Ok, so I got your attention with the likes… This article will actually cover how to get more likes, comments and all the other metrics you should be tracking on your social media profiles – specifically Instagram and Facebook.
Remember, increased actions on your content will trigger more visibility and organic reach.
I love growth hacking. I really enjoy when you can use technology to your advantage in your marketing. Social media is the perfect combination of marketing and technology.
When I can really go into the algorithms and the development of the platform and translate this into actionable items for you, I’m in my element.
Organic reach is continuously declining on the biggest Social Media platforms. Facebook was the first to introduce it and now Instagram is following the same path.
When you post your content on Instagram, only a small percentage of your followers sees that post. You have to PAY to even be seen amongst your OWN followers these days. The struggle is real!
That’s why I want to give you some hacks and strategies; so you can optimize your activities and get the most results. There are some specific things you can be doing that will dramatically increase your organic visibility without spending a dollar.
Here are 6 of them:
-
Combine Viral & Quality Content
So we have established that you need consistency in your content and you need to increase the frequency of your posts.
The best content creators on Instagram post 2-3 times per day (on the feed alone) as well as Stories and live streams.
This is of course to optimize your profile so most of your followers get to see your content. The Instagram algorithm favours consistent, quality posts and will show your content to more people the more frequently you post.
If you can engage the ones who are following you – Instagram/Facebook will open your content up to more of your followers, as well as onto the explore pages, so new potential followers can see your content.
When planning your week you need to combine your content to be good quality and content that can go viral.
Quality content is typically videos of yourself in the music process, behind the scenes, tutorials, etc. These types of posts are showing you from a musician’s angle.
Those videos will most likely not go viral but they build loyalty with your current fanbase.
Therefore you need to play around with some content that has the potential to go viral.
Memes and quotes are great for this. This is the content that generates shares and saves usually. People will share it to their friends and followers.
This is a powerful metric and Instagram will immediately open up your visibility both on this post as well as the next one. If you then strategically post a quality video AFTER you posted the viral post you will see an increase on the reach of that content.
If you are ever going to convert a follower into a fan, posting quality content will do this!
Combining viral and quality will continuously increase your visibility on your profile and help you build trust and loyalty with the followers who see and engage with your content.
My viral content pieces per week are typically tweet quotes and carousel tutorials. Sometimes they generate as many shares as likes which always grows my following and the overall reach on my account.
My quality content posts per week are the quick tip videos I produce as well as video snippets from a free consultation with a musician. I post these to build trust with my following.
2. Engage With Influencers
Ok, so there are two good reasons why you should be engaging with influencers.
Firstly, influencers who are strategic to your brand and music (the ones who have a similar audience to you) need to be utilised!
if you are visible on their profile by actively engaging on their content, then you are visible to their audience too.
This can be as simple as sharing some value (or personality) in their comment field to get the attention of their followers (I am not saying prompting your latest song as this gives no direct value for someone who is ‘meeting’ you for the first time).
By inserting your personality in the comments you get the attention of the influencer as well as their following. They will then likely head on over to your profile if you said something that caught their attention and check out your account.
Secondly, you need to engage with influencers because you need to get them to engage in your content.
The algorithm favours engagement from BIG accounts, so if you get several large accounts to engage with your content, you will get more reach and visibility on the post.
This is also called ‘the heart trick’. If you can get 5-6 influencers with a BIG following to engage with your content (preferably within the first hour) you will then see more reach and visibility on your account.
Instagram will open your content up to more of your own followers and you will make it onto the explore pages. Resulting in lots more traffic and interactions.
3. Use Metrics to Your Advantage
When I show musicians the analytics you can get through the insights panel on different channels, they always get an eye opening experience.
The success of your social media game is all in the metrics. You need to analyze your audience as well as your content.
When it comes to your audience you need to find out the demographics. Who are they? Where are they located? Also, more importantly when are they active on the platform?
By knowing this important information you know when the best time is to post and share content – when they are most active online. You will see certain times during the day more of your followers are online.
For example, when I grew the community House of Nerds we would be very active in the middle of the night. Because we saw that many gamers were online and active at night.
There was also less traffic from other content creators at night as well, so it fit perfectly for us.
Try to find the sweet spot in your industry/niche of when your followers are online and when there’s less content on the platform to compete against.
You need to also start evaluating the content you share. It’s not enough just to share content, you need to find out how the post performed. The content that didn’t achieve much is as important as the posts that did.
I always test out new things on lots of channels with my audience and many times they do not work out. You learn from this as well.
The metrics tell you how your content is doing and you then learn what to do more of and what to do less of.
Soon you will have a weekly publishing plan that both increases your visibility as well as builds trust and loyalty with your current fan base.
Check out this article that will tell you the different actionable metrics you should look for when evaluating your content.
4. Encourage Engagement on Your Content
What a lot of people used to do, and what I used to do, is only ask for a comment or like on my posts.
Facebook and Instagram are becoming smarter and have picked up on this – it is not effective in the algorithm anymore.
Facebook and Instagram knows what you are doing and they do not want just emoji comments or short answers – they want long detailed comments.
What you need to do now is to ask your audience a question in the content piece. So instead of asking for a comment, ask a specific question they can answer in the comment section.
This can be a specific question you ask your followers directly in the video or in the caption field. Why not do both?
If you get detailed long answers you need to answer them. The trick here is to follow up with another question so you start threads on your content. Then you are getting many comments on your post and Instagram/Facebook will open up visibility on the post as well as the next.
If people care to leave a comment, you need to care enough to respond and engage back! This is the number one rule of social media. Take care of your current following before you focus on new blood.
5. DM Your Following
Every week you can pick one of your quality posts (you cannot do this on all your posts every day as it will be seen as spam). Pick one per week that you are proud of, that shares TONS of value and then DM this to your following.
You will then dramatically increase your engagement on that post and are telling Instagram that your followers are liking your content.
Instagram will then open your visibility up.
Do not over use this functionality as it can easily be looked at as spam.
So instead of selling something and promoting it; always use this functionality to give some value to your users.
Whether it is your new vlog, tutorial, or live performance. It can even be a meme that you just want to share with your followers and brighten their day.
Think creatively how you can use the DM functionality, without selling and promoting too much.
If you can then drive traffic back to your content, you will see a dramatic increase of engagement and reach.
1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger. Chat bots are being made to increase the engagement rate, so to move some of your communication over to chat is a good idea.
There are also other platforms such as Mobile Monkey that will make this process a bit easier. Mobile monkey is a free software where you can create chatbots for your pages with easy(ish) templates.
Once created, your inbox will have a 24/7 bot to respond to any messages. Not only that, with a simple piece of code, a pop up icon can be installed on your website for visitors to click and start chatting.
Mobile Monkey can also collect email addresses to create essentially an “email list” on Facebook which populates with email addresses of those who have opted in to chat with your bot. With this data you can then start doing message blasts to reach an actively engaged audience.
6. Leverage Groups
We are now seeing Facebook’s transformation from being a public platform to becoming more group specific.
Groups are now a central part of the platform. A good technique is not to use the groups to promote yourself, but to start engaging with the community in the group.
There are tons of threads you can contribute to and start engaging with. Then you can link back to your content whenever possible.
I am a member of many groups with thousands of musicians engaged. This is how I use groups. Let’s say I just wrote a case study about how to use fiverr as a musician – I then post this in a Facebook group with musicians, asking for some feedback:
I strategically placed a question in the caption to start the discussion which generated several comments as you can see. It even produced several threads in the comment section:
Some groups have a very active following, so it’s key to pick the ones that are busy with engagement. You then need to think about how you can share value through both starting threads as well as engaging in others.
By being active you will of course generate some traffic over to your channels and by sharing your content whenever is suited (without promoting) – then you are also optimising.
Groups aren’t exclusive just to Facebook. Both reddit and LinkedIn both have a very active, engaged group functionality that are all worth getting involved with, should your audience base hang out on those platforms/groups.
While there’s no quick fix to generating more engagement on your profiles and growing your accounts, these six strategies will help to boost your current numbers favourably.
Keeping track of your wins and losses when trialling these different techniques is a must. See what works in different places and what bombs in others. Begin drawing up a map of where’s best to spend your time online that’s the most efficient for growth.
