Follow me on LinkedIn for jewelry retail business ideas.
I‘VE NEVER BEEN a huge social media guy. I have the usual Facebook account, and the same Facebook experience where using that platform, somehow, miraculously, gets less useful and less enjoyable every single year. And I’m just talking about Facebook as a personal tool.
For business? Facebook has achieved something remarkable: they’ve figured out how to make it simultaneously harder and more expensive to reach your own customers every year. It’s like paying a bouncer to keep you out of your own store. Each year they continue to refine their awful backwards magic — fewer people see your posts, the algorithm hates you more, and yet somehow your bill keeps going up.
It’s honestly impressive — well, if you think about it from a dystopian capitalism perspective.
But these days, everyone — and I mean EVERYONE — is pounding the same drum: LinkedIn. LinkedIn. LinkedIn. Every YouTuber with a ring light, every marketing expert who discovered “authenticity” last Tuesday, every thought leader (God, I hate that term) is saying the same thing: that LinkedIn is the Shangri-La of social media for businesspeople.
“YOU POST THREE TIMES, HEAR CRICKETS, AND SLINK AWAY LIKE YOU JUST BOMBED AT OPEN MIC NIGHT.”
They say it’s the only place where the algorithm doesn’t hate you, the conversations don’t make you despair for humanity, people have actual brains, and connections feel real instead of performative. (By the way, one important stipulation of the recommendation is that you should be operating on LinkedIn through a personal page rather than a company page, because personal pages are 5x to 10x more effective.)
Okay, okay. I’m SOLD. It’s time to wake my LinkedIn account from its 10-year coma.
Here’s what those same experts ALSO say: the biggest mistake people make with any platform — YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever — is bailing too early. You post three times, hear crickets, and slink away like you just bombed at open mic night.
So I’m committing to this as a project. One hundred days. Posting SOMETHING — good, bad, half-baked, whatever — every day to see if there’s actual signal in all this noise. (Please don’t follow me to check that I’ve posted every single day without a miss. This isn’t one of those types of challenges.)
My mission is the same as it’s always been: to discover and share things that make independent retailers think about how they run their businesses. Some ideas will click. Others will be wildly inappropriate for you. As always, I trust you to know the difference. You didn’t get this far by following every piece of advice some guy on the internet threw at you.
Ten days in? Pretty quiet. Solid cricket energy so far. So I’m hedging — repurposing content and posting it here on INSTORE as well, because why not give this thing every possible chance to work?
But there’s lots more stuff on LinkedIn, so if you want EVERYTHING, follow me there.
The Christmas Song I Can’t Stop Hating
I am irresistibly drawn to write about music. And I know most of my musical opinions are very much my own. But there’s one opinion I have that FEELS as though it should be unanimous — and that is that Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” is the audio version of botulism and should be banned or at least have its usage highly regulated.
The Business Case for Inflatable Wavy Guys
I’ve been thinking about “inflatable wavy guys” (my term for them) for a couple of years before finally writing something about them on LinkedIn.
Love Billboards? Then Try an Anamorphic One.
Signs of the Times is one of INSTORE’s sister publications and regularly covers attention-getting signs and billboards. So when I saw a discussion of anamorphic billboards, I knew I wanted to brainstorm from a jewelry retail perspective.
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