Darren Jamieson: On this week’s The Engaging Marketeer, I’m speaking with James Armstrong from Social Firefly.
James runs a social media company helping businesses with their social media outreach and posts across the web. But James started with the police and was responsible for all the social media content for his local police force.
So I’m going to be speaking to James about what that was like, the kind of reception he got from the great British public, and how he transitioned from the police into private enterprise, working on businesses’ social media.
We were talking to a podcast studio the other day because we’re thinking about doing our own podcast at some point. We went down and had a look, and it’s all very nice. If you want to do something like this, I could do it from my chair here. It’s kind of easy. I’d have to get a nicer mic, obviously, with some branding all over it.
James Armstrong: You’ve got to have a bit of branding on the mic.
Darren Jamieson: Oh, yeah. But we’re thinking about doing a couch thing where there are a couple of people sat around, so we kind of do need a studio for that.
James Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting.
Darren Jamieson: We’ve got space downstairs to build that. It is there, but it wouldn’t be soundproofed. We’d have to do a lot for that because somebody gets up and makes a cup of tea and you can hear the footsteps on the ceiling, and that’s no good.
James Armstrong: No. That’s why, I suppose, there are these little podcast studios popping up.
Darren Jamieson: There are two that have popped up in Brighton recently. One’s really good and they adapt it for you, and the other one’s a bit quicker and dirtier. Get in there, film, get out, I think. I can see why they’d be popular now. There are a lot more people doing it.
James Armstrong: Yeah. Well, that’s the problem as well, isn’t it? That’s why we’re not sure whether we want to actually do it, because there are so many out there. It’s just so common.
Darren Jamieson: There’s another one just there.
James Armstrong: Oh, it’s wrong.
Darren Jamieson: At least with you, you’ve done it for a bit longer and, I think, for years.
James Armstrong: Four years.
Darren Jamieson: Exactly.
James Armstrong: It’s finding your style. Just listening to a couple of them, it sounds like you’ve found your style and it’s very different to other people. It’s interesting for marketers because it’s not all going down one route or trying to achieve one thing.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
James Armstrong: On every single podcast, that’s interesting. Whereas others get a little bit samey and boring over time. Do you know what I mean?
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, there is definite variety with mine, although I’ve had two franchise ones in the last couple of weeks — one from America, one from the UK — so it’ll be good to put those two out side by side. That’s interesting.
But let’s ask you some questions then, shall we? Let’s kick right in.
James Armstrong: Yeah. How do you want to do it? Do we just get in there and start?
Darren Jamieson: We just get in there. I’ve not given you any questions in advance. There’s absolutely no prep work whatsoever for this. You’re not prepared in the slightest.
From a brief discussion we had last month, the thing that really caught my interest was the fact that you were doing social media work with the police.
James Armstrong: Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: That strikes me as very difficult because you’re up against a public that is not the most friendly towards the police at the best of times. And on social media, people are shits. So, what got you into doing that?
James Armstrong: I started my adult career in policing. At the age of 21, I was a police community support officer. Then I was one of the first public engagement officers, which was a local-level, district-level police community support officer who also talked to the public a bit more online.
So I was one of the first with a Twitter account, and I’d walk my patch around Rye in East Sussex.
Darren Jamieson: So you’d walk around and still be online as part of the job?
James Armstrong: Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: So you weren’t sat behind a desk as a keyboard warrior the whole time? You were out on the street?
James Armstrong: Not at that point. At that point I was doing both things.
Darren Jamieson: What year was that? You mentioned Twitter, and Twitter was around 2009, so what year were you doing that?
James Armstrong: It would have been around 2009 or 2010.
Darren Jamieson: So pretty straight in there then.
James Armstrong: Pretty much straight in there, because I was there for ten years and I left in 2018.
Darren Jamieson: Wow. So what were you doing on Twitter? Just basically responding to people complaining about stuff on the streets?
James Armstrong: No. At that time, I was the face of policing in the villages and towns I was working in. That’s what a police community support officer does.
The idea was that we also did that online. We could update people if there was a traffic incident, ask for help if there was a missing person, or deliver crime prevention advice on Twitter. That’s how it started.
In my first role, in the public engagement officer role, it became slightly bigger. I was supporting with writing blogs on the website and going to more clinics to meet members of the public. It was still quite local.
By this point, I would have been in Bexhill, which is in East Sussex, and I was managing the online engagement for the local police across all of the region. That became more online. There was less of me going out on the streets at that point.
After that, I applied to be a district communications manager, where I would manage all of the communications across East Sussex within the marketing communications team.
So I would no longer be a police community support officer on the streets. I would be behind a desk, supporting the senior leadership team to get specific advice, alerts and press releases out there into the world, but also support with internal communication.
That meant ensuring that police officers and staff members knew what we were supposed to be doing at any one time. If there was a new law that came in that we needed to be talking about, or we needed the world to know about it, or if there were things like street surgeries for your local police community support officer, I would be helping to push that out.
Darren Jamieson: What was the response to all of this? As I mentioned, people can be idiots online.
I saw a police force just last week put a post out on social media about two female police officers who were jogging, and they had body cams on. They did it as a service to stop catcalling and people harassing women when they were jogging.
The responses to that online were mixed. Some people were saying, “Well, that’s really necessary. That’s brilliant that you’re doing that.” They reported that they didn’t actually have any problems that day. Then other people were saying, “What a complete waste of time. You should be out catching criminals rather than doing that.”
Whenever anything goes online, there are always polar opposite responses that cause arguments. Did you get any of that? What were the responses you were getting?
James Armstrong: Yeah, the public are separated. They always have been, always will.
Darren Jamieson: I was wondering how you were going to finish that sentence then.
James Armstrong: In the UK, we police by consent. One of the big things that Sir Robert Peel, who set up policing, said was that the public are the police and the police are the public.
That’s why we don’t have guns most of the time. We don’t need them. We’re supposed to be members of the public who swear an oath to help the public. It’s not just about enforcing laws.
I think we took that approach when it came to social media. Everyone else is online, on Twitter and on these other channels. We really should be as well, because we are part of the public too.
You have to bear that in mind when you’re creating content for policing: you are part of the community. The whole idea is that you become a bigger part of the community by pushing yourself out there on social media.
There will be people who don’t like the police, but there are people who hate ambulance drivers and firemen as well. For some reason, people do. I know the police get a harder time of it because of the type of job policing is, but there will always be people who don’t like you.
That’s the same approach for all social media. You can never be everyone’s cup of tea, and you’ve got to remind yourself of that.
I think I saw it more when I went from being a district communications manager and became the digital communications manager for all of Sussex Police. At that point, I was in charge of not just local social media, but suddenly all of Sussex.
I was helping the communications team manage communications, but also the help centre: the people who would answer 101 calls or 999 calls. We had to put into place a system for them to be able to respond to non-emergency queries on places like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
I joke that I spent my days dealing with idiots online and then my nights arresting idiots on the street, because at this point I became a special constable.
A special constable is exactly the same as a regular police officer, you just don’t get paid. It’s a volunteer role, but you have the same training and you go out there and you arrest people.
So I had this unique skill set that no one else in the communications and marketing team had. I had also been in policing for a lot longer, and I was now out there arresting people and seeing the good and the bad of society, both online and out in the real world.
What I definitely saw online then, and what I still see online, is that social media just amplifies who we are. The people who are trolls and haters online are just amplifying who they are in real life as well, and they’re finding an outlet. Those people will always exist.
It is difficult when you’re having to manage it every single day. We were seeing the bad and the good every single day.
I managed the social media for the Shoreham air crash, which you might have heard about. People died in that air crash, and we had to manage the communications around getting people out, telling the world what had happened and giving people updates.
There were still people online who just didn’t want to hear from the police and didn’t like what we were doing, even though we were trying to support people during a really difficult time.
My point is that there will always be those two polar opposites of society, and you can never get away from it. But you have to hold on to the fact that there are more positives out there in the world.
One other thing I still say now, which I said a lot then, is that if you have a look at any of the social media that policing or any other emergency service puts out, you get more likes and positive reactions than you get negative comments.
The silent majority are the people who might like a post, share it, or just not say anything at all and scroll past. It’s the loud minority who make it seem like the world is completely negative, and it’s not.
Darren Jamieson: Was it just Twitter you were using, or were you using other social media platforms as well?
James Armstrong: All of them, basically. I helped bring in TikTok — no, not TikTok. It was Snapchat at that point.
Myself and Mel, my co-founder at Social Firefly, met in the communications and marketing team at Sussex Police. We ran a campaign together about child sexual exploitation, and as part of that we launched the Snapchat channel.
The idea was to give advice and also do some fun stuff on Snapchat so that children wanted to follow. That worked really well.
The one reason I say it worked is because a couple of weeks in, we had a young person disclose to a police officer who was on Snapchat that they had been sexually assaulted.
So it wasn’t about how many impressions we got or how many engagements we got. It was about that one child, and that worked really well. That was one of our biggest successes.
It just shows why the public sector should be on social media and understand it well enough to engage people, and have that open dialogue with all kinds of members of society, young and old.
I went off on a tangent there.
Darren Jamieson: No, that’s a really good avenue to go down. I was going to ask how well you think the public sector and the police actually understand social media.
There are so many people on there saying things that, if they said them in the street, they’d be punched in the face or arrested. Yet they say it behind the perceived anonymity of social media and get away with it.
How well do the police understand it? How well is it being tracked? What support are you getting from the social media providers themselves in terms of stamping out illegal activity?
I’m referring to incidents like Lucy Connolly, who suggested that the hotel migrants were staying in should be burnt down. She was sentenced for that and went to prison for it, quite rightly so.
Then a load of people were going online saying, “Oh, she’s been put in prison for posting a tweet.” It’s like, “No, she’s not been put in prison for posting a tweet. It’s the incitement to violence that she did.”
How much understanding do you think there is among the police, among the public sector, and among social media providers on what they should be doing?
James Armstrong: I think there is more now. We’re talking about two different things. On my side, I was marketing and communications, not dealing with investigations around someone inciting violence in a tweet. That’s a separate thing.
I do think they have got better and better at understanding it. There was a point when I was there where there wasn’t really the understanding of how to engage with the platforms themselves.
But it has got better. The platforms have specific ways to speak to them as a public sector organisation, so they have got a little bit better about it.
They don’t seem to have the responsibility they should have, I would say, especially because they’re not UK-based. None of them really are UK-based, and they have to deal with the law across multiple different countries and continents.
It’s difficult. It’s a really difficult one to get into because of the different laws across the planet.
I think the police are getting better at understanding it, but the problem is it’s constantly moving and constantly changing. Governments and the public sector are always going to be chasing the tail a little bit. They’re always going to be a bit far behind, just like massive corporates are as well.
We work with loads of different types of organisations and businesses, and the ones that don’t do social media well and bring us in to help them are often the ones with massive budgets, but also massive bureaucracy. They are just slow to catch up, and that goes for governments and the public sector as well.
I do think the marketing and comms teams are doing some interesting stuff. Sussex Police did something on Valentine’s Day recently which was quite fun, got engagement, and encouraged people to call in about someone who needed to be arrested.
We did something similar back in my day, but they’ve taken it one step further. Just like big corporates, you have to have buy-in from right at the top. You have to have senior leaders say, “We trust you. Go and do it.” That’s very difficult in the public sector: to trust.
Darren Jamieson: What did they do that was Valentine’s Day themed? Was it a Valentine’s Day post looking for somebody?
James Armstrong: It was a police officer holding a tray, like a nice little breakfast. They walked through a cell and said, “We’re waiting for you, basically.” Then it had the suspect’s name up there and his face.
Darren Jamieson: That’s harsh.
James Armstrong: No, he’s wanted. It’s not harsh at all.
Darren Jamieson: He’s wanted. That’s not harsh at all.
James Armstrong: He’s committed a crime.
Darren Jamieson: If they’re putting his face up there, isn’t that a worry that they’re possibly inciting the public into taking action themselves?
James Armstrong: Wanted posters have been around for hundreds of years.
Darren Jamieson: They have. Yes, back in the times when Americans carried guns and people got bounties for shooting dead wanted people.
But should we be putting that up so that people are in the streets making citizen’s arrests, and potentially with the wrong people?
James Armstrong: People are told not to make citizen’s arrests.
Darren Jamieson: So what’s the purpose of putting the photo up? I guess something like that is very engaging and very funny, and it does raise awareness, but is there a potential that it is going to incite somebody to attempt to apprehend somebody who either is that person or looks like them?
James Armstrong: Yeah, there is a risk there. There’s definitely a risk. But the same goes for missing people. If you don’t put out the face of a missing person, they might not be found.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
James Armstrong: It’s the same thing, really. There is a level to it. You wouldn’t put out someone’s face for really low-level crimes. That’s not going to happen.
It’s where the police think this person needs to be caught, or they need to be charged, or they need to be returned to prison. I haven’t been in policing for eight years now, but that’s the sort of situation.
The police always say, “Don’t do a citizen’s arrest. Call the police.” Then they begin to build up a picture of where this person is.
I think it’s a really vital part. As soon as they’re arrested, those photos are taken down. The same with missing people: posters are taken down once they’re found.
I think about it in the same way as wanted posters. Again, going back to the police being the public and the public being the police, the public should be behind the police and supporting them, most of the time.
I know there are loads of problems with policing, but there are also loads of great things that the police do. Most police officers are there because they want to help people and make a difference.
You hear about the negatives, and you hear about bad police officers, but there are bad people in every single profession. It’s really difficult. You’re never going to get away from that either. I’m going around in circles now.
Darren Jamieson: I was surprised when you said how quickly you were on Twitter for it — possibly within the first 12 months of Twitter being alive.
How restrictive was it? If you post on behalf of a company, the company will have rules about what you can and can’t say. In many cases, some companies have someone who wants to see what’s going out on social media before it’s posted. There’s a lot of red tape.
I would have thought the police would have a lot of red tape. What was the case with it? How much freedom did you have?
James Armstrong: At the beginning there was quite a lot of freedom, really because I don’t think anyone understood it too much. What they did was trust us as adults not to say something we shouldn’t.
We were trained in what we should and shouldn’t be saying. For instance, I used to go to parish council meetings as a police community support officer and talk about what we might have been doing in the last week, or talk about a crime that had happened in the village and ask for help and advice.
I wouldn’t have said anything on Twitter that I wouldn’t have said in that parish council meeting.
It was fairly open at the beginning. At the end of my career, I was in charge of creating a new strategy and new guidelines for the entire force, and it became slightly more strict, but not overly so, because you were trusted.
In some police forces that wouldn’t happen, but I think we had a really good senior leadership team that trusted their people.
Darren Jamieson: When you left the police, you made that decision. What was your first move from then?
James Armstrong: I was in the canteen at Sussex Police HQ and Mel, my co-founder, said to me, “Do you want to start a business together? I think I kind of want to start a business and you might be the right person.”
So she flattered me into doing it.
Darren Jamieson: That old chestnut.
James Armstrong: Exactly. I was actually the first one to leave. I handed my notice in on my ten-year anniversary.
Darren Jamieson: That’s nice.
James Armstrong: It was nice. We left with no actual clients and no real idea about what we were going to do.
We had already started the business, but the business was something completely different then. It was about trying to find meeting rooms in Brighton. It was a website we’d created.
But as part of doing that website, we realised we should be leaning into what we were a little bit better at, which was the marketing side of things. We started offering marketing advice to venues around Brighton and Sussex, and that part of the business grew.
Next thing you know, it’s COVID, and that’s when the business started to slow down a little bit, just like a lot of other people’s businesses.
But we also had other contacts reach out to us because they suddenly needed some kind of digital marketing. We had a city council reach out and ask us to support them with paid social media to encourage people to wear masks, and then later on to get their vaccines.
That’s where we moved from working with smaller businesses to working with the public sector a little bit more, and with bigger charities. It started to grow from there.
Now we work with loads of different types of organisations, from the expert French version of Polyfilla, Toupret — which is a strange thing to say, but we’ve been working with them for six years now, and they’re great — all the way through to Brighton & Hove City Council, the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra, and Centrepoint, the homeless charity.
We’ve got this eclectic group of loads of different types of businesses now.
Darren Jamieson: I presume you were the obvious choice for someone to come to for approaching the public and talking to the public about getting vaccinated and wearing masks because you already had that experience of dealing directly with the community when you were at the police.
James Armstrong: Exactly. That’s why a lot of people come to us, actually: that reputational risk experience and the experience of managing communities.
I think that’s why our agency is very different to other agencies as well. We didn’t come from agency land. We came from the public sector, so we think about things a little bit differently.
I always say that…
Social media includes the word “social” for a reason
I truly believe it’s about engaging with other human beings, not just trying to sell to them all the time.
That public sector work is definitely where we thrive, and for any client who wants to actually have a relationship with their customers, audiences or supporters, that’s the important thing. The policing background definitely helped with that.
Darren Jamieson: There’ll be a lot of business owners listening to this — hopefully there will be, anyway — who are in accountancy, financial services, or trades like builders, plumbers and electricians.
They’ll be thinking, “I’ve got a social media account. I’ve got a Facebook account or a Twitter/X profile. I’ve got a LinkedIn. I post on it every now and then and I get absolutely no engagement whatsoever. I get no comments, no likes. It’s like I’m pissing in the wind.”
What can I do to change that?
James Armstrong: Start with the people you want to engage with. What will actually make them stop and want to have a conversation with you, like a post, or share it?
Remember that we’re not on social media to be sold to. We say that around 80 to 90% of everything you do on social media should be about engaging people. It should be providing value, entertaining them, or educating them based on your specific advice and the work you do.
That’s the big key: understanding that audience and what they will want to be engaged or entertained by. It’s not about selling. That’s the big thing.
The next thing I would say is to think about the key themes you want to talk about, because social media has become a search engine as well. Social search engine optimisation is really important.
On LinkedIn, for instance, you should pick two to three key themes that you’re always going to be talking about. Make sure those key themes are in the headline of your LinkedIn profile and that they are the things you’re talking about all the time in your feed and in your posts.
The reason for that is that LinkedIn is looking for authority. It wants to group you. It wants to say, “This person is really great about social media. They’re always talking about social media, so I’m going to show them to people looking for stuff about social media.”
That also helps with AI search because AI, especially ChatGPT and Perplexity, has started to search LinkedIn for authoritative knowledge. If you can build up that authority through constant engagement around a specific subject you’re good at, you’re more likely to be seen by the people who want to engage with it, and by things like AI search.
So there are two big things: your audience, and the key things you’re really good at.
If you’re not getting engagement, it’s because you are not thinking about really good organic social media. I think the middle of the funnel, that organic social media, is where the value lies. That is where the growth can be had.
Have you seen the people who go and cut grass for old people who can’t afford it?
Darren Jamieson: I’ve seen videos on TikTok in America, not in the UK, but I’ve seen quite a few of them.
James Armstrong: There’s a guy doing it in the UK as well. I can’t remember his name.
Darren Jamieson: I saw the police go to arrest one guy for doing it.
James Armstrong: Yeah.
Darren Jamieson: Because they said he wasn’t allowed to do it for free because the council has to charge them to do it. Him doing it for free was taking business off the council. It’s very weird.
James Armstrong: It’s very weird. But he gets loads of views from that, and people are hiring him because he’s doing that.
At no point does he say, “Hey, buy from me. Purchase my services.” No, he’s showing that he’s a good person. He’s also showing his skill at the same time. “I’m really good at this.”
Then people hire him off the back of that. It’s about creating content that is intriguing, interesting or entertaining, and showing your skill at the same time. You’re going to get someone to hire you because of that.
Darren Jamieson: I know the very specific video you’re talking about there. It’s usually done in time-lapse because it’s quite a big job, and it’s a massive transformation of a really overgrown garden into a beautiful garden that somebody can use.
The voiceover tells you how it’s done for free. It’s done as a favour and he asks permission to do it.
But, of course, that requires video. It requires the skill in editing and putting it together. How important is video on social media for businesses?
James Armstrong: It’s become incredibly important. You can still do single imagery and you can create carousels. On LinkedIn, it’s great to have multiple images, and on Instagram it’s great to have carousels.
But the way we behave on social media has changed. We don’t follow as much. We don’t engage as much. But we watch more.
We’ve been trained by TikTok and Instagram Reels to understand that if I watch a video and I watch it for over three seconds, the algorithm thinks I like that video and that style, so I’ll get it again. I don’t need to actually follow that account.
Darren Jamieson: Yeah, I know I’m going to get something similar again.
James Armstrong: So having engaging video is how you get reach, because that’s just how the algorithms work now.
They don’t necessarily want you to follow or engage. They want you to watch, because it keeps us on their platforms for longer. They want dwell time because the longer you’re dwelling on their platforms, the more advertising they can sell you.
So you’ve got to play the game as a business owner. Create an engaging piece of content that will keep people there. Video is sometimes the best way to do that.
That being said, I’ve had a lot of my LinkedIn posts go a little bit viral just from long-form text because it’s engaging and I’m talking about a specific thing: social media.
That can work, but video is really important. You can do it all with a phone now. Sometimes it’s nice to get something really polished, but we do find that when you just use your phone and a good voiceover, for instance, it feels more real. It feels like a friend has posted it, so the audience are more likely to engage with it a lot of the time.
It’s good to have both, but all you need is a phone. Instagram Edits is getting better and better, and that’s quite good for editing video quickly. So is TikTok. Both are pretty good at editing video now.
But yes, you do need good video.
Darren Jamieson: One interesting question I thought of there as you were saying that: you don’t need to follow an account now to see it, and that’s absolutely right.
Sometimes if you leave a video on TikTok and you get distracted by somebody, then you look away and look back again and realise you’ve watched somebody doing a jigsaw for ten seconds, you know, “I’m going to get that now for the next week or so.”
People used to get hung up on how many followers they had, or how many engagements or likes they had on a video. Somebody shared on LinkedIn, or in our WhatsApp group, the other day that they’d had a request saying, “We can give you 100,000 followers for $670,” or whatever it was on TikTok.
What are the real metrics we should be going for now? Followers on TikTok aren’t important. Followers on YouTube aren’t really important, unless you’re going for one of the awards. You’ll still get the reach without it.
What metrics should we be going for, and what constitutes success on social media?
James Armstrong: That’s a great question. I’ve always said that…
Followers are a vanity metric
They don’t really mean much, especially when people are buying fake followers. They’re just bots.
We’ve had businesses come to us before who have loads of followers and say, “We’re not getting any engagement.” We look at their engagement rate and find that actually their engagement rate is higher than most people’s. But you’re never going to reach all of the people who follow you, because that’s just not the way the algorithms work anymore.
It is vanity just to have loads of followers.
The metrics we should be looking for — I’ve always said engagement, but that can mean loads of different things in loads of different channels.
For me, a really meaningful engagement is that somebody has saved something or shared something. They are the highest form of engagement, especially if somebody shares.
If somebody is sharing something you put out, they’re telling the world something about themselves. They’re saying, “I believe in this thing.” It’s quite selfish.
We don’t think about it consciously, but we see a great post from a charity and we share it, and subconsciously we are also telling the world, “I believe in this charity,” and that makes the world feel something about us as human beings.
That person is a good person because they are sharing that post from that charity. The same goes for any content.
If you can find ways to encourage people to share, you’re going to reach more people.
The other key thing to look at is your video views. Anything over three seconds and you’re doing better than 95% of everyone on the internet, really. If you can get somebody to stop and watch for a little bit longer, that retention rate is really important.
This is why every business needs to be looking at their analytics and understanding which posts actually get people to stop and stay for a little bit.
That’s what’s really important: dwell time, people staying, and meaningful engagements like shares.
Comments are nice as well. It’s great to get loads of comments, but only if you’re going to reply and build that conversation.
Reactions and likes aren’t as important as they used to be. Impressions are just somebody scrolling past. It really doesn’t mean a lot. Followers don’t mean much at all anymore.
Darren Jamieson: If you’re not getting a lot of engagements, comments, likes or shares on TikTok, typically your videos will stop around the 200 to 300 mark. You’ll find that every single post you put up is around 200 to 300.
I think it’s advisable that most businesses look at influencers, look at videos that are doing well, and see what it is about them that’s doing well. You’ll find that most of them have something happen in the first three seconds that is different and disrupts the screen.
You’ll never get one with somebody standing there going, “Hi, my name’s Darren from Engage Web,” because that’s gone.
How would you advise people — I don’t know if TikTok is your speciality at all, it might not be — to get from that 200 to 300 view level up into the thousands for each video?
James Armstrong: One, it’s not going to happen for each video. It’s not going to happen for every single one. There has to be a lot of testing and learning.
That’s what we say for every single client and every marketing strategy. All marketing is test, learn, test, learn, optimise, test, learn, optimise. It’s always going to be like that. You should always be testing and learning.
There’s a three-act structure we always talk about: hook, narrative and call to action. You grab attention, tell the story, and get someone to do something at the end.
That call to action shouldn’t always be, “Hey, buy my thing.” It could be, “What do you think about this?” It could be a question.
You do that three-act structure. We think of it as a curve. You grab attention in less than three seconds, so you’ve got to use some psychology around that.
I talk about the psychology of hooks. One that works really well is baby schema: big eyes, big forehead. A bit like me, but much, much cuter.
That’s why dogs and cats work. That’s why babies work. Some kind of cuteness at the beginning of a video helps hook people in.
Next is pattern interrupt at the beginning of a video, and that’s basically shock and surprise. The reason shocking things or bright colours grab our attention is because we have to see the out-of-the-ordinary or bright colours really quickly, because in nature those things could hurt us.
We are not that evolved. We’re still kind of cavemen. We are still looking out for what is going to hurt us.
So if you can find a way to surprise someone at the beginning — and there are loads of different ways to do that — bright colours are good. Grabbing attention with something completely out of the ordinary is great.
The last thing is people and faces. Talking directly to the person on the other end of that phone is really important. We’re built to recognise this shape: the eyes, the nose, the mouth. We see it in inanimate objects as well.
Darren Jamieson: It’s why we see Jesus in a tortilla chip. We’re just looking for it.
James Armstrong: Exactly. We’re just looking for it.
If you can find a way to have that right at the beginning of a video, that is going to grab attention more than an inanimate object.
Then you tell a story. It can be a really short story or a longer story where you have rising action.
For instance, you might have seen hooks where a box is thrown and the box doesn’t hit the person, but they say, “You thought that was going to hit me, didn’t you?” Later in the video, there’s a climax where the box does actually hit them, because they’ve been telling a story. The box hits them, that’s the climax, and then you continue to tell the story to the end and have the call to action or interesting ending.
That three-act structure is always really good to think about. It’s the simple three-act structure of any story. Any film, you can see that three-act structure happen.
Darren Jamieson: Hook, content, offer. Or hook, content, call to action.
Most people don’t bother with the hook and they don’t bother with the call to action. They just go straight into the content or story, and that’s why they don’t get any engagement.
James Armstrong: Yeah, and the content normally isn’t a good story anyway.
Darren Jamieson: No, it’s trying to sell something.
James Armstrong: I’m guilty of that sometimes. We have to do that sometimes.
Like I said earlier, about 80 to 90% of what you do should be about providing value, but 20% does have to be about selling if you’re a business. You do have to tell the world what you do because otherwise they’re not going to know.
You just have to know that those posts are not going to be engaged with as much.
It is a compounding thing over time. That’s another thing I used to say with policing, because we did have members of the public saying, “Why are you putting this post out? This is frivolous,” like a photo of police puppies.
It got loads of engagement, but we would reply with, “The reason we do this is because you’ve now engaged with it, which means the next time we post something about a missing child, you’re more likely to see it.”
Darren Jamieson: Yeah.
James Armstrong: It’s that compounding over time. The same goes for businesses.
Darren Jamieson: The number of times I’ve had to explain that to people.
James Armstrong: As marketers, we’re always going to be explaining that kind of thing.
Darren Jamieson: You’ve spoken at BrightonSEO?
James Armstrong: Yes, I’ve spoken at BrightonSEO twice.
Darren Jamieson: Tell me about that. Other than the fact it’s on your doorstep, what made you want to do that? What sort of experience was it?
James Armstrong: I think it’s one of the better speaking experiences I’ve had. I’ve spoken at a few different conferences. BrightonSEO is definitely the biggest one I’ve spoken at.
They really look after you. They give training and hold your hand a bit. You have a nice WhatsApp group with the other speakers. It’s really fun.
It’s also being part of the industry. It’s called BrightonSEO, but there are loads of talks that aren’t just about SEO, even though SEO has become so important in social media as well.
Darren Jamieson: I heard it was dead now. AI has killed it.
James Armstrong: AI definitely has not killed SEO. If you’re using it properly, if you’re thinking like a human rather than posting out AI slop, then you’re going to perform better over time.
BrightonSEO is a really great one. It’s a good one for the whole industry to come to. It’s a busy one. I don’t want to promote them too much — this isn’t an ad, I’m not being paid to say this — but it’s a really nice one. It’s a lovely group of people who run it and it’s very well respected.
That’s why I wanted to do it at first. A lot of our work comes from partnering with other agencies. Our key demographic, the people we want to reach, are marketing managers, because they hire us to come in and be the social media specialists.
BrightonSEO is a really great one for marketers to go to because you’re meeting other peers, and as an agency owner, they are potential future clients as well.
Darren Jamieson: So from your perspective, it made commercial sense?
James Armstrong: Yeah. I can’t directly track any clients we have now from speaking at BrightonSEO, but what I can directly track is people I’m now connected with and have conversations with who are in large organisations that may need us at some point.
We’ve grown engagement with them and we’re building relationships.
I think it’s the same as any marketing or branding, speaking at any conference or speaking on this podcast. These are all things that help us build relationships with other marketers, and at one point they may need us.
It’s all about being seen and heard, and being thought of as the expert. Eventually, it makes commercial sense.
Darren Jamieson: That’s interesting. I’d genuinely dismissed doing it as a concept because it’s mostly to your peers, and there’s not much point standing up and talking to a load of SEO people about SEO because it’s not going to help me commercially.
But based on what you’ve said, potentially it could.
James Armstrong: Yeah. The stages I was speaking at were focused on paid social, so I was talking to a bunch of people who were interested in paid social but weren’t necessarily experts. They’re other marketing managers.
I think it does make sense.
I do want to speak more at specific marketing conferences. Having clients in the entertainment industry and charities, I need to speak at more of those.
CharityComms, for example — I’ve delivered events for CharityComms. We sponsored one of their conferences last week. Again, that helps because they are my peers, because they’re marketers and strategic marketers a lot of the time, but they also work in charity and we have a lot of charity clients.
You have to pick the ones you think will make long-term commercial sense. It’s the same as networking. You’re building it over time. It’s the same as social media. You’re building over time.
Darren Jamieson: It’s that compounding again, isn’t it?
James Armstrong: Exactly.
Darren Jamieson: I suppose, like with networking, public speaking and social media, you could end up doing too much that isn’t right for you. It’s the wrong content, wrong platform, wrong audience. You need to make sure you’re doing the right stuff in front of the right people to make it pay off.
James Armstrong: Exactly. This is why we also say you don’t need to be on every single social media platform, because your audience isn’t on every single social media platform.
Especially if you’re in professional services or you’re a smaller business, you haven’t got the time to be stretching yourself thin across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Choose one and get good at it first. Find out where your audience is and focus on that one first, then expand if you can.
Darren Jamieson: I have to delve further into that. We are running out of time, but that is a question I do have to delve further into.
If I am a trade — say a plumber, electrician, chippy, whatever — what is the main social media platform I should be using if my audience is homeowners?
James Armstrong: It depends on the level of homeowner. It depends on how premium they’re looking for as well. You have to think about that and who your target audience is.
Some plumbers, decorators and electricians work with more high-end people and high-end houses that want a very specific thing, and they’ve got a premium on their fees.
Instagram tends to be really great for that because it’s a slightly older audience who really care about aesthetics. There’s a really good group of people who care about aesthetics there. But so is Pinterest.
Those are the two I would say. It’s really interesting. A lot of people miss Pinterest, and they really shouldn’t for interior design, decorators and builders. I think it’s a really interesting one to focus on.
But if you’re just a local chippy and you’re only working within a small area, Facebook groups are a gold mine. That’s where you build your relationships with people.
I would still say Instagram is interesting for that, but Facebook groups will take a lot of your time in engaging with people, commenting and giving people advice — not selling all the time. But you don’t have to do as much visual content as you would on Instagram.
Did that answer the question?
Darren Jamieson: It did. And you almost started me on a rant there as well.
I manage quite a few groups on Facebook, as you can probably imagine. One of them is a local group and I’ve probably got, I think when I last looked, four and a half thousand unapproved posts in there. There are probably 50 or 60 a day people try to put in, and it’s the same shit.
It’s your local taxi firm sharing a post from their page with no comment straight in there. It’s your local roofing company, or three roofing companies, sharing posts from their page.
What they’ll do every day is go on Facebook, go to their own post on their own page, and share it around half a dozen groups. That’s their social media activity for the day.
Much of that isn’t even getting approved by the moderators because nobody wants to see that shit.
What’s your message to people doing that? It doesn’t have to be clean.
James Armstrong: My message is: imagine doing that in a networking group. Imagine walking into networking with a poster, shoving it up against someone’s face and saying, “Hey, buy my thing,” or “Here’s my plumbing service,” and then walking out.
It doesn’t mean anything. The same goes across all social media. You should be engaging, building relationships, providing advice and replying to people.
It is not a broadcast platform. Social media includes the word “social” for a reason. It is not a broadcast platform. You should be having conversations with people.
Remember, these people are just like you. You don’t want to see those posts all the time. You don’t want to be sold to when you’re scrolling on Instagram. So don’t do it to other people, because it is just crap.
It’s the same as AI slop. No one is going to pay any attention to it eventually, because they know everything’s AI. They’ll just scroll past. It’s a waste of your time and everyone else’s time as well.
I could have got less clean there.
Darren Jamieson: You could have. I know. I was feeling it bubbling under there.
I think we’d better end it now. James, for anyone listening to this thinking, “I love this. I love the sound of your voice. I want to know more about you. I want you to speak at my event, or I want to work with you on our social media,” what’s the best way for somebody to reach out to you?
James Armstrong: The best way is on LinkedIn: James Armstrong. Or Social Firefly. My email address as well is james@socialfirefly.co.uk.
I’d love to do more speaking. I’d love to be working with more people across the UK and beyond.
Darren Jamieson: Fantastic. I will put the email address and the LinkedIn profile link below the podcast.
More About James
James Armstrong is the co-founder of Social Firefly, a social media agency that helps organisations build stronger relationships with their audiences through meaningful, human-focused content. Before launching the business, James spent ten years with Sussex Police, where he progressed from Police Community Support Officer to digital communications manager, leading social media and public engagement across the force.
His background in policing gave him first-hand experience of community management, reputational risk, public sector communications and high-pressure messaging. He worked on campaigns covering issues such as child sexual exploitation, public safety and emergency response, including social media communications around the Shoreham air crash.
Today, James brings that experience into his work with businesses, charities and public sector organisations, helping them use social media as a genuine conversation tool rather than a broadcast channel. Through Social Firefly, he has worked with a wide range of clients, including local authorities, charities, cultural organisations and commercial brands. He has also spoken at events including BrightonSEO and CharityComms, sharing his expertise on social media strategy, paid social and audience engagement.
You can connect with James here:
Website: https://socialfirefly.co.uk/
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/jjfarmstrong
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoFirefly
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jjfarmstrong/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
