🔴 Every social media manager's favorite newsletter

ft. Rachel Karten, creator of Link in Bio

Author

Francis Zierer
September 13, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes

Today’s issue in partnership with The Webby Awards

Today’s guest is Rachel Karten. She’s a social media consultant and the creator of Link in Bio, an excellent newsletter about and for people working in social media. She started publishing in early 2021 and has since built an audience of 69k subscribers. Her social media work has earned her multiple awards, including a Webby; she now sits on the Webby Awards judges panel.

In this issue:

  • 💹 Turning her newsletter into a sustainable, well-paying job

  • 🏘️ How she build a thriving, active community around the newsletter

  • 🤔 The most common trait in all the best social media managers

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Rachel or watch it on YouTube.

Social media expertise requires humility

“One reason I created Link in Bio is I felt like social managers were always sort of looked down upon. I try not to talk about this that much, but the ‘intern’ thing, it's very overused, but I still think it's indicative of how people think about people who run social media. And so I wanted to be an advocate for social managers.”

The trouble with figuring out rules, guidelines, or even general advice for working in social media is the rapid pace of change. Algorithms are black boxes. Trends come and go as soon as they’re defined. There are all kinds of resources out there — books, blogs, YouTube videos, social media accounts about social media. Few are as consistently sharp and rich as Rachel Karten’s newsletter, Link in Bio.

By the time Rachel left her job leading the social media team at Bon Appétit in the summer of 2020, she’d won a Webby for her work there and had worked in social for more than half a decade.

Not ready to go back into a full-time job, Rachel started consulting and writing a newsletter at the same time; the former to make money, the second as a sort of duty to her profession.

“I started the newsletter not as a [consulting] lead generation, thought leadership thing. I was like, I need this resource to exist. I want to make it. Let's see what happens. I published when I could and wasn’t super strict about it.”

When Rachel started working in social in the early 2010s, the field wasn’t mature enough to have produced much of an expertise canon. In an early issue of Link in Bio, Rachel says she wanted her newsletter to be “the anti-Gary Vaynerchuk social media resource. I wanted it to highlight lots of different social media managers, and never just be me doling out personal advice week after week.”

She’d read one of Vaynerchuk’s books (Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, published in 2013) when she started in social, but years later it bothered her that so many people still saw him as a leading social media expert — that he’d become “more motivational speaker than social media professional.”

Link in Bio had a few thousand subscribers when Rachel wrote that post, three months after starting the newsletter. The ethos described therein underlines why the newsletter was already becoming such a success: “Doing social for a non-profit is very different from doing social at a huge agency. And doing social at a beauty startup is very different from doing social at legacy magazine. I recognize that I don’t know everything there is to know about social media, and unlike Vaynerchuk, I don’t pretend I do.”

Over 69k subscribers in bio

At the time of writing, Link in Bio has 69k subscribers — two weeks previously, when I interviewed Rachel, it had 65k. By the time you read this, it may be past 70k; you can check.

Rachel already had a decent following across Twitter, LinkedIn, and especially Instagram when she started the newsletter; you don’t have to be good at personal social to succeed as a social media professional, but it certainly helps. When she announced her newsletter on her personal socials, it didn’t take long for some 8k people to sign up.

Revelio Labs reported that in 2022, there were over 64k social media managers working in the United States alone. The number had been flat for a year after steadily increasing throughout the previous decade.

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Accounting for other countries and disregarding any possible growth or contraction in the social media manager workforce, that number is likely over 100k by now. And Link in Bio may be their primary trade publication.

Plenty of the readers, though, don’t work in social media at all.

You don’t have to be a professional to get something out of the newsletter; even if you only use social media in your personal life, Link in Bio offers is an excellent, accessible resource for understanding the what and why of the social media accounts and trends we interact with on a daily basis.

Other people and brands may have tried to fill the gap — Gary Vaynerchuk, social media software company blogs — but Rachel’s boots-on-the-ground approach, complete editorial independence, and primarily subscriber-funded business model make for an integrous, authentic product.

The newsletter audience is Rachel’s biggest client

Link in Bio didn’t have a paid subscription option until April 2023, just over two years after the first issue went out. By then it had 27k free subscribers. Rachel was making a healthy income consulting, but it dominated her days, and she was having trouble giving the newsletter the time it deserved:

“With consulting, I was working on the newsletter at the end of the day, at night, on weekends.

I wanted to be able to work on it in the morning when my brain is working best, and I wanted to make it sustainable for me.

That was the motivation for [offering paid subscriptions]; I'm spending a lot of time making this, not during work hours, and I'd like to make it my job.”

While she declined to say how many Link in Bio subscribers pay, Rachel did share that the newsletter makes up about 60% of her income. So consulting is still a significant source of income for her, but she’s certainly succeeded in making the newsletter her job.

Free subscribers receive just one interview-based issue each week, featuring social media managers like the New York Public Library's Victoria Reis, Letterboxd’s Flynn Slicker, and Duolingo’s Zaria Parvez. There are, occasionally, additional free omnibus and original research-based issues like ‘The Link in Bio Guide to Freelance Social,” ‘Brand Social Trend Report: Q1 2024,’ and an upcoming social media compensation survey.

Paid subscribers, besides supporting Rachel’s work producing the free content, receive:

  • 🗞️ A second weekly newsletter (more strategy-focused)

    • Essays on social topics, quick-and-easy ideas for on-trend brand posts, additional interviews, etc.

  • 🤝 Access to a Discord channel

    • A thriving community of people who work in social (across industries) trading insights and advice

The information and advice behind the paywall is actionable and tactical; Rachel says she sees brands post “those ideas, very clearly,” within days of the paid posts going out. Readers who work in social have told her they will regularly sit down and read the newsletter together with their team to brainstorm social post ideas; it’s one-to-many consulting on a subscription basis.

From the Discord to the conference hall

In her first role at Plated a decade ago, Rachel’s responsibilities were ostensibly community and people ops (social was scope creep). Community is precious — hard to build for brands, as much as they may try, but so meaningful when it happens organically around a shared interest.

Rachel did not set out to create a community, but that’s what she’s done — social media work is the shared interest, Link in Bio is the core text, and the Discord is the venue. She doesn’t need to do much in the way of management. There’s a chat room for every industry and people happily trade ideas and feedback. They even organize meetups among themselves.

“There is a difference between brand communities and newsletter communities.

One community is aligning around loving a product, whereas one community is aligning around, like, ‘We all work in the same industry, I work alone, and I've been dying to talk to somebody else who also does what I do.’”

It’s impossible to be an all-encompassing social media expert. There’s too much to know, changing too rapidly. Rachel’s expertise is in her curiosity and attendance; in knowing where to look and when; in knowing how to tell when a trend is rising and when it is about to die. She’s spoken at several conferences and has considered running one herself.

She’s done meetups — she launched paid subscriptions right after a meetup and alongside a photo shoot featuring members of her readership. The need she sees for a Link in Bio conference is the same as the need for the community that has grown around the newsletter; existing conference models are deeply reliant on and thus inevitably influenced by sponsorship dollars. It’s a question of authenticity.

From the photo shoot announcing paid subscriptions.

“I'd love a conference that did not even have sponsors. And you're not hearing from the CMO, who's then talking about the social strategy that they didn't even work on. It's coming from the people who are actually in the weeds and doing that work.”

I often ask Creator Spotlight guests if and how they think about their responsibility to their audience. They usually don’t have an answer. Rachel did; she said she thinks about it a lot and feels a responsibility to advocate for social media managers — to empower and uplift them. These are the values that power the newsletter and attract such an engaged audience.

Will she ever work on Link in Bio full-time? Never say never, but Rachel has no plans to stop consulting; she says it’s “what makes me good at writing the newsletter.” She’s in the trenches alongside everyone she interviews and all of her subscribers; that’s what makes it the resource she always wanted.

Connect with Rachel on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Link in Bio.

For the full story, listen to our podcast or watch it on YouTube.

The 29th Annual Webby Awards are now open! This year, a new generation of creatives will make their mark as Webby Winners, with a brand-new dedicated suite of categories for Creators.

Join past Creator winners like Mr. Beast, Mark Rober, Abi Marquez, Recess Therapy, Michelle Phan, and Patrick Starr.

Don’t wait. Create your mark and enter before the early entry deadline on October 25. Enter today.

🎙️ In the full interview:

  • 🤝 Advice for creators who want to partner with brands

  • 🤳 The crucial differences between a “creator” and an “influencer”

  • 🤖 Rachel’s hot takes on our relationship with social media algorithms

One trait the most innovative social media managers have in common

There’s no one way to do social media well, not even necessarily one way to do it well on any given platform or for any given niche; that there are so many ways to approach it is the thesis of Link in Bio. But!

I asked Rachel if there’s anything the hundreds of social media pros she’s talked to have in common. It’s a comedy background.

For example:

“I interviewed the woman who is the voice of Elmo on the internet and she is doing standup classes right now.

If you're not trained in comedy, maybe try taking a comedy class. And I've always thought improv would be a great non-technical skill for a social manager.”

It’s not just about humor, though that’s part of it. It’s that comedy training teaches you to be reactive to a situation, to an audience. To think on your feet. To control the narrative. To take risks, to fail and move on.

Some schools offer social media management degrees nowadays, but you might be better served by taking an improv class.

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