Here’s what you’re getting wrong about your social media strategy: how to ACTUALLY improve engagement
I’m going to cut through the marketing bull#*$ and deliver you some hard truths. This is not going to be some gimmicky checklist of top-level vagueness. If you’d rather keep on with what you know, or have someone else do it for you, you can stop here. If you’re here to understand why your social media efforts don’t work, and learn from a teacher worth their salt (hi), read on. This is gonna take a bit, so buckle up.
There’s something fundamentally incorrect about the way musicians, creatives, organizations, and businesses understand social media, and marketing in general. To figure it out, you might go to a coach or marketer, and they’ll give you a lot of top-level advice like: “post good content” and “engage with your community.” Those things are true, but you need to know how and why.
Let me paint a picture.
You log onto Instagram or Facebook. You switch into your creator or business profile and start clicking around just to…do something and feel like you have done it. You’re engaging with your community, or so you think. You repeat this process for around 45 minutes, put the phone down, and wait to go viral.
Except that doesn’t happen. You’re disappointed, give up on social media, and your feeds stagnate. Lather, rinse, repeat. You’re not being heard, you’re not saving the world.
You think maybe consistency will do the trick. Sometimes it does, but what actually happens is you stumble into a great mix of hashtags along the way, or some follower who has figured out the algorithm shares your content, or you make something that gets a lot of people talking in the comments, tons of shares, people return to it, and it’s never really the consistency or even the content that makes it go viral. It’s the combo platter of the content, the eyes and ears, and the response, both yours and theirs, but mostly theirs.
This is what happened to me when I “went viral” and one of my reels surpassed half a million views, and several others reached 20k+. My new minimum for video views became 1-2k. I don’t think what I shared was really that profound (although, the comments may have proven otherwise). It was a video on a provocative, existential thought I had while watching The Neverending Story.
What happened is it reached the right audience, and I engaged back once I had their attention. I really, really leaned into it by sprint-responding, then the content took off. It took off so much that Facebook stopped delivering notifications when someone commented or shared it. Then the algorithm did its polarizing thing and now there’s spammers and bots all over it because it’s free eyes on their fake offers.
The same reel didn’t get there right away on Instagram. It was a slow burn over around 6 weeks, but it did eventually end up with 15.6K views. The platforms have their own rules and algorithms, and they change (which is why you pay the folk who stay on top of these trends the big bucks). Once the algorithm picks up that your content actually matters to your audience, the effect snowballs if you feed it, and the reason is engagement. Both yours and theirs, but mostly theirs. If you stop feeding it, it stops.
So how do we bridge the gap between what you post and what it means to people? How do we engage? How do we know when whatever the f*#$ it is we’re doing when we log onto social media is actually going to work, and the people who care will see it? This is a communications lesson for people who aren’t trained in it…
Here’s how you know:
Win at engagement and your social media feeds are curated with people who care about what you do
Notice I said people, not followers. You only need a handful, maybe a hundred die hard fans of your work in order for your message to resonate (which will eventually lead to people buying from you). If you’re actively doing your work and living your life, you probably know 100 people without even thinking about it. At least one of them will buy your art, attend your show, or give to your organization.
This is all very lofty, but it bears repeating to creatives, nonprofits, and businesses who think that they should buy followers or have millions of followers to be successful on social media, or to blow off accounts that only have a few hundred followers but are somehow raking in the big bucks serving their mission - they only have a few hundred followers, so they can’t be all that great, right?
What actually happens is an interesting phenomenon. Have you noticed when your social media feeds start mirroring your own personal opinions, thoughts, desires, and what you think is funny, relatable, or inspiring…not your target audience? This is great for your personal feed! But not if you’re trying to sell something or use social media to drive business. You are not your audience. Instead, you need to take off your own glasses and put on your “you” glasses, and by that, I mean the glasses of your business, which are a different prescription.
Try this:
Think of something that attracts you in real life as it relates to what you do creatively. It could be a business, an event, or a person or orgnaization whose social feeds you admire and who really seem to “get” the digital game.
Find their social media account. Pick a post or piece of content that resonates with “you” (the business).
Look at it and type in the comments what you say or think out loud. Be authentic and be real.
Look at who liked the post. Look at their content and follow them if and only if their content resonates with “you” (the business).
Go back to your first account you looked at. Go to their follower list and repeat this process. The platform will start recommending accounts to you. Repeat this process for a set amount of time. Not 45 minutes (unless that’s your intentional limit). Not forever. Just until you decide you’re out of time.
Do this daily for at least 5 minutes.
You’ll know it’s working when you open up your social media and look at what the all-knowing algorithm thinks you’re interested in. This could be your “for you” page, recommended pages or followers, or your feed of people you are following.
If you see content that resonates with you personally, but not you, the business, then you’re getting distracted when you engage. This could look like:
A bunch of ads
A ton of or unrelated content - cool content, but not related at all to your business
Or recommendations of accounts who probably won’t give a flying f*#@ who you are and what you’re doing
If that’s the case, you’ve lost sight of who your audience is somewhere. Go back, put your other “you glasses” back on, repeat this process, and watch how this affects your views and engagement rate. So,
Nonprofits, engage with your patrons, members, volunteers, and partners
Musicians, engage with your listeners, students, bandmates, and collaborators
Businesses, engage with your customers, staff, and products
Creative solopreneurs, engage with your community!
See how we end up back here again? Your community = your people. You have to find them, and if you can’t, you’re probably missing opportunities to find where they are (by not collecting their information and then going to them in their inboxes, phones, or e-mails). You have to listen to what they have to say, and engage back. Marketers get this. Most others do not. Most marketers say how to improve social media engagement, but cannot explain or teach it.
You’re playing engagement right if your social media followers are people who would actually buy what you’re offering
Notice I said followers, not thousands of followers (although that’s awesome if you’ve got that and it works!)
A habit a lot of business, musicians, and organizations have gotten into is this:
Follow us on social media, along with a beautifully branded QR code that people point their phones to that magically brings them to your broadcast channel online community.
All that is great, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that, because you should. But what you should do in addition to that is engage. Once they’re following you, you’re in. You have their eyes and ears and they’re primed. In marketing, they call this the top of the funnel - awareness. They’re aware! Now what?
Now you should engage with them as you would a conversation, nurturing them down the funnel. In social media, you do this online and convert them to in-person actions. How do you do that? You show up for them and engage.
You show up in their feeds by:
Commenting on the content they post
Liking their content
Sharing or saving their content
Having conversations with them in messages
If they’re another business, you actually buy what they sell.
This is business to business, or B2B to use a sexy marketing acronym. Example: I, a social media manager, might buy business coaching services or social media marketing templates like a business expense tracker from another social media manager. But they are not my target audience. I do not follow them unless I want to start seeing a bunch of ads to buy social media strategies. I don’t want that - I offer that. My audience needs that, and I need to give it to them. It’s a wild mirror effect.
But there’s another half to this that’s super important to understand if you do not have a marketing background, like I don’t, and like so many of the people I work with don’t….
Your social media engagement should take less time and yield more
Here’s the kicker…you might do everything I just listed above, BUT…you don’t do it on ALL the content you see when you log on. Only the content that resonates with your audience. Not you, but you, the business.
That means you have to be selective, and have laser focus on what you’re doing when you log onto social media and you’re not on your personal account. This is intentional engagement. This is what builds accounts, makes content go viral (among other things), and gets you dollars in your pocket for what you do, without spending hours on social media.
It might be surprising that for myself and my clients, I am only on social media intentionally engaging for 15-20 minutes a day per account, not hours (unless my intention is actually to not have an intention, but to gather creative ideas or just talk to my friends I haven’t heard from in a while). Imagine the snowball effect that an hour a day could have. And I know, because I’ve done that on my personal accounts for a mix of content related to parenting life, millennialism, teaching, and mental health. After all, that’s me.
If you engage authentically and intentionally - which is a lofty thing that doesn’t mean much without understanding it - you do not need to spend hours on social media to get what you want.
And we’ve arrived back at the distilled, marketable, blah, sales-y, gatekept message. Understanding it, though, might change things for you and your feeds.
How to improve social media engagement: Here are 3 more signs it's working
You open up your app and have a uptick or a ton of notifications that you actually care about. The notifications have not “wandered” into territory you gloss over. If this is the case, the algorithm is confused and you need to retrain it.
Your minimum video views start becoming one or two thousand and not two hundred. This is usually based on timing, and the number of engagements on your content within concentrated time periods.
Someone in real life mentions something you did on social media that took you almost no time to post or create…because it reached them.
Does all this make sense?
So the next time you open up your feeds and switch into your creator account, remember that shouting into the void is cool and may work your diaphragm, but hearing the echo back is the whole point.
If you need to know to do this, here’s an easy 10-step engagement checklist to move your needle and start hearing back from your folk. You can have it for free. You deserve to be heard.
- Robin Anderson
Get the 10 step engagement checklist
