still the second most highest trafficked web presence next to Google online right now. That’s, that may not be true in a few years, but right now it still is.
Jenny: Yeah.
Chris Boyer: So you have to keep that. The other thing though, is when you get into like Facebook and X and, you know, these other channels that are out there, this is where you have to really take a look at, is this the right form for me to reach my audience, the audience that I want to reach?
I would say that a lot of health systems right now are still using Facebook as a way to communicate with their own, their own audience. People their own employees, right? They follow them on these social channels, so they’re now starting to shift more of using those channels as an informal way to communicate feel good stories about [00:14:00] themselves to their audiences.
I think that’s still a safe and benign way to do that. They don’t pay a lot for that, right?
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: So that’s it’s a kind of a low investment and it’s an augmentation of your communication channel. But when it comes to X, that’s the one where I see a lot of health systems already abandoning SHIP on.
They’re leaving it. Same. They’re moving on.
Jenny: Mm hmm.
Chris Boyer: And, and to me, I wonder, because I have an account on X still. I don’t post, but I haven’t felt the need to pull the plug yet and leave. And I’m still wondering because is this going to change again? I mean, think how quickly it happened, right? It was what, two years ago, right?
That it, it’s over the last two years, it evolved and changed. Is that going to happen again in two years? Are we abandoning ship too early? Can we just sit it and stay and maybe temper down the active you know, involvement that we have on these social channels, and the only way we’re going to really be able to do that is by measuring the interactions that you have [00:15:00] and really quantifying those and quantifying them now less on the top of the vanity metrics about how many people you reach, et cetera.
But more on, is that content resonating? Is it producing the actions you want? Is it getting clicks through for an action or is it doing the community management that you want it to do? Are a lot of people using Facebook as a way to come to make comments about their care? Right. Or, or what have you, if that’s the case, you can’t really abandon that platform, but maybe you can reshift your focus.
What about you? What are you hearing?
Jenny: So a couple of things. First of all, I got off Twitter last year, maybe 2023. I was like, I gotta get out. This is. Nah, I don’t feel good when I’m on here. So I jumped ship. And I am so happy that I did. A point I want to make about having a different video distribution platform instead of YouTube is that’s great for patient privacy reasons as well, because YouTube is one of those embedded tools that’s grabbing IP address behind the scenes.
So there are multiple benefits to doing that beyond just thinking about like [00:16:00] content distribution. Best practices. So I want to note that’s a good reason to think about that. Additionally I, at this point, none of our clients are actively pursuing anything on X. The political nature of the platform has just made all of them want to shy away.
Most of them still have their handles, but they’re not actively doing anything, including paid on it. I think my advice, usually whenever we’re talking with clients about this is to really step back and think about your personas and who you’re trying to actively target based off of your key service lines and key geographies.
And can you serve them appropriately on those platforms and with the content that they need to move forward? Right? So I think it’s easy to say everybody’s on Facebook. Okay. A lot of people are on Facebook, younger demographics. Maybe they have an account on Facebook. They’re not spending time on Facebook meaningfully, right?
They’re on Instagram. So if you’re trying to target a younger demographic and yeah, you have an account on Instagram, do you actually have the [00:17:00] expertise or a partner with the expertise and then the money to meaningfully engage with them on Instagram? Cause there’s a difference, right? So organic content creation can you meaningfully create and maintain that content distribution strategy? Or do you just need to do paid? A lot of folks that we are working with are choosing, like you said, to really pull back on the organic content creation. They’re still doing it. They’re not shutting accounts down right now. But they’re really leaning in on the paid side because they can make sure they’re targeting exactly who they need. They’re actually seeing it, which a lot of our brands still aren’t seeing on the organic side, and they’re able to much more effectively measure conversions and whatever. We had a really cool campaign launch for one of our clients.
It was actually around a specific location and it highlighted a couple of key individuals and it turned into this beautiful love fest. All they, it was shared dozens of times, all like hundreds of comments talking about how amazing this location is and that these employees are. And it’s not of course, [00:18:00] necessarily going to be driving immediate patient appointments and volumes as a result of that campaign, but it’s building brand affinity.
So really thinking about the channels and how you want to leverage it based off your resources is important because. If we’re going to be going out and testing blue sky and all of these other ones, then we can’t show up equally at all of them. Or should we?
Chris Boyer: That’s true. We really can’t. Yeah, exactly. I like that.
I, and I think, you know, when you, when you mentioned that client with that story, it also brings up something that I hear a lot from people that are participating in these social channels as a users is that they’re, they’re really looking for content that’s not political in nature. That’s not negative in nature.
So this could be, these, you could really have a homestead of content that has feel good stories about the care you’re doing in your community and have that really perform very well. Again, this is early stages, right? But as, as more people are starting to say, wait, should I be still on Facebook, even [00:19:00] from an advertising perspective?
Well, yeah, Facebook is going to go through its little. You know, just it’s gonna move over to a certain extent. It’s not going to be really good right now, but there may be an appetite for really great positive content, which hospitals and health systems can promote. Right, so maybe that’s an opportunity here, you know, too early to tell, but, but the whole concept, I think I, when you and I last spoke, I, or at a recent presentation I gave, I talked about social media advertising as being paid for education.
So there’s another opportunity there, too. If you think about it, well, whether we like it or not, these channels do reach a lot of people. If you can leverage advertising on social channels as a way to reach these audiences that are hard to get otherwise, can you do it in a way to educate people about your brand?
About the work that you do about the wellness that you [00:20:00] provide to your community. Is that worth it? I think it is absolutely top of the funnel metrics, but it certainly helps you in the long term.
Jenny: I definitely agree. Let’s talk a little bit about the the conversion tracking restrictions on Meta. Cause I think that goes hand in hand.
And if you’re going to be launching a campaign, can you measure the success of it and I think it’s really interesting because Meta made all of these announcements at the beginning of December, and I’ve been slowly rolling out additional information. Different organizations have seen restrictions hit their account.
There’s 2 different levels of restrictions you know, high and medium, depending on how concerned they are with the level of potential PHI that they are coming into into contact with, and I think a couple of things that I just want to educate folks on what they’re really trying to do is they’re going to, they’re trying to stop receiving patient level information as a result of your advertising campaign.
So if on your website, let’s say you have a [00:21:00] hospital website and your campaigns are driving to a specific service line where it’s a schedule appointment. When you have all, you have a conversion pixel on that landing page and you have a form where they’re requesting an appointment or it’s tied into Epic and they’re scheduling an appointment that way.
Facebook doesn’t want any of that. They don’t want to see any of that. Right? So if you’re using a CDP, if you’re using fresh paid, if you’ve set up sGTM, like I preach about all of the time as one of the cheapest ways to move forward with fixing your analytics, you’re, you can still run all of your meta campaigns because you already have all of these best practices set up.
We have not seen any restrictions with any of our client campaigns because we already took out all potential PHI. We changed our naming structures where we’re not giving hints to them about if it’s about scheduling an appointment or, you know, we don’t have campaigns named like mammography or anything that would help them even understand what’s going on.
It’s all, you know, veiled you know, naming structures. So learn about it. Learn about how they are restricting [00:22:00] it, but then go back to that patient privacy, one on one, you know, framework of what do we need to do to make sure we’re not accidentally sharing this information with any third party platform, and then you’ll be fine on Meta and you can still run your campaigns as.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point, Jenny. When you think about that, right HHS guidelines really set the bar for where we want to go, and I know they revised them like in the middle of last year, but they reinforced the fact that you want to avoid sharing any kind of privacy information with any third party company, you know, and it was so much so that Google said, yeah, not us.
Don’t even use us, right? They basically said we don’t want to be used. Well, now that is going a little bit towards that route as well by saying, right? Look, we’re going to restrict the use of what you can track through our platforms, which really reinforces the first party data strategy that we all need to take and the privacy centric frameworks that we need to adopt.[00:23:00]
So when you look at like, you know, the tools that, you know, various different tools about how you can keep patient privacy withheld, I think that’s great. I think the also is where do you want to apply that pixel? How do you want to track? Where, where in the funnel do you want to bring them in to measure them through and when do your own internal measurement systems take over and measure it through to, you know, conversion, ultimately conversion, we all have to do that.
And we got along, we got by for so long by not paying for any of this stuff.
Jenny: I know it was, Oh my gosh. And retargeting that was so much fun.
Chris Boyer: Oh my gosh.
Jenny: Lookalike audiences. That’s the other thing that Meta’s big announcement restricted is you can’t do lookalike friends. We shouldn’t have been doing that for anyway.
We shouldn’t be uploading a list of our cardiology patients and saying, find me more of these. And a lot of people were doing that. So if we’re not going to be learning and kind of holding our own selves accountable as healthcare marketers, these platforms are [00:24:00] going to do it for us because they don’t want the liability and I don’t blame them.
Chris Boyer: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be in that business either. And, you know, I think that it is time for us to really kind of level set our marketing technology to address the current state of privacy of patients of not only what the government restricts. Think about all the state level. Restrictions that are coming out and they’re changing state by state.
There’s something like 20 different state legislations right now, and they’re all slightly different.
Jenny: And there’s a national privacy law that’s working its way through. We’ll see with the incoming administration. They typically historically have tried to push things to the state level. Maybe the national one will be put on hold for the next four years.
Who knows? But no, I agree for anyone who’s listening. I have a really great HIPAA 101 episode on the We Are, Marketing Happy that walks through the state of the state where we are in some tech frameworks that you can think about to get your organization aligned. Go check out that episode. If all of this is a new topic to you, because that will get you caught up to speed really fast.[00:25:00]
Chris Boyer: Yeah, it’s a really good episode. It really kind of breaks it down in a very easy to understand way that I think that’s really fascinating. And also the other thing is. Think about internationally, they’re already ahead of the game, right? So a lot of organizations I work with are building their privacy frameworks to meet what the EU has already established.
Right.
And so I think that they are far advanced than the United States is in terms of the privacy. It is more complicated and rightfully so, right?
Jenny: It is. But I mean, Chris, they even have laws coming out around AI governance in the EU right now. And we are years behind that in the United States.
So following all of the privacy laws in the EU, and I will say California mirrors a lot of those. So in the States, if you want to look at the most restrictive state, definitely start looking at California and consider that a best practice. And that’s typically the way everything rolls out. You can spam if you want to.
Go way back, [00:26:00] right? Like that’s how it rolled out. EU first, California, and then national. And so my guess is we’re going to see that not only with patient privacy, but then in privacy in general, but then also of course, with AI eventually.
Chris Boyer: Right now. Now let’s, I want to circle back to a word you used earlier on when we were talking the political aspects of things here.
Because that really is weighing its hand here. I was just listening to the New York Times daily about how the technology companies are embracing the new administration because they believe they’re going to ease restrictions on these social channels because they believe it hinders innovation. And so there is sort of like a cultural shift of technology companies to embrace sort of that more of this open, unregulated, unfettered, innovative social world, right?
Technology slash social world that we’re in, hence why we’re moving away towards from content moderation, those sorts of things. [00:27:00] But it’s gotten to the point where, where does it start? When does it stop? And unfortunately, that’s the hard part. I was over the weekend, the Washington Post released an article, an interview with Xavier Becerra, who’s led the Department of Health and Human Services.
And he said, I just can’t go toe to toe with social media anymore because the level of instantaneous information and quote unquote disinformation that’s being propagated on these channels is so hard for the government to participate in. So, wdoes that mean for us as health systems? Do we have to start regulating our content as well because there’s no higher body that’s going to be addressing this?
What are your thoughts, Jenny?
Jenny: So I always recommend that an organization kind of create some rules and guidelines that make sure they’re being true to themselves and their brand, right? What are the brand’s core values? What’s important to the brand as far as the way that they show up in the way that they develop [00:28:00] relationships and share information with their community.
Develop those first. And in the vast majority of situations, that’s going to be much more conservative than any social media platform will try to guide you. And so I always recommend creating that and then have your content strategy, speak to that. You have to have a review process before you put anything out into the world where you look at it through a variety of political lens.
How could this be interpreted? How could we accidentally be stepping into something that maybe we don’t fully understand that review process now, unfortunately needs to be mandatory. Whereas, you know, a year or two years ago, it didn’t. But that’s something you need to do to make sure that you’re not accidentally using language or imagery or something that, you know, could accidentally get you in trouble.
Now your brand to be positioning yourself as one thing or the other, you know, one side or the other, and that’s fine, but accidentally doing it as a landmine that most brands, you know, want to build some general, you know, safety nets around. So that’s, [00:29:00] you know, my general recommendation, even basic things like pronoun, there’s so many ways you can accidentally step into it right now on social media.
But generally if a healthcare provider system, et cetera, wants to develop an education a platform to be able to communicate directly with their patients, potential patients, education, and sharing your point of view. Folks are hungry for real information. And a lot of folks do have the ability to understand misinformation and spot it.
And they’re looking for content from trustworthy sources. So I actually view this as an opportunity for brands that have the ability to create content that’s meaningful and educational to lean in and help create some content that’s trustworthy on these platforms and fight against the misinformation.
Because otherwise if we all lean back, then the platforms, you know, we’ll have zero value for consumers. And who [00:30:00] knows, you know, where things will be guided in the future.
Chris Boyer: I really like that. I really like the fact that you’re suggesting that we are sort of the stewards of combating medical misinformation as best as we can, whether we like it or not, we as health systems still have a lot of trust in this space.
The elements trust barometer is still pretty high for hospitals and health systems. It’s gone down for federal agencies like the CDC. It’s like a 40 percent now down from 64 percent for just two years ago. Right. I mean, we’re starting to see the trusted. Established organizations don’t even ask about mainstream media, right?
It’s just like, trust is going all over the place. But one thing I found consistent is that hospitals and health systems that have a local presence in their community still have a trust index that’s lingering between 60 and 70%. That’s pretty significant in this day and age.
Jenny: It is significant. And I have [00:31:00] found with our clients that whenever you go even deeper than that, and you actually have humans that work at your organization that are well known, that are well loved that have a large client or patient base that loves them.
If you have them be the face of your content, we have found that drives engagement and trust even further.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. But, you know, this, conversation reminds me of what it was like 15 years ago when we were talking about adopting social media in this space, right? Is that we’re still dealing with a lot of things of like, is it trustworthy?
Is it going to damage our brand? Are we going to participate? I would argue that. We always should be questioning what we’re doing to that same level of you know, critiques. We need to make sure that everything we’re doing is meaningful, is addressing our end ultimate end goals as our strategies of our organization.
It reflects us in a genuine, authentic way. That’s our branding, right? In order to do that. Does that mean we’re going to be on Facebook in 3 years? Who knows? Right? [00:32:00] Because that may change too. There may be a backlash. I’m kind of on the mindset of like, if it’s not working, just go quiet and let it go.
Right. And then see if you come back to it eventually.
Jenny: Mm hmm. Here we are standing away.
Chris Boyer: Yeah. So. I mean, maybe it’s gonna happen again, right? And maybe Twitter will eventually or whatever X will then shift hands again. And suddenly, you know, maybe it’ll, it’ll shift or maybe there will be a replacement coming into play, who knows, right?
But at this point in time, I think we still need to be very cognizant and be truly authentic to who we are as a brand. That’s my theory.
Jenny: I agree. And create a hub where all of your content lives in one place and then view all of these channels as simply distribution methodologies. And it’s going to shift over time and then that gives you control of your future and not have you, you know, be beholden to some, you know, [00:33:00] billionaire’s whim decision.
Chris Boyer: And if you’re in, if you’re getting into paying social strategies and how much your media distribution cost should be, that’s where you need trusted partners that really understand the space to help you with those decisions. If you’re doing it all yourself, make sure that your team internally is very aware and understands where their dollars are being spent.
But I will tell you, it’s great to have people like you at Hedy & Hopp to kind of help organizations make it, you know, make the right decisions in the space because we’re in a hot mess situation right now.
Jenny: I know it’s really interesting. I will say just anecdotally that we have no clients right now doing anything on X, but almost all of our clients that are running paid campaigns are still really heavy on meta platforms and it’s driving really strong performance.
So just anecdotally for anyone listening. And saying like, has everybody pulled from Meta? Are we behind? No, most people are still doing from my experience and purview are still actively promoting on Meta. That doesn’t mean they’re creating content [00:34:00] organically on meta and investing time there, but from a paid perspective, it is still driving meaningful results that you know, warrant putting the dollars there today, as of January early January, 2025.
Chris Boyer: Get back to us in two months or two years.
Jenny: Exactly. Well, Chris, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of We Are, Marketing Happy for anyone who’s interested in following you or connecting with you, where can folks find you online?
Chris Boyer: Well, I’m easy to find because that early on I learned how to SEO myself and I also am doing AI SEO right now.
So you can just Google Chris Boyer, probably find me. But the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn, Chris Boyer. You’ll see my headshot there geeky guy with glasses, or you can find at christopherboyer.com. That’s my website. And then of course, listen to my podcast at Touchpoint Health, the Touchpoint Podcast.
Jenny: Well, thanks so much for being on today, Chris. And for listeners, we’re going to share all of those links in our [00:35:00] show notes. So if you want to reach out to Chris, it’ll be super easy to reference later. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining us. I hope today was helpful and gave you a little bit of an understanding about all the different shifting sands in the social media world today.
So thanks for tuning in and join us on a future episode of We Are, Marketing Happy. Cheers.
