“You’re really … into all this stuff, aren’t you?” he asked, picking up one of my sticky notes with username ideas.
“Into it is one way to put it. I went to school for this.”
“They have social media majors now?”
I snatched the sticky out of his hands.
“It’s a focus under marketing.”
Kean stared at his empty hand for a beat longer before settling back into his chair.
“Okay.” He sucked in a deep breath, all that big, lean muscle tense and awkward in a tiny office chair. “Where do we start?”
I hadn’t realized I was braced for an attack until my shoulders dropped at his words. In the business of social media marketing, a business predominantly run by and consumed by women, my job was regularly belittled, even by the people who hired me. And since Kean wasn’t interested, it stood to reason he’d undermine it, too.
But that’s not what was happening. His body language was tense, sure, but I got the feeling that came from his social awkwardness. Or awkwardness with me. Otherwise, he was attentive, eyes focused on the papers, hands laced together, elbows on his knees to lean close.
He was giving this an earnest shot.
And I wasn’t going to waste that.
“Right, so I’ve got three focal points for your accounts, that I’ll —”
“Accounts?” he repeated, mouth twisting.
“Yes, accounts for different platforms. It won’t be more work for you, though. We’ll cross post content.”
“I don’t …” He paused, eyes shifting to the side. “I don’t understand what that means.”
“Oh.” I bit my lip to keep from gaping at him. I know he said he didn’t use social media, but just how ignorant was he? And how did I ask that without sounding like a dick?
“When social shit became a thing when we were kids, I was too busy playing soccer to get into it. And it just … kept being like that.”
Well, damn. That might be the longest, most personal thing Kean’s ever said to me.
“Right, so quick crash course then.” I opened up my personal Instagram on my laptop and turned it for him to see. “So basically how most platforms work is you have an account, you post images, videos, or text and all of those will be posted under your name. So like, if people want to see just your content, they’d go to your page. But most people look at content on their ‘for you page’ or whatever the platform’s equivalent is.”
I paused to give Kean a chance to ask questions, but based on his furrowed brow, I was already losing him. What kind of analogy would make this make sense to him?
“The FYP is sorta like flipping through TV channels before streaming? But personalized. Like if the channels reorganized every time based on what they think you want to watch.” Was it a weird analogy? Absolutely. But given that Kean’s technology knowledge stopped somewhere before we were teenagers, it was the best I had.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “But how does it know what I’d want to see?”
“Oh, fuck,” I murmured. How the hell could I explain algorithms to this dude? “Um, it’s a combination of a lot of things. But one of the simplest ones is based on the accounts you follow. So if you’re only following soccer players, your FYP will be focused on soccer.”
Kean leaned back and nodded.Phew.
“Great. So then each platform, Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads, Facebook, all of those have different focuses, content types that do better on them. But that doesn’t mean youhaveto do all of it, especially in this stage of building your platform. So we’ll be posting the same content across all those pages.”
“Content being …”
“Oh, sorry. In your case, mostly photos and videos. Text posts are probably … not your strong point.” Kean grunted in response, so I quickly moved on before he could get offended by that comment. “So with that in mind, I’d suggest we focus on making content around one of the following: the team, your —”
“Not the team,” he said immediately with a huff.
“Why’s that? If we focus on team content, I can repurpose posts from the team’s page and you don’t have to spend as much time on this.”
“Yeah, but then you’ll end up talking to Brooker and —” He stopped talking abruptly and looked away from me. It took a few seconds, a good number of finger taps, but he finally said,“They’re annoying. I don’t like dealing with them most days, so I don’t wanna put you through that, too.”
