My recent mini course has been prompting a ton of questions from you. One of the most common questions I’ve received recently has been about engagement and how to successfully do it.
The adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t always ring true when it comes to engagement on social media.
Now that you’re equipped with my content calendar workbook and mini course, and you’ve begun building up a great library of content, you might be wondering how to get that content out to others and, more importantly, how to get them to become customers.
Simple – let’s talk about ENGAGEMENT.
What Is Engagement?
Engagement is the act of another user interacting with your account and content. An important thing to note is there is Good Engagement and Bad Engagement.
- GOOD Engagement is your ideal audience, your potential customers seeking you out and authentically interacting with your content. The comments they post help to further the conversation and may prompt engagement from you or others. They may even deep like* content you post, going further and further back in history, getting sucked into the content you post. These are your genuine followers and the target.
- BAD Engagement includes bots, comments on your content that are completely unrelated, followers that are disinterested in your business and what you post. These are often shallow comments that might be one or two words, such as “awesome!” or just a string of hearts. The responses they post may sound like robots, and they may copy and paste the same response onto multiple posts. They rarely, if ever, reach out to you directly in your messages. This type of engagement can actually hurt and hinder your brand, and may even make it harder for your genuine followers to find you.
*Deep like refers to liking content that’s from years ago on your page, like a new dating prospect snooping on your Facebook page and accidentally hitting “Like” on an image you posted back in 2005. This shows your audience is genuinely interested in what you’re posting and REALLY likes you – you go tiger! 😉
How Do I Build Good Engagement?
In order to build good engagement on your account, you must first offer genuine and authentic engagement towards others. This means spending time on Instagram and connecting with accounts that you feel will resonate with the content you post, and writing authentic comments on the content they post.
Authenticity is CRITICAL here. If you’ve been following me for a while now, you know that authenticity is the number one thing I preach. It’s important you SHOW UP and connect.
If you spend the time to get out there, interact, and build authentic connections this WILL result in conversions. How much time should you spend engaging on social media? Aim for 20-30 minutes daily. That’s it.
You can find 20-30 minutes in your day to engage with others. While you’re making your coffee, when you feel like mentally tuning out of whatever you’re doing, while you’re sitting on the toilet.
Yep – I went there.
The point is 30 minutes is not a lot of time when it results in a big return.
Your next question might be, “well, if it’s just 30 minutes daily, can’t I just combine that and do 3-4 hours in one go? or combine it in some other way?” I wouldn’t recommend it – content changes constantly on Instagram, and you want to engage with the latest daily so your comments are reaching others when they’re most likely to. If you comment on a post on Monday, by Tuesday that post might be buried among the thousands of other posts.
Another thing to note is you want to engage when content is still relevant, and content is most relevant shortly after it’s posted.
This goes for your content as well, which brings me to the title of this post.
Don’t Post and Ghost
Your content is going to get the MOST quality engagement shortly after you hit that post button. That means if you’re just posting blindly and then walking away, you’re missing out on a critical time to boost your engagement.
It’s recommended you begin your engagement strategy either shortly before you post or shortly after you post, that way when others see your comment and engagement on other pages (your ideal audience) that they resonate with and they navigate to your page, they’re seeing your latest content. New content is exciting and fresh, and when your audiences interacts with it with gusto and authentically, Instagram notices you’re receiving quality interactions and begins to push your new content out to even more users that are similar to the ones engaging with you.
BUT, and there’s a big but here, Instagram also takes a look at your followers. If you’re spending too much time building BAD engagement (as mentioned at the very beginning), you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to booster that GOOD engagement.
If you haven’t already, make sure you snag my FREE 100+ page Content Calendar and Mini Course to help bring clarity to your content plan.
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