On the unexpected congruence of teaching teens and Instagram book marketing

How good you are at either is all about how you 'sell it to them'

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I’m at the stage in life when it seems I’ve stopped understanding time.

I sat down to write this rumination on my first career as a secondary school teacher being the unlikely perfect training ground for becoming a social media marketing strategist and educator, did the maths, and apparently - impossibly - it is 20 (TWENTY!) years since I embarked on my teacher training.

WTF.

Equally alarming is that I stopped teaching 8 (EIGHT!) years ago. I’m sorry, the math might be mathing, but it just isn’t mathing, if you know what I mean...

Even as I struggle with the nature of time however, the work that I’ve made my business over the last 18 months - moving my social media support from small businesses to writers - has been a clear full circle moment to what began two decades ago.

I know how to teach writers how to use Instagram because teaching is what I trained to do. I know how to build curriculum, how to structure lessons, and how space for practical application - not just new knowledge - is essential when people are developing skills. This grounding is reflected in how I’ve developed and delivered my 1-2-1 sessions, workshops and group programmes as an Instagram educator.

Returning to teaching in this way has been a source of real pleasure in my work over the last 18 months. The audience and subject matter are different, but the thrill of transforming how someone feels about a subject, watching them develop their own skills, and empowering them to take what they’ve learned and make it their own, is exactly the same as it was for all of those years in a classroom.

Inject it into my veins, I bloody love it.

It seems I am the epitomy of the old adage, ‘Once a teacher, always a teacher’ and while I’m conflicted about being a walking talking cliche, a more surprising and interesting link between my role as a social media marketer and teaching teens has emerged.

My social media philosophy is that platforms like Instagram are about connections, not transactions (bear with me, I promise this is relevant).

Whether you’re a small business selling gift boxes, or a writer with a book you want people to buy, it isn’t enough to simply appear in someone’s feed on a random occasion (there will of course always be exceptions to this rule - but the rule has to exist to have exceptions, right?).

To be successful in your promotional endeavours, whether it’s through humour, shared experiences, beauty or inspiration, you have to connect with people first.

Repeated connection then deepens the relationship between the ‘merchant’ and consumer and eventually ends up with your audience being ready to buy your product or read your book.

How long this takes varies from person to person but the process is always roughly the same - you nudge, say hi, show them why/ how you/ your work might be relevant to them by talking about the things you both care about, nudge again, make it clear how/ where they can support your work, nudge again, and ultimately let them make up their own mind.

When I work with a client on their social media my aim is for the transaction to not be the end of the relationship. By then you know each other, you’re into the same things, why not continue hanging out? Hopefully, at some point in the future, you’ll have something new and valuable to offer them too.

But what does this have to do with teaching teenagers?

Well, spare a thought for noughties-2010s Ms Washington standing in front of 30 teens, offering them a poem about some random rich girl from the 1500s who dies at the hands of some random rich dude, only for some equally random poet to write about it 300 years later.

‘Like, seriously Miss, I don’t care.’

I could have disciplined them into paying attention but the truth is I was really bad at keeping track of who’d done what and what punishment their transgressions supposedly deserved.

I was also never convinced that people - and teenagers are, after all, entire, three-dimensional people in their own right, contrary to the dominant societal narrative that surrounds them - do their best work because they feel threatened.

Plus, working in inner London secondary schools will quickly teach you a detention barely even registers on a list of ‘Bad Things That Can Happen’ for some young people.

No, if I was ever going to win them over and get them paying attention, I had to connect with them in some way, and I had to connect their lives with the poem.

In short, I had to sell it to them.

We would talk about relationships, control, that time Chris Brown beat up Rihanna, domestic violence, male violence against women, and how men acting like they own women comes from a time when men actually did own women.

We’d talk about the mindset of a man who would kill his wife out of jealousy - the stories he might tell himself about why that was ok; the stories society tells men that legitimise such murderous behaviour. And we’d talk about her - the Duchess - what it might have been like to live in such a household and the strategies she might have used to try to survive.

It never escaped me that for some children in those classrooms, all the time we were questioning and exploring, role-playing and writing mock newspaper reports, what we were talking about was also their life.

Only once their interest was piqued, their passions roused, would I introduce the poem. Then and only then would we talk about form, meter, rhyme, and imagery. Only then would I get them to write essays about it. Sometimes they’d actually be interested, but mostly they were at least willing.

Over the 12 years I was in the classroom, I ‘sold’ this poem, obscure in its language and references, to somewhere between 300 and 400 members of the world’s most difficult audiences: teenagers.

I didn’t know it at the time but the thousands of hours, over 12 years at the chalk face, spent planning and delivering lessons about everything from subordinate clauses to Shakespeare were also preparing me for what I’m doing today. They were teaching me about the importance of connection when we’re ‘selling’ anything.

So, next time you’re agonising over algorithms, or what Janet on the school run might think of your latest Instagram post, please think of me standing at the front of a classroom doing my best to convince teenagers that yes, Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess is absolutely and utterly relevant to their lives. Surely, it can’t be any harder than that? ❤️

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Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash