Here is a transcript generated by Otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with Kate Busby, global social media manager at IWG:

Shaheen Samavati 0:14
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here with Kate Busby, global social media manager for International Workplace Group or IWG, which provides offices and coworking spaces worldwide. Thanks, Kate, for joining us. Could you tell us a bit more about what you do and and your background, and what IWG does as well?

Kate Busby 0:35
Sure, well, we’ll start with the last and then work to the first. IWG is the world’s leading provider of coworking and flexible workspace solutions. So they have been around for about 30 years and they have presence in like 100 plus, maybe 120 countries worldwide, and heaps and heaps and heaps of flexible workspace locations. So my role for them is to manage their organic social media channels. So not the paid advertising side, but the organic activity, principally on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest as well, most recently. And my day-to-day kind of looks a little bit like content creation plus community management. And we have several agencies as well; with a company our size, you definitely need extra support. So we have a number of agencies doing the various different parts of the puzzle. But I’m sort of helping to calculate the strategy and then look at results and then find our way towards greater visibility. So I think as a brand, we’ve been pretty quiet throughout our 30 years. Although, to be fair, the last few years, we’ve really mobilized in terms of, you know, getting on the key channels and actually creating content of value for our customers. So it’s been a journey. It’s definitely not over yet, but expect to see big things in times to come.

Shaheen Samavati 2:02
So how long have you been in that role? And how long has the role existed—is it new? Because you mentioned these are some new initiatives that you’re working on.

Yeah, I think our branding team was formed maybe five or six years ago, our social media function around the same time, I’ve been in the role in various guises for about two years now, coming up to. And yeah, it’s definitely a question of, you know, we’re learning as we’re going, I think we’ve definitely got up to date with data and looking at performance data. But as a legacy company that’s been around, you know, for decades, where data wasn’t such a big deal in the very beginning, I think it’s definitely been a progression, getting up to speed with all the elements. And I’m super pleased that social media has now become you know, it’s become a key function. And one that, you know, we see as having plenty of room to develop, because we’re sort of still at the start, really.

Yeah, I think every business is having to adapt constantly, because these things are changing all the time. So in your role, are you in charge of social media in all markets or particular ones? How does that work?

Yeah, so we have a global social media policy, which kind of means that we have a centralized team serving all the different markets. However, you know, we are investing in tools and platforms to facilitate social media on a local level, because essentially, social media is a local thing, right? It’s about building local relationships, peer-to-peer, but, you know, it works best when it combines the online stuff with the offline stuff, and the offline stuff has to happen locally, right? So we’re trying to serve both the global and local interests with our social media. But yeah, when it comes to the actual management, it’s centralized.

So you’re the one managing all the different community managers for the different markets.

Yeah, effectively. Imean we don’t officially have community managers for all the markets, but we do have what we call “content champions.” So the sort of movers and shakers in each market who tend to go above and beyond their job scope, you know, they’re the ones who are networking off their own back and building relationships anyway in their local communities. And they’ve sort of embraced social media as just another method to further grow their visibility locally, and build those connections online. So yeah, those are the guys who power our social media. And, yeah, they don’t have the fancy title of community managers. Maybe they should, but you know, they are definitely experts at what they do and they’re exceptional at social media and leveraging the channel.

And they work specifically for the brand?

Kate Busby 5:02
Yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 5:02
Okay. So I was curious, because I mean, I suppose your audience are businesses that, you know, it’s a B2B business. So I was curious, which channels? I know that that’s always a challenge, like how do you engage with businesses through social media? So I was curious, what channels you use and what kind of strategies do you see working?

Yeah, it’s a real hot topic at the moment, because I think we’ve, I think I’ve read a recent Kantar report that social media usage, particularly on Facebook and LinkedIn has gone up by 30% since the onset of the global pandemic. So I think businesses are even more switched on to the fact that, “yeah, I’ve got to be using social media,” but a lot of them start with “how?” You know, how do I actually infiltrate this world of cat pictures and selfies and actually create something which, you know, as a corporate brand we would be comfortable with going out with? So I think the best learnings to share on this subject, working for, you know, a company with a 30-year history that in the beginning didn’t really have much data collection going on, is that LinkedIn is definitely still the bread and butter of our social media strategy. I know for competitors, it’s more Instagram, but we’re definitely not there yet. You know, we’re a solidly B2B company providing for, you know, clients like Google and Spotify and Twitter. So, you know, for us to really sort of embrace the Vines and the Instagrams and the, you know, dare I say, TikToks of this world, it’s just, I think we’ve got a few more years, or at least a good few more months before we find a strategy that works on those channels. But LinkedIn definitely is the place where not only our corporate clients tend to consume content, but actually the people who make the deals. So the property directors, the brokers, you know, the sort of influencers within the real estate industry are solidly on LinkedIn. And they’re using that channel when they go to events, to, you know, say I’m here and look for content and for hashtag conversations around that event. So I definitely say that LinkedIn is the best bet for B2B businesses, even now, today. I think there is some experimentation with other channels, but you’ve got to wait for the migration of the majority of your users to go to those channels as well. And I don’t think that’s happened quite yet. I think for Twitter, it’s still very much the second-biggest channel for business. But it requires a lot of investment. You know, it’s very difficult to use Twitter as a sort of content maintenance channel where you’re just posting once a day or once every couple days, you know. You sort of need a dedicated team or person at the very least to be, you know, retweeting constantly, looking for conversations to join, producing content and sort of snappy, fast, witty observations or updates in real time from events. It’s definitely not a channel that fully embraces kind of automated marketing, kind of, you know, it really requires hyper personalization. So, although it’s a fantastic channel for reaching out to influencers, business people, potential customers, it requires maybe sometimes more bandwidth than the average social team, especially if it’s for a big company, can allow. So I guess what I’m saying is, you know, the traditional channels still hold. But one that I am particularly excited about is the rise of Instagram for business. I think the number of businesses now that have a presence on Instagram is enormous. I mean, it runs into the millions. There are one billion active monthly users on the platform. So, you know, part of that traffic, that enormous amount of traffic, some of it’s got to be for your business. Some of it’s got to be relevant for you; it’s just about finding out, you know, where it is. And when it happens to sort of be on the channel, looking at content, and what content is looking at.

I feel like your business lends itself to imagery, but for other types of businesses, it might be difficult to identify, what kinds of images is it appropriate to share on Instagram, right?

Kate Busby 9:34
You’re absolutely right. But I’ve been particularly inspired by how, for example, the Financial Times in the UK, which, okay, you know, it’s a broadsheet with images, granted.But it’s not an image-driven publication, you know? The images illustrate the text and the stories, right? So I’ve been very inspired about how the Financial Times social media team have taken the stories and actually created relevant content for Instagram. Now their captions are like much longer than the average Instagram account caption. And, you know, they really use the various elements on the interface, on the page, to create a very engaging and exciting Instagram channel. And I think when we were looking at, as IWG, were looking at Instagram as, you know, a potential place to grow, we were looking at the more traditional companies that weren’t necessarily oriented towards imagery, to sort of understand how they could create such great content on that platform. But I think you’re right, I think our job is slightly easier because, you know, one of our biggest assets is our interiors, right? Our interior design, the interior design of our offices. And one thing about IWG that isn’t that well known is that it’s an organization with lots of different brands. Regus is definitely the longest standing and most well known of the brands. Spaces is kind of billed as this WeWork competitor, because it’s looking at coworking and community and exquisite interior design. But we also have a high-end brand, No18. There are fewer of them than there are the other operating brands, but you know, everything is about detail and beautiful vintage furniture and artwork. And so there are so many opportunities to take fragments of that and share it with our community on Instagram and encourage people to, you know, sort of explore our website and understand us more, because I think one of the things that we really are knuckling down on, using social media, is just to be more visible, just to show the world what we do. What we have within our, you know, our scope and within our umbrella organization. There’s so much going on. But, you know, if you’re not online, you’re not visible, you know, it’s just a sign of the times. So yeah, for a business looking to contact another business online, just to sort of summarize, it’s definitely all about LinkedIn and Twitter. But Instagram is the one to watch. It’s the fastest-growing network, traditional companies are flocking to it. And they’re finding ways and means of adapting what they do to really lend itself to making good content on that platform.

Shaheen Samavati 12:39
One thing is, you know, with Facebook, you have the global pages, international pages in the management platform. With Instagram, I believe you have to have individual pages for each market. So how do you handle that?

Kate Busby 12:52
That’s a really great question. I think the best way to respond to this is to sort of jump to one feature of Instagram, which we’ve been looking at really carefully, which is the Instagram location tags. As a company that has 13,000 employees, 2.5 million customers, I mean, these are big numbers. There is every possibility that, you know, when you’re doing local social media and creating new accounts per market, like you described, that there’s an inconsistency with the branding, that you know, maybe the key messages of each brand get lost, you know, there’s so much going on that it’s very difficult to be consistent and to be high quality. So for that reason, we advocate having one global social media account, per channel. But to solve the challenge of creating local content, local relevant content, or even national content, we’re exploring the use of creating content around location tags. So what that effectively means is that each center can kind of create its own bank of images. And you know, those images need to be uploaded to people’s personal accounts, yes. But we’re encouraging employees to use their business email address to create their own business Instagram account, or if it’s not an Instagram for business account, officially, it’s just an Instagram account they use for their work life, not their family and friends life, so they keep them separate. And from those accounts, they upload content and tag the location of their center, of their cluster, of their region, of their country. And that way, you know, you maintain your one global account, which is perfectly consistent with regards to imagery and messaging, etc. But then for the building of the local community, you develop content around locations. So that’s how we’re attempting to overcome this massive hurdle, because it’s true that that you know, everyone wants to have their own community on Instagram. Every local market wants to build their own ecosystem. So to avoid creating 120 different national accounts, we opted for this other solution.

Shaheen Samavati 15:14
That’s the number of countries you’re in, 120?

Kate Busby 15:17
Yes.

Shaheen Samavati 15:18
Okay, wow.

Kate Busby 15:20
That would be quite a lot of community management as well, right? So, you know, we want to try and keep lean, always.

Shaheen Samavati 15:27
So you’re in charge of coordinating across all of those markets.

Kate Busby 15:32
Yeah, I mean, I’m not completely alone, I definitely have the support of a wider team, a wider marketing function, and then as mentioned before, a number of agencies. But yeah, the sort of, the social media function is looked after, let’s say, by me, yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 15:51
Yeah, okay. And then, when you talk about a global page, that’s in English, I suppose. Like it’s one central page on that platform that’s in one language?

Kate Busby 16:02
Not necessarily. So I mean with LinkedIn, for example, which, as I mentioned before, is kind of like our bread and butter for our social media landscape, we have the global content, what we call the global content, which is, you know, distributed to all our followers, right? We have that in English, but we geo-target in language content, or native language content, through that same account to our followers in the relevant territories. So recently, for example, IWG acquired a Swiss franchisee, so we franchised… our entire Swiss operation’s now looked after by another company, that’s our close partner. And of course, they wanted to start building their LinkedIn following in Switzerland. They speak up to, I think four languages in Switzerland. I mean, definitely there’s three, and then I think that there’s four if you include Italian, so four languages. And so, you know, they were basically using LinkedIn and geo-targeting, through our core account, content in German, English, Italian and French, to the various communities. The various French-speaking, Italian-speaking, German-speaking and English-speaking communities within Switzerland. So technically, we’re using lots of different languages on our one global account, but we’re geo-targeting them strategically to reach the right people.

Shaheen Samavati 17:39
I see. That’s super interesting to learn from your experience working in so many different markets. I think you win for that so far out of the people I’ve talked to. So I was curious to learn about your background a little bit and how you got into content marketing in the first place.

Kate Busby 17:54
Sure. Well, I began my career working for a contemporary art agency based in London. I went to the Venice Biennale one year, just out of interest and passion for art and met a group of people who were promoting Middle Eastern artists in Western markets. I thought that was a very interesting concept and kind of, definitely of its moment, especially with the Arab Spring and other political events really becoming prominent in Western media outlets, the Iraq War, everything, really, in our generation, sort of raising questions about what life is like in the Middle East and what countries are like and culture. And I think that I agreed with the mission of the company at the time, which was, you know, we see a lot of stuff on the nine o’clock news, but we don’t really know it. So let’s try and know it through art or through, you know, artists practicing in the Middle East. So I found that very interesting, worked with those guys for a number of years doing various education programs in London, setting up exhibitions in Berlin, and, you know, it was very, very hands-on, very fun, small team, maybe seven people. And then after that I met my now husband who lives and works in Barcelona. We moved in together and I effectively started my career from scratch. I didn’t speak Spanish or Catalan. I knew nobody in Barcelona. The economic recession of 2008 was still very much affecting Spain when I moved over in 2011, so finding work was really tough. So I eventually adapted my professional profile to be more in the line of content marketing, because there was still demand for that role. And with my writing experience and experiences working for cultural institutions and events, it sort of seemed like a happy-ish marriage, sort of taking those skills and integrating them into a content marketing profile. So I ended up working for a number of agencies and companies, including Vice, a couple of local companies in Barcelona, creating copy, doing some community management, social media, sort of design and planning. And you know, just a little bit of everything really. And then eventually I ended up managing a team, and then moving from a couple of management roles to my current one. So I guess that’s, yeah, the potted history of my career. But maybe the most important thing that I learned along the way is that you should never stop learning, and you should never define yourself too strictly. You know, I really always thought that I was going to be a writer, and that’s it. And I would not compromise or do anything else. But now I find that there’s not only utility in being able to pivot and take on new job roles and change your professional profile and branding. But it’s actually extremely enjoyable to learn and challenge yourself to learn new things, which I never thought I would do. So yeah, I think that’s definitely the key takeaway, and I’m now committed to a life of learning.

Shaheen Samavati 21:23
I can relate to that, as someone who changed from journalism to content marketing and business, and learned a lot of skills along the way, but those writing skills are so fundamental in everything else.

Kate Busby 21:34
I agree with you, yeah, definitely.

Shaheen Samavati 21:37
Cool. So I want to go into our rapid-fire questions. So basically, a marketing influencer in Europe who you would recommend?

Oh, without a doubt, Mark Ritson. Every time I read anything by him, I’m just in hysterics. He is a no-nonsense, no-BS marketer. He’s British, but I think he was based in Melbourne, Australia for a number of years, so I hope he still counts as a European, and with Brexit as well, I hope he still counts as a European influencer. But yeah, he’s definitely someone I look up to. Otherwise, outside of Europe, there are, you know, the Neil Patels of this world are definitely, you know, ones to keep watching. The content they produce is outstanding. But yeah, in Europe, definitely Mark.

Awesome. And then an app or a tool that’s essential in your job? Maybe a lesser-known one?

The one I use from day to day, which I have now developed a healthy dependence on, I think, is Percolate, a content management system used by IWG, I really rate it because of its adaptability. Outside of that, I really enjoy Ubersuggests, which is the aforementioned Neil Patel’s keyword search engine. I think it’s incredible that someone has created such a complex and all-serving tool, but it’s completely—well, completely free, no, it has a freemium model but you can use it pretty much to get the job done and it doesn’t cost a cent. It’s astonishing, everyone should check it out: Ubersuggests. So those are my two…

That’s good content marketing, from his part. And then any valuable networking resources or in Europe that you’d recommend?

Kate Busby 23:36
Yeah, I think there are a number of Facebook groups that any content creators, social media marketers or content marketers should definitely get on board. There’s The Content Mix for European job opportunities and networking opportunities. And then a bit more locally, there’s a Facebook group called Content Creators Barcelona. You need to sort of request to join, but there’s no exam and it’s extremely active. I was always a little bit hesitant about these Facebook groups because it felt like there was just like one admin who was always saying yeah let’s, you know, motivation… and there was no real substance to it, but actually the groups I’ve just mentioned post jobs, there are networking events, maybe not right now, but there will be again. You know, it’s very active; every day you’ll see a new job listing, so get on those. They’re really helpful, yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 24:34
Awesome. Well, any parting advice or comments?

Kate Busby 24:41
Social media is the future. Honestly, I’m not saying that just because I’m working in that particular role. I’ve always, even when I was a writer in London, helping, you know, artists with their careers, I always knew that social media was this incredibly powerful tool. But for the uninitiated, it seems like a monster. Like, you know, unless you understand how to do it, it’s almost not even worth trying. Because it’s so, you know, riddled with complexity and posting and getting five likes is somehow so demotivating, and how do all these people around the world get these millions of followers and these power accounts? It just seems like this, you know, this thing that you can’t quite access. But what I’ve noticed now I’m much more rooted in the social media landscape is that it’s incredibly intuitive, not just to get started, but actually to accelerate your following and get the engagement and, you know, build a business on social media, incredibly intuitive, and it really does deliver. You know, the social currency is social media. You can’t do without it if you’re a business. And when you’ve got it and it’s working, it gives you an enormous amount of leverage for partnerships for opportunities to grow. So yeah, the future is social. Definitely.

Shaheen Samavati 26:13
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Kate, for joining us and sharing your advice and insights with The Content Mix community.

Kate Busby 26:19
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Shaheen Samavati 26:22
And thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We’re gonna have a lot more interviews like this one with content marketers across Europe. So see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai