Author: Franz Malten Buemann

A new social network has taken the internet by storm, and it goes by the name of Mastodon. Having amassed a following of almost two million active users by this January, the platform is described as an alternative to Twitter.
So what does this new name have to offer marketers? And can your brand benefit from having a presence on it? In this post, we’ll break down what Mastodon is and how to leverage it — according to an experienced and trusted marketing partner here at HubSpot.

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What can you do on Mastodon?
On Mastodon, users can explore different servers according to their favorite topics of interest or industry spheres. When you find a forum you’re interested in, you can join in and engage with whomever you like — more or less like you would on Twitter. You can:

Follow users
Reply to other people’s posts
Engage in or begin your own conversations

You can build a feed tailored to what you want to see and use features like an explore tab to find new and exciting content.
Tips for New Mastodon Users
We asked Crystal King, one of HubSpot’s very own Senior Marketing Managers and Principal Inbound Professor, if she had any useful tips for people new to the platform. Here’s what she had to say.

Put yourself out there and join a variety of servers.

“Like any new social platform you might join, there is a learning curve with Mastodon. The hardest thing to get used to is the idea that not everyone is on the same server as you are, but that you can still talk to them.
“It doesn’t really matter what server you are using, but if you want to find a topic-specific server to join then it may mean your local feed is slightly more curated toward that topic, but it’s not a necessity to do so.”
No one’s an expert at something when they first begin. When you join Mastodon, don’t feel you belong on only one or two servers. Everyone has a place to share their thoughts and opinions just as much as the next person.
Mastodon has much more freedom of choice regarding the content you’re given. While it can recommend conversations and servers to you, it won’t crowd your personalized feed with content you haven’t followed, like Instagram or Twitter — where recommended, sponsored, or related content can clutter your feed.
2. Find your favorite accounts from Twitter and find where they reside in Mastodon.
“One thing you can do to find your Twitter followers that are also on Mastodon is to go to Twitter and search for the word ‘Mastodon.’ Then, click the three dots to the right of the search bar and click ‘Search filters.’ That narrows down the search to only people you follow, and by doing this you can often see tweets where they have shared their Mastodon profiles.”
If you’re lost on where to start, look at who you already follow on Twitter. Chances are that if they’re a full-time influencer or a frequent poster, they may have already made their way to Mastodon — and can help you identify which servers you’d enjoy the most.
3. Don’t expect visuals, expect conversations.
“Mastodon is a text-heavy platform, and you won’t see many moving .gifs, videos, or big images. Those things are present, but you usually have to click through to see them. Instead, focus on creating and having conversations. Share interesting information. Ask great questions to get people talking. And engage with others. That’s where you’ll find the most value.”
King recommends that new users focus on contributing insightful conversations to gain traction in the platform. While Twitter and Instagram prioritize visual-heavy content, Mastodon will display trending conversations and forums where visuals are more of an added detail than a priority.
Why would a brand want to use Mastodon?
According to King, Mastodon allows marketers to get creative with their digital marketing.
“Brands may feel skeptical about using Mastodon. After all, there are no ads. There aren’t any rewards for having a certain number of followers. There aren’t any algorithms to push content to more people. In short, it feels like Twitter without all the things that made Twitter great for marketers.
“And that’s sort of the point — people don’t typically like to be marketed to, and that’s what the platform’s creators had in mind when developing it. But that doesn’t mean brands can’t or shouldn’t use it. You just can’t think about the platform as a replacement for Twitter. It’s something different. Mastodon is a place to share information and engage with an audience. And brands that can do that will find a niche on the platform.”
Marketers can’t rely on paid or promoted ads to reach targeted audiences. Instead, they can use Mastodon to provide value, insight, or content that engages prospects — rather than sell to them.
“The engagement rate on Mastodon is much higher than that of Twitter. Plus, there’s a heavy journalist presence on the platform as well, which bodes well for your brand’s visibility. If you are a brand that loves chatting with your audience, it may be a great place for you. The best way to find out is to develop a test of three to six months and see how it works for you. Just don’t expect it to look or act like Twitter, because it’s not.”
You can’t approach Mastodon expecting the same results as you’ve gotten from previous social media channels. If anything, King is saying that brands can position themselves for better brand visibility on the platform if they focus on thought leadership — delegating designated content marketers or journalists to post about buzzing conversations and news.
See All the Possibilities Mastodon Has to Offer
With the rise of new social media channels, marketers can use new greenspace to attract prospects. While Mastodon itself isn’t directly optimized for paid advertising, there are many ways to grow a following and engage with your target audience.

A couple years ago, artificial intelligence still seemed like a somewhat far-off, sci-fi version of reality. And it certainly didn’t seem like something that would completely transform how marketers work within the next few years.
But in 2023, generative AI is officially here, and it’s only growing. In fact, the generative AI market size accounted for over 7 billion USD in 2021, and it’s projected to occupy more than 110 billion USD by 2023 — growing at a CAGR of 34.3%.
All of which is to say: Generative AI is poised to completely disrupt — and elevate — business’ content strategies in 2023 and beyond.
And disruption of any kind can be scary. What does generative AI mean for the future of marketing? Will it replace us, or elevate us? And what about SEO? Will Googling be replaced with AI chatbots — and what does all that mean for content creation?
Here, I spoke with Samyutha Reddy, Jasper’s Head of Enterprise Marketing, to explore her perspective on whether AI will replace content creators, as well as SEO, in the future.
Let’s dive in.
Will AI Replace Marketers?
AI Augments The Human Experience — but It Doesn’t Replace the Human Within That Experience
Generative AI can research virtually any topic across the internet, and distill that research into original content. It can format that content as a blog post, email, Facebook ad, or something else, depending on the query.
Generative AI is still in its early stages, and it has some issues. The information it collects can be biased or simply false, and it doesn’t have the discernment of a real human to catch those inaccuracies.
But as generative AI continues to learn and grow, it makes sense that marketers are concerned. In the future, rather than needing a team of five or ten content creators, will you just need one — someone to fact-check the AI’s content?
Fortunately, Samyutha isn’t worried. In fact, even though her team currently uses generative AI on a daily basis, she’s still actively hiring and growing her team.

As she puts it, “AI augments the human experience, but it doesn’t replace the human within that experience. We value writers in our society because they’re able to give us a thought-provoking human perspective on the world. It isn’t just about summarizing facts that are out there. It’s about humans sharing opinions on very real topics that help build your perspective on how you feel about something. So an AI could really never replace that human perspective.”
However, AI Will Force Content Creators to Re-skill
Samyutha does acknowledge that AI will force content creators to re-skill, as aspects of their roles become more automated.
She told me, “I think it’ll force content creators to re-skill. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s what every big shift in technology has done for humans.”
She adds, “I’ve never met a content creator who has said, ‘Wait. I really want to spend more time doing all the rote tasks of reading everything I need to know on the internet about a given topic.’ AI will give marketers more time to be creative, form an opinion, and incorporate more data sources into their perspectives.”
Rather than thinking of AI as a content creator replacement, it’s better to think of AI as a marketer’s efficient side-kick.
Consider this: A marketer decides she wants to write a topic about SWOT analysis. Rather than spending her morning chugging coffee and reading up on what SWOT analysis means, effective SWOT analysis examples, and how SWOT analyses can help businesses grow, she can simply plug the query into an AI chatbot.
Once she’s confirmed the sources the chatbot used to pull that information are accurate, she can quickly skim through the AI’s response and learn everything she needs to begin writing about the topic. She can even use the AI’s response as a first draft, and strengthen it with her own unique tone and perspective.

From there, she can leverage the AI’s proofreading skills to edit her final copy.
Additionally, if the marketer has written a piece of content that she’d like to turn into an entire campaign, she can use AI to re-format her blog post into corresponding ad copy and creative, which she can hand over to her sales and paid ad teams.
As Reddy puts it, “I can effectively hand over to sales an entire drip campaign, an entire outbound sequence, complete with landing pages, with the ads that people will click and see. And it really allows me to take control back on what it means to execute a campaign. It enables me to truly be a project manager and a strategist, versus someone who is waiting on other people to deliver their end of the bargain.”
Marketers Will Need to Become Experts in Select AI Platforms
Freelancing platform Upwork recently announced it added a new category, ‘Generative AI’, as a specialty within their marketplace.
This means business leaders can now hire freelance content creators who have expertise with a specific AI platform — and Reddy isn’t surprised.
She says, “AI has biases deeply embedded within its models that people are working on. AI has the tendency to hallucinate and start talking about random things when you’re asking it for outputs, so it would be really tough to just completely remove a human from the process.”
She continues, “Similar to how a marketer can level-up by becoming HubSpot or Salesforce certified, I think we’ll soon see marketers who demonstrate their value by saying, ‘Hey, I’m skilled in using generative AI platforms.’”
AI Will Eliminate Portions of the Creation Process – But it Will Also Elevate Marketers
Reddy admits, “I do think it will eliminate some portions of the content creation process.”
However, she’s quick to add, “I think AI will focus on elevating folks, and I think the angle you take matters on this whole generative AI front. If you’re a writer, content creator, or a marketer, you’ll want to ask yourself, ‘Am I going to be someone that embraces technology and figures out how to upskill myself and actually become the cream of the crop in terms of talent? Or am I going to be someone who pushes technology away, refuses to believe it’s happening, and clings onto an old way of life?’”

For Reddy, she sees marketers at the forefront of a tool that will ultimately upend all roles within a business, and she believes there’s great privilege in being the first to adopt it.
As she puts it, “I think there’s a certain power here that marketers can reclaim, and instead of being the victims in this story of ‘generative AI is coming for marketing’, I think we really reposition it as saying, ‘generative AI has landed in the most innovative portion of the enterprise: marketing.’”
She continues, “And we are now the stewards of this technology and how it’ll be used within the enterprise, and we get to pilot it and see how it can supercharge our work. And the folks who lean into being the stewards of this powerful technology will reap its benefits. I consider myself and our industry extremely lucky to to be in this position.”
Will Generative AI Replace Search Engines?
As more marketers and consumers use AI chatbots to get quick answers to common queries, it stands to reason that they’ll be leveraging search engines less often.
Reddy doesn’t see search engines going away, particularly since the information supplied on search engines is what powers generative AI results — but she does see it drastically changing.

As she puts it, “Search can help battle AI’s inaccuracies. For instance, Jasper has a function where you can toggle on Google search results. So if I say, ‘Jasper, help me write a paragraph about XYZ,’ it’ll write the paragraph, and at the bottom it’ll put in the Google search results it used while it helped me create that output. So I have factual links which I can cite, and fact-check to ensure they’re the most reliable piece of content on a given topic.”

She continues, “I don’t see search going away. I do see a future where I don’t necessarily want to type things into a search bar, and instead, I want to use chat functionality. That, I think, is imminent. And I think we’re already seeing that with the virality of Chat GPT. In just a couple of days, it’s become the fastest-growing consumer app.”

Ultimately, my conversation with Reddy felt positive and uplifting. As marketers, we don’t need to fear AI: We need to embrace it as technology that will help us do our jobs better.
And, personally, I’m all for any tool that minimizes the amount of time I spend researching, so I can get back to what really matters: creating content with the intention to move, inspire, or challenge readers’ to think differently.

On the surface, it would seem that Juliana Pache landed her dream job. The New York native was the head of social media at Rolling Stone – the famed music magazine. But in reality, the gig was anything but. Despite working in a job that blended her two passions – music and social media – Juliana found herself weighed down by an unhealthy work culture and demanding schedule.As she dealt with the stress of her nine-to-five she developed a side hustle – making clay jewelry early in the mornings. While she initially started the venture as a hobby, a way to ease into her hectic days, she soon realized she had something special. After 11 months at Rolling Stone, she quit to launch Pache Studio.made more in my first year as a full time small business owner than I did last year as a salaried employee and I just want to say thank you to everyone who stressed me out beyond my limit at my 9-5 because without you I wouldn’t have taken the leap! happy new year ☺️— juliana (@thecityofjules) December 29, 2022

By betting on herself, not only has the entrepreneur achieved inner peace, but she’s also making more money than ever before. Matter of fact, in her first year of operating her small business full-time, Juliana brought in more money than at Rolling Stone where her salary was $90,000. Here’s exactly how she did it.A creative outlet stems from an unfulfilling 9-5Born and raised in Queens, New York, Juliana had a culture shock when her family moved to the suburbs of Florida during her middle school years. The minute she turned 18, she knew she needed a change of environment and landed at Temple University in the heart of Philadelphia where she majored in media studies and production.A singer herself, Juliana originally envisioned a career in music but after a few classes, she realized the technical aspect of producing music wasn’t for her. This led her to shift her focus to journalism and media. During college, she landed a marketing internship at Red Bull where she worked with the infamous “wings” team.The experience was formative for her and she worked at the energy drink company after college. But needing another change, Juliana left Red Bull and moved back to New York where she did marketing for a coconut water startup. Unfortunately, it was no comparison to her previous job.“Red Bull is an outlier. It’s an exception to the rule. Right?” she said. “It was really cool. They do stuff with arts, music, sports, and culture. It was just completely different.”Luckily, it didn’t take Juliana long to find another position where she would thrive. She became the social media editor at the Fader, a publication that covers music and the culture around it. The job blended all of her interests including music, journalism, and social media. In her three years there, Juliana worked her way up to become the social media director. She then moved to do socials for VICE, a larger and well-respected publication, and was then hired by Rolling Stone a year later.But while her career trajectory looked amazing from the outside, this was a difficult time for the media professional.“Rolling Stone broke me,” she said.Juliana found herself in a toxic work environment where she was given an unreasonable amount of work and no support. It all became too much for her.“I was having frequent panic attacks. And not only that, but the hierarchy at Rolling Stone is so old, white, male dominant. And they have a certain way — culturally — of communicating that they don’t recognize is demoralizing and condescending,” she said. “So the combination of all of those things, I just felt like I was alone out to sea. No support.”Realizing that she was being taken advantage of, she quit only to have the company offer her two extra weeks of PTO and the promise of bringing in additional support. But after a month and no hiring progress, Juliana left for good.Leaving a stable job was risky, of course. But Juliana had a plan. In the morning and evenings when she had a respite from her day job, she was working on a side project she started at the end of 2020 and decided it was time to fully invest in it.“I had started my [jewelry] business, Pache Studio,” she said. “It was a side hustle, a creative outlet. It was a way to make some extra income. By the time I quit Rolling Stone, I felt like, ‘oh, I have enough of a following here that I could really make something of this.’”A passion project becomes a stable businessTechnically, Pache Studio started as a hobby. Having stretchy and sensitive earlobes, Juliana found herself getting most of her earrings from Etsy because they were lightweight.“I was buying clay earrings a lot on Etsy,” she said. “And I was like, ‘I wonder how they’re making this?’’”After doing a Google search, she purchased all of the necessary materials and decided to try her hand at producing jewelry. Two weeks later, her Etsy store went live.A social media professional herself, Juliana was able to get the word out about her small business relatively easily and grew Pache Studio’s Instagram organically. While she was still at Rolling Stone, the volume of orders for Pache Studio was quite low, which allowed the entrepreneur to slowly work on the business. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Pache Studio (@pachestudio) An early riser, Juliana naturally goes to bed from 9:30 – 5:30 am. This meant she had several hours every morning she could dedicate to jewelry making before her day job. At the time, she wasn’t necessarily thinking about expanding this project into a full-time business. Rather, she found the craft was becoming a form of therapy.“Producing the jewelry was kind of my creative outlet,” she said. “It was a very relaxing, kind of repetitive hobby. So that worked out in my favor.”The stars just happened to align and when she found herself at her breaking point at Rolling Stone, Etsy approached her and wanted to feature her business. This helped Juliana take the leap to leave her salaried job in October 2021.​​“I knew I was gonna have a flood of income coming,” Juliana said. “Etsy featured me in their blog. They featured me in the newsletter on Small Business Saturday. So I was good.”After leaving Rolling Stone, Juliana devoted all of her time to Pache Studio and it became her main source of income in 2022. This was also the year she prioritized in-person sales and began tabling at local markets throughout New York City. She found great success with this approach.“I kind of shifted some of my priorities to do the in-person markets,” Juliana said. “Because it’s quicker. I can just bring the earrings, put them in a bag, and make the sale,” she said.Juliana recalls that her first in-person sale was at a small popup in Bushwick. Despite feeling a bit unprepared – she forgot to bring a tablecloth for her display – the day was a success.“I just remember that whole time at that market, feeling like, ‘oh my god. I can’t believe I sold this many earrings,’” she said.The behind the scenes of running a small jewelry businessWhile it’s never easy to let go of a stable paycheck, Juliana’s found greater financial freedom through her small business.The entrepreneur made more in 2022 than she did in 2021 when she was employed full-time at Rolling Stone. While she did do a bit of freelancing for VICE, the majority of this income came directly from Pache Studio. Here’s a look at her company expenses and what it costs to operate a small jewelry business in New York.Initially, Juliana paid exactly $1,250 to open up Pache Studio. This included the $500 fee to start an LLC (limited liability company) in New York City along with an additional $500 to get the LLC published in the newspaper. The remaining $250 was the cost of the first supplies and materials Juliana bought to make the earrings.The entrepreneur spends about $250 on admin tools every month, including her Shopify website and Quickbooks. The materials for her jewelry can be anywhere from $200 – $400 a month. Her monthly vendor fees also range from $400 – $600 depending on how many markets she attends. On the high end, her total expenses per month can be around $1250. Still, Juliana has been profitable every month she’s operated Pache Studio.Her schedule is broken down into spending about three hours a day on admin work: fulfilling orders, responding to customers’ requests, going to the post office, updating inventory, tracking expenses, and tweaking the website. The remainder of the day – anywhere from two to four hours – is dedicated to the production of the jewelry.Depending on the technique and assembly required, Juliana spends about two to five hours on one batch of earrings which amounts to 12 to 15 pairs.Currently, Juliana is operating as a team of one. She does work with a part-time employee who helps her at the markets and sometimes utilizes Taskrabbit for help on shipping out orders, including hiring someone to pierce holes in the earring cards.With Pache Studio growing, she feels like it’s time to bring in a team member to assist her. As a small business owner, it can be a bit intimidating from a financial perspective to take this step, but Juliana acknowledges that she needs the help now.“I’ve decided now I need to hire someone because it’s just not sustainable,” she said. “Mentally, I’m buzzing around. And I’m checking things off my to-do list, but every time I check something off, it feels like five more things are put on my list.”The creative process of making jewelryFinances aside, Pache Studio has allowed Juliana to tap more into her creativity, something that’s been with her since her childhood.“I’ve always been a very creative person,” she said. “In elementary school, I was in the art club. I just remember using materials in a fun, creative way.”Now, years later, she’s continuing to experiment with materials – this time as a career. Each earring is hand-crafted by Juliana herself using polymer clay and hypoallergenic materials. First, she shapes and molds the clay and will sometimes add mixed elements like hardware and resin. Once she has finished manipulating it, she cuts the earrings up into different shapes and will then bake them in the oven.Designing the earrings comes naturally to Juliana, as she’s always had a penchant for identifying striking color combos and patterns in everything from buildings to fabrics.“I was looking at the preview of The Real Housewives of Potomac reunion and the colors and the set design — they had these lush purples, blues, and little hints of pink – and I was like, oh my god, that would be such a great color scheme for some earrings,” she said.While Juliana has made a career out of managing social media for large news organizations, she applies the same principles for posting when it comes to promoting her own brand: giving back to the audience. She’s found that filming Instagram Reels that showcase the creative process gets the most engagement.“I’ve tried to think about, “what is the most generous thing to post?” Because that is oftentimes the most engaging thing to post. Like, what am I offering to the audience?” she said. “I’m offering something that is really interesting to look at. So I’m not just selling earrings, I’m also offering them something that piques their curiosity.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Pache Studio (@pachestudio) Achieving peace of mind through Pache StudioDespite all of the responsibilities of Pache Studio falling squarely on Juliana’s shoulders, she’s in the healthiest place she’s ever been both mentally and financially. It may seem like a paradox, but the freedom and independence she’s gained from her small business has allowed her to thrive.“Honestly, it’s way less stressful to put that amount of inertia into a business, knowing that it’s controlled by you, you set the rules, you set the pace, you make the schedule,” she said. “It’s a different kind of stress because it’s not the kind of stress where you feel like, ‘what is the point of this?’”In fact, Juliana was able to open her second small business, Black Crossword, because of the mental clarity she’s found. A fan of word games, Juliana created the crossword as a way to highlight and honor the diversity of Black culture. In a New York Times interview, she said her goal with the project was for, “people of the Black diaspora to learn about each other in a way that’s fun and rewarding.”Running two small businesses is difficult, sure, but it’s also been fulfilling and purposeful for Juliana. The entrepreneur especially appreciates that she’s in charge of her schedule and says becoming her own boss has has drastically improved her life.“The quality of life is so much better when you don’t have to work with jerks,” she said. “If I want to break up my day and go to a cafe and read a book, or go to a park, I can do that. I just feel more in control.”She acknowledges there can be a lot of condescension from others when it comes to small business, and that not everyone is supportive of this lifestyle. But even so, she encourages other aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap and trust themselves as she did.“Your friends might not know what you’re doing. They might think you’re crazy. They might think that you’re twiddling your thumbs with your little arts and crafts,” she said. “But you just have to forget about all of that and focus.”