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I recently published academic research in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines with Michael Coolsen titled, “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement.” Exciting right?

If you’re a research geek or academic maybe. A social media manager? No way. Yet, I know the findings, specifically our Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is very exciting for social media pros! So I wanted to write this blog post.

But, as you can tell by the title, an academic audience, and a professional audience are very different. Taking a complicated 25-page academic research article and translating it into a practical and concise professional blog post could take me hours.

I’ve been meaning to experiment with Google’s new AI generator tool NotebookLM so I thought I would try it. Thus, this blog post is about our research on social media engagement framework and how I used AI to streamline my process to create it. As a bonus, I got a podcast out of it!

My co-author and I did the hard work of the research. I was okay with an AI assistant helping translate it into different media for different audiences. Click for my AI Take Framework.

Using NotebookLM.

Our study was on types of content that generate engagement on Twitter, but the real value of the study was our proposed model for engagement. So before uploading anything into the AI tool, I condensed it to just the theoretical and managerial implications sections. Then I added a title, and journal citation, and saved it as a PDF.

NotebookLM uses Gemini 1.5 Pro. Google describes it as a virtual research assistant. Think of it as an AI assistant helping you explore and take notes about a source or sources that you upload. Each project you work on is saved in a Notebook that you title. I titled mine “Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement” because that is what I wanted to focus on.

Whatever you upload NotebookLM becomes an expert on your information. It uses your sources to answer your questions or complete your requests. It responds with citations, showing you original quotes from your sources. Google says that your data is not used to train NotebookLM, so sensitive information stays private (I would still double-check before uploading).

Source files accepted include Google Docs, Google Slides, PDF, Text and Markdown files, Web URLs, Copy-pasted text, YouTube URLs of public videos, and Audio files. Each source can contain up to 500,000 words, or up to 200MB for uploaded files. Each notebook can contain up to 50 sources. If you add that up NotebookLM’s context window is huge compared to other models. ChatGPT 4o’s context window is roughly 96,000 words.

When you upload a source to NotebookLM, it instantly creates an overview that summarizes all sources and offers key topics and questions to ask. It gives set documents to create such as a FAQ, Study Guide, Table of Contents, Timeline, and Briefing Doc.

You can also ask it to create something else. I asked it to write a blog post about the findings of our research. Which can be seen below. Yet, by far, the most impressive feature is the Audio Overview. This generates an audio file of two podcast hosts explaining your source or sources in the Notebook.

The NotebookLM dashboard gives you a variety of options to interact with your sources.

Using Audio Overviews.

There are no options for the Audio Overview so for now you get what it creates. But what it creates is amazing! My jaw literally dropped when I heard it. And it will give you slightly different results each time you run it.

I noticed things missing in the podcast such as the journal and article title and the authors’ names. I did figure out how to make adjustments by modifying my source document. Through five rounds of modifying my source document, I was able to get that information in and more.

Sometimes overviews aren’t 100% accurate. It says, “NotebookLM may still sometimes give inaccurate responses, so you may want to confirm any facts independently.” The running shoe brand following our model in the article was hypothetical. But in a version of Audio Overviews, the podcast hosts talk as if the company did what we said and got real results that we measured.

I was impressed that in other versions it didn’t use my example and applied the model to new ones. One time it used an organic tea company and another a sustainable clothing brand. On the fifth attempt it even built in a commercial break! This last version gave my running shoe example and added its own about a sustainable activewear brand.

What’s really interesting about the last version is that it pulled in other knowledge and applied it to this new information. At the end, the hosts bring up how our model will help you know what to say but that you still need to customize the content appropriate for each social platform. That is a social media best practice but not something we specifically mention in the article.

The Audio Overview Podcast NotebookLM Created.

It’s amazing these podcast hosts discussed our research and explained it so well for social pros. What’s more amazing is that they are not real people! Yet NotebookLM did more. Below is the blog post it wrote. It included our diagram of the model, but had trouble getting it right. So, I replaced the image with one I created from our article.

Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement.

This post examines a model for social media engagement based on an October 2024 study in the Quarterly Review of Business Disciplines. “Engagement on Twitter: Connecting Consumer Social Media Gratifications and Forms of Interactivity to Brand Goals as Model for Social Media Engagement,” published by Keith Quesenberry and Mike Coolsen.

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement is a framework to help social pros create more effective plans by aligning brand goals with consumer goals. It emphasizes understanding the motivations behind consumer engagement and tailoring content accordingly.

How the Model Works

The model outlines three key brand goals:

Building brand community (Reach): This goal focuses on expanding the brand’s audience and increasing awareness.
Building brand-consumer relationships (Response): This goal aims to foster brand interaction and engagement.
Building brand-consumer bonds (Recognition): This goal seeks to create brand emotional connections and loyalty.

Each brand goal is associated with a corresponding consumer goal and form of social media engagement as seen in the graphic below. Consumers can manage people’s impressions and persuade others by sharing certain brand posts. They can gain information about a brand with other types of brand content for deliberation. They can bond with others regulating their emotions in evaluating brand posts with other fans.

Click on the graphic to download this model for social media engagement.

Here is an example

A sneaker brand launches a running shoe and aims to build brand community (reach) creating content that appeals to runners’ desire for impression management and persuasion. This could be sharing inspirational stories about runners breaking records encouraging retweets and brand visibility.
Once awareness is established, the brand could shift its focus to building relationships (response) by providing information about the shoe’s features and benefits, appealing to consumers’ information acquisition goals, and prompting replies and comments seeking further details.
Finally, the brand can foster brand bonds (recognition) by sharing content that resonates with runners’ social bonding and emotion regulation needs, such as posts about the challenges and rewards of training, which encourage likes and emotional connections.

Key Insights from the Study

The study found that simply using popular content types like videos or photos is not enough to guarantee success on social media. The message accompanying the content is crucial.

Marketers need to consider:

The target audience’s motivations for using social media
Buying cycle stage (awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty)
Desired word-of-mouth function (sharing, deliberation, evaluation)

The Brand Consumer Goal Model for Social Media Engagement offers a strategic framework for developing effective social media campaigns. By understanding the motivations behind consumer behavior and aligning content with both brand and consumer goals, marketers can achieve better results and build stronger relationships with their target audience.

I hope you found this look at NotebookLM and the insights from our social media research helpful. In what ways do you think NotebookLM can help in your job? How will the insights from our Brand Consumer Engagement Model change your social media content strategy?

Could NotebookLM be a good tool for my students? I believe as long as they use it as a study guide, reinforcement, or tutor and not simply replace the reading and listening in the first place as seen in the graphic below from my previous post on subject matter expertise. Personally was okay with using this tool I co-author and I did the hard work of the research. I was okay with an AI assistant helping translate it into different media for different audiences. The same would apply to my students.

This graphic shows that in stages of learning you go through attention, encoding, storage, and retrieval. You need your brain to learn this process not just use AI for the process. — Click the image for a downloadable PDF of this graphic.

Half of This Content Was Human Created!

I taught a social media strategy class this summer and I was surprised to find most students were not very active on social media personally. At first, I was stunned. This was a social media class after all. Would you take a film class if you didn’t watch movies?

After getting to know the students I found two reasons for this inactivity. It was a graduate course with a mix of older professionals and younger students right out of undergrad in our 4+1 MBA program. The older professionals never really got into social media. The younger students deleted personal accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat for negative personal effects.

To see if this was unusual, I posted on a social media professor’s Facebook group asking if other instructors saw this in their classes. The number of responses indicate it’s not unusual. Most professors notice students backing away from personal social media use and mention reports of people limiting social media to focus on wellness.

This is a graph showing a stead increase in the search term

Focus On Social Media Wellness Is Increasing.

Social media apps have faced increasing scrutiny for their negative effects on youth. It’s been a year since the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on youth mental health and social media. This fall an increasing number of U.S. schools are Implementing student cellphone bans amid a mental health crisis and decreased learning. I instituted tech limits in my classes after the pandemic due to negative learning outcomes.

A recent article from Very Well Mind shared the news that TikTok is adding automatic 60-minute daily time limits for users under 18. This may not be surprising considering the recent scrutiny over teen social media use. What was interesting is that the article also posed the question, “Could everyone benefit from similar time limits?”

The article makes a good case for restrictions citing a study from the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking which found people who stopped using social media (Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram) for a week had significant improvements in their anxiety, well-being, and depression. The average age of study participants was 30.

Very Well Mind interviewed Jamilia Jones, a clinical therapist who says, “By learning to set boundaries on the time and energy we invest in scrolling through our feeds, we can potentially reduce feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness often associated with excessive social media consumption.”

Limits Can Help Users Maintain A Healthier Work-Life Balance.

In full disclosure, I had particular trouble writing this article because I kept feeling drawn to check my social media. That Facebook group and my LinkedIn. I’ve been posting about AI recently which has sparked a lot of conversation. I wanted to see if anyone else has Liked or commented.

Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was developed with the objective: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” This led to features such as the “Like” button to give users “a little dopamine hit.” Parker continued, “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Some return to social media to see how many Likes a post, picture or video got to feel good. Others, turn to social for news or to fill time but find themselves “doomscrolling” as algorithms serve up more negative content because it keeps us engaged. This can lead to anxiety, depression, and isolation. That’s the bad. But there’s still plenty of good.

What If Your Job Is Social Media?

Social media still has many positive personal benefits. It is also a driver of business for large companies and local pizza shops. We need social media professionals and I teach students how to become them. How do you strike a balance between professional social media use while guarding against negative personal social media effects?

Boundaries to consider are social personal use, professional use (career), and company use (posting for a brand). It’s easy for these to bleed together when all are accessed anytime, anywhere from the same device. Social media professionals specifically report having a hard time with work-life balance.

We’ve talked about the negative health effects from social media, and social media professionals spend the most time there. The field is changing all the time so there’s pressure to keep up and it’s hard to leave work at the office when social media is 24/7/365. Emma Brown at Hootsuite suggests several ways to avoid social media burnout.

Ways to avoid social media burnout:

Set boundaries. Have social media–free time. Turn off work streams after work.
Give eyes a rest. Eye strain can lead to irritated eyes, neck and back pain, plus can cause headaches.
Get up and move. Walk (without your phone) regularly for mental and physical health breaks.
Get some sleep. Sleep (without devices) is healthy and makes you more productive.
Structure time. Assign parts of your day to specific activities (one-hour blocks).
Delete apps. Make your phone a personal device. Manage brand social on a laptop.
Digital detox. Take digital free time off for a night or weekend to recharge.

Do You Have To Be Personally Active On Social To Be A Social Media Professional?

This question got the most responses in the social media professors group. Some clearly say that you can’t make students be on social media even for a social media class. But others make a strong point that you can’t be a social media marketer without knowing what it is like to be on social media.

Companies used to want to hire college students to run their social media because they knew grew up spending their time on social media personally. I worried that they didn’t know enough about the business side of marketing strategy. Twelve years after I began teaching social media strategy we may see the opposite.

Today students could be studying social media marketing but limiting personal use or even deleting social media apps. A survey of 18-to 27-year-olds found significant regret over social media use. While 52% said social media benefited their lives, 29% said it harmed them personally. In fact, about half of Gen Z wish TikTok (47%) and Twitter/X (50%) were never invented.

What about current social media pros? Do they need to be active on every social platform to do their job well? Or can they run social media business accounts on platforms like TikTok and Twitter/X but not have their own account to limit personal exposure?

What Does All This Mean?

I’ve been teaching social media marketing for over a decade, have created social media campaigns for clients, and have a social media marketing book. I have benefited from social media personally and professionally. I’m obviously not recommending deleting or banning social media. But I think it’s obvious we need more balance.

I resisted having AI write this article, but I did turn to Copilot for some ideas on how to find more balance in our social media use. I think the suggestions are a good beginning.

An image of suggestion that Copilot had for balancing social media use by setting boundaries, using technology like screen time, prioritizing real-life relationships, curating your feed, and mindfulness. — Copilot doesn’t use social media, but has good suggestions for us to manage our social media use. Generated with AI (Copilot) ∙ September 6, 2024 2:30 PM

Have you seen the social media wellness trend? What does it mean for you personally and professionally whether you are a social media pro or a social media professor?

This Was Human Created Content!