E140: An industry insider’s take on how to succeed in social media with Erin Corn

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Erin Corn is the owner of Shorebird Media, a digital agency founded to help online businesses scale. Erin started her career at Yahoo, later worked on the advertising team at Facebook, spearheaded the rollout of global advertising solutions at Instagram (as employee #40), and worked in digital marketing with Amazon.

Episode highlights:

• What it was like to be employee number 40 at Instagram.
• Why Erin went from a successful career at iconic businesses to being an entrepreneur.
• The most “humbling” part of starting her agency (as many can probably relate), and how Erin dealt with it.
• Erin’s proven process and what it takes to be a successful advertiser.
• Is her background an unfair advantage? Erin weighs in.
• How platforms fight against the fact that “marketers ruin everything”.
• Erin’s advice for creating content, and how her agency interacts with customers on Instagram.
• Best advice received: It’s a losing game to compare yourself to other people.
• Habit that contributes to success: Resourcefulness
• Recommended tools: Canva for creating content and more
• Recommended book: Becoming by Michelle Obama
• Run time: 35:42

Links:

• Shorebird-Media.com
• On Insta
• Canva 
• Becoming by Michelle Obama

Quotes:

• “I have the ability to hand-pick my clients.”
• “(The founders) reviewed the creative…which wasn’t very scalable.”
• “You really could have the ability to make an impact on a large audience of people.”
• “You really need to build those proof points.”
• “I don’t want to operate in a silo.”
• “User sentiment has always been important to Facebook and Instagram.”

Takeaways:

• Consider short-form videos for your agency.
• Next time you’re doing something interesting, like a photo shoot, have someone take some behind-the-scenes B-roll. End consumers love that kind of video.