Crush Your Social

(Upbeat Music)

Are used in any of the 14 kinds of engagement that I've discovered over my four years on Instagram. Today, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about what they are, why they're important, and how to use them. And at the end, I'm going to give you a really good tip for getting started on engagement if you've never done it and you don't know how to do it.

(Upbeat Music)

So what is engagement on social media?

All it is is how you communicate with people, accounts, content on the platform. So it's really just talking to people. Are you talking to people on social media? Because if you're not, your content's probably not getting any reach. So let's dive into the 14 kinds of engagement I've discovered in my four years on Instagram. I'm gonna run you through them, and then I'll come back and take you through each one individually and kind of give you a little overview of what they're for, how they work, and why you need them. So we have pre-post engagement, we have post-post engagement, we have several kinds of story engagement, we have DM engagement, we have commenting engagement, we have outreach engagement, and we have influencer engagement. And within all of those are several other kinds of engagement. So I'm not gonna name them all, but let's start at the top. Let's start with pre-post engagement. The kind of engagement you need to do to get your content out to people that don't know you. So the algorithms will send content out based upon engagement. So it first sends content to your followers. If your followers engage, then it sends it out to more followers, and then eventually out to people who don't know who you are. So getting engagement is really important for your content. Most people post and ghost. It's kind of a funny name, but they post their content and then they leave, and they just never show up again, which is what I did. I posted and ghosted. I just put my post out there and nobody knew who I was, and it didn't go anywhere, and I couldn't figure out why until someone told me. So I learned there's pre-post engagement. So the way the algorithms work with engagement and content is that the closest relationships you'll have on Instagram are in the DMs and in the stories, and specifically the stories because a comment on a story goes to the DMs, and the DMs are the most close relationship. Your content will get shown to people that you are talking to in the DMs, and that's why DMs are really important. So for pre-post engagement, 15 minutes or so, before you post, you're gonna wanna go to your homepage, go to the top where all the circles are, and tap strategically on people's stories. And don't just tap the Like button, type a comment, or say a comment if you wanna use your voice. Something about the story, whatever it is, maybe, oh, I've been to that restaurant before, it's really cool, or oh, what a pretty sunset, or whatever it is, just type something in so it goes to their DMs. So what happens is that once you do that, when your post goes live, it will go to those people's home feed, and they will see your posts come through their home feed. So it will most likely get engagement if you're talking to them. Now let's talk about story engagement, because we just talked about stories and how important they are. When you're commenting on a story, I just gave you a couple of examples, you want to be thoughtful so that when the person sees your comment in their DMs, they'll respond back and maybe you'll have a conversation. So it's all about building relationships, being friends, things like that. So always try to think of something that's going to intrigue them when you're leaving a comment on a story. So there's another little trick for stories that doesn't have anything to do with commenting, but it's kind of an important way to build relationships with people that don't know you, that you're interested in building trust with. And what you can do is you can share their posts, if they have a post in your stories. And if you tag them with the sticker called at mention, a little thing will come up. If you swipe up, you'll be able to see how many people went to their profile on their page because you shared it in your stories. If you take a screenshot of that, you send it over to them with a little message that says, "Hey, five of my followers went to your pages, aren't that great?" It makes them kind of feel like, "Oh, they did something nice for me. I kind of owe them." And they're more likely to trust you and to start engaging with you. So when I was first starting out, I would target people that I really wanted to get to know, and I would find a post that I knew my community would like, that would be useful or helpful or funny or whatever to them. And I would share their post in my stories. And then I figured out that if you use the at mention sticker, that I could like take a screenshot of how many people went to their post. And I would send that to people and say, "Hey, that's so great. I just love that my community likes you too. I think we should be friends." And sure enough, every single time I did that, people would start sharing my content and their stories, and they would start commenting on my content. So it's just a little extra trick that you can do with people that you really want to get to know and you want to build the trust and you want them to like pay attention to you. Moving on from story engagement, we have the DMs, direct messages. And that's what happens when you comment on a story, it goes to their direct messages. So there's a couple of things you want to know about DMs. There's commenting in the DMs for engagement. So we talked about like how to leave a nice comment in the DMs or in the stories. What I like to do as well, when I'm starting to get to know somebody, even if I didn't see their stories that day, if it's somebody that's on my like target list, I'll go into the DMs and I'll DM them something like, "Hey, how's it going? How's your week been? What's new? I haven't talked to you in a minute." Or if they're new to me, I'll say something like, "Hey, it's me again. I found another one of your posts that I really liked and I wanted to let you know, specifically what I liked about it because I know that's helpful." So, you know, something valuable. So commenting in the DMs is another avenue for getting engagement on your post and building relationships. There's a couple of areas of the DMs that we talked about in a previous post. And one of them is requests. A lot of my clients come to me and say, "What do I do? I get these requests." And I'm like, "Well, in the beginning, I didn't know what to do with them. So I just would like respond to them and people would start pitching me like crazy in the DMs because I would respond to them because I thought they were being nice to me." But you want to be able to screen them out. If you think someone's reaching out to you in the request section and they want to be a friend, you can accept the request into your general, don't put it in your primaries, put it in your general requests, and you can respond back and say, "Hey, thanks for reaching out. Nice to meet you." If they're following you, say, "Thanks for following me." And then leave it at that. If the next conversation they start trying to pitch you or they start trying to qualify you on like, what, are you having problems with this? And you find out they're a copywriter. Oh, are you having problems with your copy? Are you having problems with your website and you realize what they're doing, then you're going to want to kind of shut that down. And I usually just will say, "Please don't pitch me in the DMs. I'm not interested." And you can delete it. Or you can just leave it and see where it goes. But you want to be careful with the requests.

Selling in the DMs, I'm just going to say it, don't do it. Unless you've been on the platform for a while and you've built a reputation and people are actively asking you, can you help me? Can we work together? Or if you have an automation from a post or from a story that says, "Hey, I have this free thing or I have this thing I'm selling." If you DM me or if you comment and you have your mini chat set up, it will go to their DMs and you can start selling that way. If they ask you for help, then that's your cue to be able to qualify them or to ask them more questions about what a conversation might be to work with you. But don't pitch people without them asking you because it just makes people mad. This is kind of controversial. Some people are like, "Oh, I send out lots and lots of pitching DMs and I get a certain percentage back in sales." I don't believe in it. I don't believe that that's the way you build community. I don't believe that that's the way you build relationships and partners. And I also don't believe that people want to be sold to. I know I don't like it. So I'm just going to tell you, don't sell them the DMs unless people are asking for your help. That's just my own personal opinion, but that's the way I think it works. And it's worked for me.

So let's move on. Post-post engagement. So now your post has gone live. What do you do now? Well, you're going to want to comment to people's comments on your post. So, you know, your post is there, people comment, you want to respond to that, right? So the best way to do that is to respond to their comment. Like if they say, "This was really helpful, thank you." Or if they ask you a question, be there right away to answer that. And if they want more information, let them know. You can slide into their DMs and take the conversation further. Usually I just keep the conversation going on the post because that activates more engagement and will make my post go further. But you always, always, always, especially when you have those really thoughtful commenters, always say, "Thank you so much for commenting. Thank you for adding your thoughts to the conversation." Let them know that you appreciate them because that's so important and it makes people feel recognized and appreciated and they'll come back and they'll do it again. So the next thing, that leads me to the next thing you do post, post. When these people comment on your post, not only are you going to respond with a thank you, you're going to go to their page. So you're going to tap their little name in the comment section and you're going to go to their profile page. That's where you'll automatically go. And you're going to look at their most recent posts. So it should be at the top of their feed on the left. That's the most recent. If it has a little pin on it, you can comment on that, but that's not the most recent post. So skip the ones that are pinned for the moment and just go to their most recent post and leave a comment. And not just great post, not just any comment. Try and think of something that you can either compliment them on or if you have a question, if they're not in your industry or even if they are in your industry and the post was intriguing, maybe you needed more information. Hey, could you explain such and such a little further? Or maybe the content isn't that great. It happens. Look for something positive that you can comment on. Maybe their video was really cool or they had some animations or maybe it was a carousel or an infographic that you really liked the style. Make sure you give them something back. Give them a reason to like you. And if you can add some value to the post, that makes you look smart and their followers will pay attention to that and your comment might even get pinned. So that was a lot I know. So we've got over post post commenting. Let's move on to outreaching to new people, which is kind of hard to do, especially if you're an introvert and there's a lot of introverts on social media that really don't like the engagement part. But it's really important to build your community that you find people that you like, that you can grow with, who will support you and that you can support as your account grows. When I started, I had of course zero followers for a whole year I posted and I grew to like maybe a hundred followers with no engagement, which is a miracle in itself. And then once I learned about engaging and communicating with people, I started connecting with people who were like me. They were in my industry. They had hardly any followers and I would be able to ask them questions about like, hey, did this like glitch happen to you on the Instagram today because like I like lost my story. It just disappeared or whatever it is. And they can go, yeah, yeah, I had that same problem. So, you know, it's not you, right? Because sometimes because of the standards that Instagram has content will be removed, which is another conversation. But you can ask your peers kind of if they're having the same experiences. One of the biggest ones that I would get and I would also ask would be like, is your post not going anywhere? Is your reach really bad right now? And they'd be like, yep, there's something going on. Politics is happening or whatever's going on in the world, sometimes will affect post reach. So it's nice to have those people that you can bounce ideas off that will support your content and that you can support their content. So how do you find those people? There's lots of ways to do it, but you're gonna wanna focus not on your potential customers. You're gonna wanna focus on people who are in your industry. They might be even be direct competitors. They might do what you do, but let's face it, you're different from the guy next door who does what you do. So you're not exactly competitors because your focus is different, your expertise is different, your clientele might even be different. So you're gonna focus on people either in your industry, direct competitors, or maybe potential partners. These are people that have the same audience, but they do something different. They will also benefit from your content because they do something different. So they might even actually be a potential prospect down the road, but you're gonna wanna look at them as potential partners. So you're gonna wanna look into your industry, find out like who are the people that you find interesting, and that's who you're gonna target. You're gonna make a little list. You find them by going on the explore page. You can go to any friend of yours's page in the industry and there'll be suggested accounts that you can follow. But just take a look and see if there's content out there that really intrigues you and see if the person behind it looks interesting. So when you're doing outreach, what do you say to a stranger, right? It's easy to respond to somebody who's responded to your post, but it's harder to reach out to somebody that you don't know. So here's what I do. I find somebody that's really cool that I want to be in my community. I will go to their page and I will thoughtfully comment on their most recent two to three posts if they're good. And I'll leave a thoughtful comment that like grabs their attention. They're like, "Who is this person?" So I'll get their attention and maybe they'll come and see my page. Maybe they won't. The next thing I do is I send them a DM that says, "Hey, John, I'm Tony. It's so nice to meet you. I ran across your page. However, I really like your content. I really like what you do. I think you're pretty cool. I wanted to let you know that I would love to be a part of your community. And I gave you a follow. No expectations. I just wanted to let you know that I'm here. And that's it. And of course, then I follow them. So the people that you're going to be like reaching out to, you want to make sure that they're worthy of your follow because we talked about that whole follow for follow thing. And you want to only be engaging with people who are going to engage back with you. So be strategic in who you choose.

Okay, this is my favorite thing, influencer engagement. There are people in your industry who are famous for what they do. And they have big accounts and they have a lot of followers and they have a lot of engagement. What I found is that those people will never talk to you when you're new. They don't know who you are. They have a lot of people to juggle. They're just trying to keep up with their current followers and they're not looking for new friends. So how I used it, and somebody told me this once, go to an influencer page. And they said to try to be there like within minutes of when they posted. So set an alarm for when they post and be the first poster. Well, that doesn't work for me because most of the people in my industry are up at like my time, 3 a.m. And I'm not setting an alarm and commenting on someone's post at 3 a.m. So I would comment when I felt like it. So I get up in the morning and I have a list of people that are the influencers in my industry. And when I go to their content, I would go to their most recent post and I would leave a really thoughtful comment. Something that made me stand out. So whatever the post topic was, I would add value. I would say, yes, I totally agree with what you're saying here. This is a great topic. And I would like to add my thoughts to it. I'd like to add some value to it. And then I would add a tip or something that was my experience that their readers, their followers would find useful. The influencer probably never cared. Once in a while I'd get my comment pinned, which would be an added bonus, but it was pretty rare in the beginning. So when you post a thoughtful comment, their followers will notice. So this is how you use influencer accounts for engagement. You will post thoughtfully, hopefully grabbing attention. And then you're gonna look at the influencer's comments on their post. Who are the people there and what are they saying? Are they saying intriguing things that you think are interesting? If you find some cool people there, then you're gonna go to their page and you're gonna reach out to them. But usually if I find somebody on an influencer page that I want to engage with, I will also leave a comment under their comment so they know where I found them. They'll say, "Hey Mary, this is a really great comment. I'm gonna go check out your page." And so she's kind of expecting me, right? So when I get there, she sees my comments, she may see a DM and that starts a new relationship. And I guarantee you if they are somebody who is an active commenter and they get the game, I guess it's an engagement game, and you're authentically communicating with them in a way that they can trust you and know that you're gonna be part of their community, they're gonna engage with you and they're gonna follow you back and be part of your community. Try to pick people that have smaller accounts that are around your size because then you're more kind of equally based. So that's all I've got for you for that. I promised you a tip on how to get going with your engagement and here's the best thing you can do. You can take like the next week or two or even a month if you want to, but it's a simple little thing you can do. Go find three people a day and engage with them. I like to keep a list because that's just me because I wanna check the metrics later. But go out and engage thoughtfully on three posts a day. You don't even have to do multiple comments. Just find three people that you would like to engage with and comment on their most recent post and then kind of track it. See in the next week or two or three or however long you wanna do it, how many of those people respond back to you? I guarantee that you're gonna start finding people to engage with that will support your content and support your legitimacy and your credibility online, especially if they're in your industry.

Now let's go crush it.

(Upbeat Music)