Social Spotlight with Justin Allgaier

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Each week, I ask a member of the racing community about their social media usage. Up next: Justin Allgaier of JR Motorsports.

You’ve been on social media for a long time now. I feel like you’ve been through the ups and downs of it. How has your personal use evolved over the years to what it is now?

I think that there’s a fine balance of what you put out and what you choose to not put out. I was on social media before I had a child, and I think that having a child changes how you spend your time and how much time you have to devote to certain things. And just the stresses and the pressures and the time allotment of what we do here right now is a lot greater than what it was when I first got onto social media. So I’m probably not on it as much as I would like to be.

I take that back. I’m on a lot, I just don’t necessarily post a lot. I struggle because I love the interaction of it and I love being a part of it. To be honest with you, my wife (Ashley) is great at social media and I learn a lot from her on a daily basis. On the flip side, I’m kind of living in the moment of things instead of documenting them. In some ways that’s good, but in other ways it’s kind of bad. So I’ve struggled with social media on and off because there’s times where I wish I was better at it and then there’s other times when I wish I had never started it and just kept off of it.

But I love the interaction with the fans. My challenge is that 140 characters is just not necessarily enough to communicate with our fans, and that’s tough. At Chicagoland alone, I went through like 800 tweets of people just sending congratulations (after he won). Well I went through 250 text messages, so it’s like, there’s no way you can ever respond to every one of them and not get lost. I had people that were like, “Man, I texted you after Chicagoland,” and I’m like, “You did?” And one of them was one of my pit crew members, and I was like, “I didn’t even see it.” So I think that there’s a fine balance there and I kind of struggle with what that balance should be.

So you touched on this, but being a dad, how much does that take you off social media? Even if you wanted to be on it, how much less time do you have for it?

Now I find myself getting on and scrolling to the top (of the feed), right? Like “What’s going on right now?” If I have a few free minutes, I’m looking at what’s going on in the current moment.

The challenge of that is, I want to go through every tweet until I get to the top, or if it’s Instagram or if it’s Facebook. I’ve got to read all of them and see what’s going on, and I have to go in order and I have to go at my pace. So my wife gets so mad at me because she’s like, “You literally need to get off of Twitter without scrolling to the top, it’s not the end of the world.” I’m like, “No, because if I get off, I don’t know where (I left off). Like when you come back on, it refreshes, and I’m gonna lose all that.” I’ve kind of gotten into the habit of trying to get out of that and scrolling to the top and being done with it.

But on the flip side of it, especially Instagram, if you’re on Instagram, there’s a lot you miss because it doesn’t necessarily come in order, it comes in whatever it thinks you want to see. Like I’m missing a lot of things that would be things that I would want to see and usually seeing the crap that nobody wants to see on my feed.

So I struggle with that part of it. My wife posts a lot of videos and pictures of my daughter. And it’s not like I don’t want to post those pictures and videos, but she’s usually the one taking them, and then I’m gonna end up posting the same photo she posts, and more than likely most of my fans follow my wife anyway. So it’s easier to let her do that part of it.

But there isn’t a good way to do it. I’ll be honest with you, there’s not a good way to balance it. I’m typically reading Twitter at 10:30, 11 o’clock at night in bed or when I get up in the morning or when I’m out by myself and I’ve got five minutes — like if I get somewhere early, I’ll sit in my truck and scroll through. But I think that leaves me not posting as much because I’m typically not on whenever I would want to post something cool.

You touched on a few interesting things there. On Instagram, how arrogant is it on their part where they think that they know what’s best for you to see? I want to see all the posts, like you, in order — and yet you can’t do that! It’s so frustrating with Instagram.

That is the really frustrating part. I always get in that moment (where) I’ll think of somebody’s posts, and I’m like, “I haven’t seen them post in a while.” I’ll go to their page and they have five new posts that I haven’t looked at. So I’ll go through and look at them, but then you get in that moment of, “Do I like all five of them? Or do I not like them?” Because then their feed’s gonna be blown up with, “Justin Allgaier liked all your photos.” But on the flip side, if I don’t like the photos, then they’re like, “Justin Allgaier hasn’t been liking my photos lately.” Especially if they like my photos, then you’re like, “Man.” So to be honest with you, I’ve actually gone on a binge of not liking anything, because I don’t know when it’s from — whether it’s from four days ago or if it was 20 minutes ago. So I agree with you on that, I think for sure it can be done better.

That being said, on Instagram I follow 1,858 people, and on Twitter I follow 1,400 people. So in that regard, sometimes it can get a little bit challenging because you’re go on at times when nobody will post and you’re like, “Man, I gotta go search hashtags or search things” or I’ll go to the trending (section).

Then there’s other times where it seems like everybody wants to post at the exact same time, and you’re like scrolling up, scrolling up, scrolling up and I’ve only made it three minutes. So that’s the other challenge, too: People post in waves, companies come in waves, everybody does things on a different schedule and nine times out of 10 they all do it on the same schedule.

I also wish Facebook was a little bit more user-friendly as far as going back and seeing stuff, because I’ll go on, look at a page, and if I go through and approve a post on my (official) page, then when I go back to my main feed, it’ll be all the posts that I’ve just approved. And some of them might be from 10 days ago. So that doesn’t necessarily work, either.

So I’ve struggled with all of that, but at the end of the day, I guess it really doesn’t matter, as long as you have the people that you want to see and you get their stuff liked or commented on or retweeted or whatever you’re gonna do there. It makes it worth it.

A lot of drivers seem down on Facebook. They kind of ignore it, they have someone else manage it. It sounds like you are still managing your professional page yourself. What is the value there? How do you use that for your professional work?

I still look at everything, and I still try to do some of the official page. All of my personal accounts, I don’t let anyone else touch it. The only person who has access is my wife, and the only reason is if she wants to keep people updated when I’m in the car. She has done that before, but we typically don’t do that.

Now on my official Facebook page, my PR girl Megan (Johnson), she does do some of the posting on there, and the only reason for that is because it went dormant for a while. I got on there one day, I was checking stuff out, and the last post was eight months before that. I was like, “That kind of defeats the purpose of having an official page if there’s not going to be any posts on it.”

And then I went through a spell where it’s tied to my Instagram, and so I was posting on Instagram — you have the option to post on Twitter, post on Facebook — I didn’t know it wasn’t posting to it. There was a glitch between the two, and I went three or four months where I didn’t know the pictures that I was posting weren’t being posted onto it. So now I let her do some of the posts or some of the things that she thinks are important. I’ve given her access to be able to put stuff on it just so there’s at least content on there.

But I still go back through and reread all the comments and try to keep up with what’s going on, what people are saying. At the end of the day, I don’t know if what you post is most necessarily important, it’s more the interaction that I think is probably more important to people. So I think that’s how I’ve kind of gone with it. I’ll post as much as I can post on my own personal stuff but then on the official page, I let her do it.

It goes the same with the website (JustinAllgaier.com). It’s crazy how much websites have changed from years past. Mine now is more of kind of a news hub/ social media hub, so you get the news, the team’s gonna put out at a press release doing whatever, and then the rest of it, it’s all social media on the main page. Right now there’s obviously the tabs that you can go to other places, but keeping people updated on what’s going on on your social side of things is as important or more important than anything else.

I didn’t even think about that, actually.

When was the last time you went to a driver’s website?

That’s what just started going through my mind. The best way to keep it up to date is if you had your social feeds directly plugged into it, because that’s the most updated information you’re giving anyway. It makes a lot of sense, really.

I think so. We do all of our press releases and then right below that is all our social media, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or Instagram, it’s got all of them tied to it.

YouTube is, for me, the easiest, and I keep wanting to do videos. I keep wanting to do more of YouTube. I’ve said that like 10 times. I bought a bunch of camera stuff and I was gonna do YouTube, and it’s hard. Like I don’t know how people get big YouTube followings.

We posted the video the other day of Harper giving me my helmet, and the story of it, and I had 800 likes between all three social medias that I run — and I had 40 views on the video. And I was like, “Well, the post on social media was to watch the video, and people liked it or commented on it — but I was only on 40 views.” That doesn’t add up in my mind. So I’m struggling with that.

Want the story on the helmet that I’m wearing for the playoffs? Thank you @OffAxisPaint and @hypersloth_med https://t.co/DvdY6oAGIC

— Justin Allgaier (@J_Allgaier) September 23, 2017

What happens when the interaction turns negative? Like for instance the Indy thing (when he was criticized for mistakes that cost him a shot at the race), you posted a statement responding to everything. Do you go through all those comments on a bad day like that, or do you just have to turn it off after a while?

My wife gets so mad at me because I go through (the feed) good, bad, or indifferent. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s good or if it’s bad, I want to know what people are saying and I want to know what the interaction is.

And the hard part for me is, I get really aggravated when people don’t tag me. Like if you’re gonna subtweet or tweet about somebody, at least tag them so they know what you’re saying. I feel like that’s like going to high school and you’re at one table and you’re talking about someone sitting at another table, right? Be man or woman enough to stand up and say, “Hey, this is how I feel and this what I think.”

My statement from Indy was kind of a loaded statement. Steve Letarte called me after Indy, and we had this conversation about there were a lot of things that happened that day. Obviously, there wasn’t a lot of positives out of it. But there was a lot of the story that never got told, and I told Steve, “You buried me on TV, which led to a lot of what happened on social media. They took your comments and Jeff Burton’s comments and they turned those into headlines.”

And what they said (on TV) wasn’t necessarily as bad as what the headlines ended up reading, but it still caused things to snowball into something. I had people that wanted NASCAR to drug test me and all kinds of crazy stuff, and like it literally went from zero to 100 right now. So I felt like it was important to put out a statement.

At the end of the day it didn’t really matter, it didn’t change anybody’s perception, it didn’t fix what happened on the racetrack. But for me, I at least feel like all sides of the story should be heard at all times, so that’s where social media is at. Whether you like somebody’s opinion or not, you can at least post about it on social media so people know where you’re at and why you stand for what you stand for.

But it was great, because of social media, it caused the conversation between Steve and I. And I don’t know if it changes anything on how he did the TV side of things, but for sure we had a great dialogue out of it and I feel more comfortable with where he’s at as a broadcaster and his position on things and understanding some things, and I also think he understands some other things of where he felt I was at as a driver. So social media caused great dialogue that we would have never gotten had it not been for that.

Something you touched on at the start of that comment is very interesting to me is about tagging people. I personally struggle with that, because let’s say you’re going to say that “Justin Allgaier messed up right there” or something like that. If somebody tags you in it, it’s almost like they’re wanting you to read it. You said you want to read it because you want people to be a man about it when they say it, but at the same time, that could bring a ton of hate your way, like an avalanche of people saying, “That guy sucks!” or something. So what is the balance there? When do you tag somebody, when not?

Because I follow a volume of people, I see a lot of stuff where people aren’t tagged. … But the funny ones to me are the ones where I’ll see someone’s response with a tag of my name in it, but the original post didn’t tag me in it. So it’s like now I’m catching it secondhand. Now you’re reading back through it and you get fired up. Like I would feel better off to know what somebody said.

And at the end of the day, if we make a mistake, if we do something stupid — Indy for example — we already know what happened. We already know that it’s dumb. We already discussed it internally as much as anybody else externally is going to discuss it. That being said, for me personally, from your standpoint or whether it’s any other media member or fan, I think tagging somebody is appropriate. I want to at least know if you’re talking about me. Good, bad or indifferent, I at least want to know.

When it comes to being a dad and sharing your home life, you mentioned you let Ashley handle a lot of stuff because she’s used to being in that role. What is the balance there? Do you feel like fans want to see that part of your life and you feel comfortable sharing that part of your life?

I think I’m more comfortable sharing that part of my life than what fans would want to see of that part of my life. Being around the racetrack and talking to a lot of our fans, I get a lot more responses on the posts that I make about my daughter than I do on the posts that I make about whatever is going on in my life.

I still struggle with that, because I would post pictures of my daughter every day, right? I love my daughter and I’m super happy to watch her grow up and be a part of it. That being said, I feel like sometimes you find there’s enough and there’s too much — and I don’t ever want to hit that plateau. Because once you hit that number, it separates you out from everybody else.

You don’t want to go to work or to dinner or to whatever and one person is constantly, “Hey I got this new photo in my wallet,” or “I got this new photo on my phone,” and constantly showing people photos of their kids. I love that, but at the end of the day, I love it because she’s my daughter. Not everybody else loves it because that’s not their daughter. They could care less. So I don’t know. I struggle with that.

But I feel like the people that follow my wife are either really close friends of hers or they understand that (off-track look) is what they’re getting. I think sometimes as drivers or team members, you’re in a different role. If they watch me race on Saturday from the grandstands and they want to see what’s going on next week, they don’t necessarily know that they’re signing themselves up for a picture of my daughter or a picture of her at dance class or whatever.

I think there is a balance. I don’t know if I know what it is, but I try really hard to not over-incorporate one side or the other. I want people to understand that my social media pages are my own, and so if I post only info and commercial-type content, like race team-style content, people are gonna be like, “He doesn’t do any of his social media.” But then again, if I only post on my daughter, people will be like, “I can’t go there for information of what I want to find out.” So it’s trying to find that balance is really important for me.