Trendsettrs: Rachel Karten
Advice from Link In Bio newsletter founder and social media sage.
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Trendsettrs: Rachel Karten
Trendsettrs is a Pollinatr column about marketers blazing their own trails. They’ll share tactical advice from the front lines that will help you be smarter at your job.
Meet Rachel!
Rachel Karten is a social media consultant and author of the industry newsletter Link in Bio.
She has worked in social media for over 12 years and previously led the social media team at Bon Appétit and Epicurious. With Karten at the helm, the social team won both a social Webby Award and a prestigious National Magazine Award for best social. Since leaving Condé Nast in 2020, Karten has been consulting on social media strategies for brands like CAVA, West Elm, and many more. Her newsletter Link in Bio has over 95,000 subscribers and is a top 5 business newsletter on Substack.
I have been a long-time subscriber of Rachel’s and was pumped when she interviewed me about the work my team and I have been doing for Duolingo on LinkedIn. I was even more excited to turn the tables and pick Rachel’s brain.
She has an incredible background and her newsletter is an absolute must-read for me. She has found her wheelhouse and only has up to go. Our convo below covers:
✍️ Advice for Substack writers
👀 What cultural trend she’s paying attention to
🔮 Her prediction on the future of social media
Michelle: Career highlights/things you're most proud of?
Rachel: The first thing that comes to mind was working on CAVA’s campaign with Emma Chamberlain a few years ago. They are a client of mine and it was so fun to see that partnership through from start to finish. The best part was I knew Emma was a huge fan of my old co-worker Claire Saffitz. I was able to make that connection and work with all of the teams to create a sponsored YouTube video that gained over 2M organic views. Still one of the coolest things I’ve worked on to this day.
Michelle: You've built an incredible newsletter, I love how tactical and actionable it is - it genuinely helps me in my job! What are five pieces of advice for Substack writers (myself included!)?
Rachel: Thank you! Okay here are my five pieces of advice:
Act like a writer, even if you don’t consider yourself one. Take your role as a newsletter writer seriously from day one! Build out a content calendar, send your posts consistently, and write with authority.
Put on your blinders. It’s easy to scroll through Substack Notes or LinkedIn and feel like you have nothing original to say. It’s easy to compare yourself. Don’t do it. Your unique perspective on a topic—even if it has already been talked about—is what will make you stand out.
Promote your newsletter in social-first ways. When I first started writing Link in Bio, I’d post the link on social platforms and the reach would tank. Slowly I learned how to take the stories I wrote, and tell them in platform-specific ways. Even if I don’t post the link (which I rarely do), the reach of those social posts leads people to my newsletter.
Be an internet sleuth! People are always surprised that my interviews often come from cold DMs on LinkedIn and Instagram. If there’s a story you want to tell or a brand you want to interview, reach out! People usually respond and are thrilled to be thought of for a feature.
Your newsletter doesn't always need to be long to be valuable. I think I used to feel like I had to cram so much good information into one send to make it worth people's time. Yet, when I'd personally receive a really long newsletter I'd often glaze over it or not click out when it got cut off at the bottom. Always ask yourself "Would I read this?" before sending.
Michelle: What prompted you to start Link in Bio and how did you decide to go full time with this? Tell me the story!
Rachel: I started Link in Bio because it was the resource I wish existed when I was in a full time role. I had just left my job leading social at Bon Appétit and didn’t have anything lined up. I heard about Substack and thought Okay, should I build this resource? On day one I had 8,000 subscribers who signed up from me posting it on my personal social media. I knew I was on to something.
Michelle: The Discord channel is impressive and one of the best examples of building real community - how did you do it? I’m sure at one point there were only a few people in it, how did it become so popular?
Rachel: The Discord has been a perk since I first went paid and probably started with something like 20-30 people. It has obviously grown since then, but I think the fact that it’s just for paid subscribers has kept it feeling fairly intimate and manageable to keep up with. I’m in there every single day—along with social pros who work at places like Morning Brew, Empire State Building, Sesame Workshop, Away, and more—and it’s easily my favorite part of starting Link in Bio.
Michelle: Five years from now, what does the landscape of social look like?
Rachel: Honestly, I don’t know and I don’t trust anyone who claims they do!
Michelle: What's something social media managers inherently understand that most other marketers overlook?
Rachel: The payoff of taking risks that data could never back up.
Michelle: What's a cultural trend you're paying attention to?
Rachel: This isn’t new but I’m paying a lot of attention to how many people watch YouTube on their TVs. I still think very few brands have figured out how to crack the platform (cool to see this new show from Converse and I love Huckberry’s consistently good strategy!) and think there’s a lot of opportunity.
Michelle: Do you have any hobbies or random skills?
Rachel: I just worked with my husband on a short documentary. I love watching documentaries (highly recommend Pee-wee as Himself on HBO right now!) and it was cool to actually get to be behind the scenes working on one.
Michelle: Advice for marketers and social media managers on breaking out of their algorithms?
Rachel: Working in social media it’s important to acknowledge that your algorithm isn’t fully representative of the wider culture. I always recommend setting up a “trending” Slack channel with coworkers (including ones who don’t work in social!) as a place to share what they are seeing in their feeds. Helps get you out of your own algorithm.
Michelle: What's something most people don't know about you?
Rachel: I thought I wanted to be a physicist. In high school I was even awarded “Outstanding Student of the Year” by the American Association of Physics Teachers lol. The dream quickly faded once I got to college.
Michelle’s final thoughts:
Re: her advice for writing a newsletter. All of them are very compelling but the one that struck me most personally was “put on your blinders”. When I write, I often try and read everything published about the topic so that I can have an extremely informed and balanced perspective. Not saying this is bad per se, but for me that sometimes waters down my POV and ultimately the piece I’m writing. The original thought you have gets chopped, mashed, and mixed up with other people’s takes and it can be hard to hear your voice through it all.
Re: The power of developing your personal brand. Having 95k subscribers is impressive, but I think even more impressive is the fact that when Rachel launched her newsletter she drove 8k subs overnight. She had already been building an audience for herself way before she launched anything. There’s a continual debate amongst social media professionals that you do or don’t need to have a strong personal brand or impressive follower count to work in social media. My two cents is that social media is one of the only marketing/advertising functions that you can test ideas out yourself, which can then inform strategies and ideas for your day-to-day work. I think the focus should be less about developing a fanbase and more about developing your craft—the output is developing a fanbase. I don’t think you need to try to be a full-fledged influencer, but why not get creative and see what you can learn? Candidates who stand out that I have interviewed over my career are the ones that have creative pursuits going on outside of their job. It shows passion, curiosity, and entrepreneurial thinking.
Re: her Discord community. Any brand would be thrilled to have such an active and passionate community as Rachel’s. As she touched on, the fact that it is just for paid subscribers makes it more intimate and IMO one of the reasons this works is that it innately creates an inner circle of the more dedicated readers, which has a compound effect. She uses it in such a smart way, like testing out which subject line her readers would click on the most. But more than that, the community has become this self-sufficient, coworker vibes group chat that is genuinely kind, helpful, and insightful, which is hard to come by in the internet age of trolls and a competitive industry.
The question is can a brand actually create a thriving, private community like this, and should they? They have certainly tried. Rachel wrote about this last year, which is a worthwhile read. IMO, it has to be a central part of your strategy and approach or else it will not work, but if you do commit the resources to it, it can be a HUGE competitive advantage.
Re: her prediction on what social media will look like in five years. PREACH. I completely agree. Especially with how fast AI is developing and how rapidly it is changing how people work, I think more now than ever it’s impossible to know what the future landscape will look like. My advice: ride the wave vs. getting swept away by it. Get curious about AI, test out the tools (for personal stuff and work stuff) and see what you can do with it. .
Thank you for your time and wonderful insights, Rachel! ✨
Dinner Party Fodder
Tasty tidbits to talk about at your next dinner party. 😋
🔥 Hot take of the week: Agencies should start drinking their own Kool-Aid and post on LinkedIn. Here are some thought starter ideas for you.
🥥🍋🟩Recipe of the week: It’s kind of cold and rainy here in Raleigh (which I’m savoring before it gets hot!) so I made one of our fav Defined Dish recipes, Coconut-Lime Chicken.
▶️ Non-recommendation of the week: We watched Mountainhead on HBO and it was so bizarro and I do not recommend watching it LOL. BUT it is quite timely with the billionaires running the country being so petty on Twitter! 🤣
📺 Ad of the week: Instacart 1999. Loveee the nostaliga, love that this wasn’t just an ad but also a product update (prices for these items are at the cost it was in 1999!), and love that Millennials are being celebrated! Interestingly, I think the tides are turning and Millennials are becoming cool again - I bet we’ll start seeing more Millennial content in the near future.
🍟 Tweet of the week: McDonald’s SMM goes a little rogue in the best way to announce their dedication and excitement for the return of the Snack Wrap. Honestly so excited about this lol, love the snack wrap! Switching up your brand voice by breaking the fourth wall and being direct and vulnerable is a surprising and a great tactic to use in certain situations like this.
🤯 Release of the week: Epic Games released a very cool new update to their MetaHuman tool. Now you can create digital humans AND do real-time animation, straight from your phone, with even higher fidelity.
🤝 Partnership of the week: Kiehl’s x Life Time Fitness x Brittany Cartwright
💗 Follow of the week: This account is a great follow and the way they use visuals is so smart and sticky and their messages are very uplifting.
✨ Click that nice little share button below to send to some frandz ✨
Have a buzzy week.
🐝 Michelle
Rachel’s 5 tips are so good. Putting blinders on sticks out to me too. I find myself paralyzed by the “what do I have to say” dilemma, but I need to just go for it. Feeling motivated, thank you both!