Instagram engagement sometimes feels like pulling teeth doesn't it?
Hey Guys! Welcome back to my channel, the place for bosses and business owners who want to show up
consistently, creatively and most importantly through their content. Today we're going to
delve into the world of Instagram and the task of driving engagement which for some of us,
if we're honest, actually seems like a myth. I mean, do people actually engage on Instagram
or is that just something that we only see on influencers channels? Well, yes they do and today
we're gonna learn how to do that more effectively but before we dive into that I wanted to address a
couple of things. The simple fact of the matter is that engagement is getting more difficult
and much like we encounter ads in everyday society and billboards in everyday society and we don't
tend to notice them anymore, social media posts are much the same they're so much a part of our
world that we fail to even recognize them. We fail to engage with them. Think about the times where
you scroll Instagram, you wouldn't be able to even recall the last 30 posts that you saw right,
because everything is kind of just normal to us, we're used to it, very little surprises
or delights us or captures our attention in such a way that it compels us to action. So if we want to
drive more engagement then we need to understand what actually compels people to engage and I've
distilled it down to three main places that it comes from: the first place is from relationship.
So the deeper your relationship is with someone the higher the chance of you interacting with
their content is going to be. So think about it like this: if your friend gets married and
they put out their wedding photos on social media there's a good chance that you're going to like
it, if not comment on it as well, because your relationship with them is much deeper than say a
marketer who puts out a piece of content educating you about something, right. The second place that
engagement stems from is very strong emotion so personally and anecdotally I share content from a
very strong place of emotion so I actually shared this piece of content on my Instagram Stories last
night and I have been very known to talk about this very thing on my Instagram stories before
so in The Devil Wears Prada they really make out Meryl Streep's character to be the villain whereas
when you look at the story again and again it's actually Andy's boyfriend who continually holds
her back and gets mad that she doesn't stay the same and that she doesn't do the things that
he's used to and it doesn't acknowledge the fact that there are seasons in our life where we have
to hustle and there are seasons in life where we actually have to work really hard and put in time
and sacrifice other things to get to the place that we want to go. So when I stumbled across
this meme and by the way I don't even follow that account it just sort of was showed up in my feed
I had a very strong emotional reaction to it and I shared it and as you can see I also commented
on it and that's really normal behaviour. If something is relatable and compels our emotions
we tend to share it or comment on it or engage with it because it expresses part of us that
maybe we haven't expressed in that way before or it reinforces something that we believe
but it comes from that deep sense of self and emotions that are attached to certain situations
or things or people or thoughts that we've had. So the third place that engagement comes from is
a place of gamification, on Instagram as an example um people go to the hashtag section
and they'll find hashtags that their ideal client uses and they will go into those and comment on
different posts because the numbers game suggests that if they comment on enough posts they will get
followed out of that right. The other way that gamification is used particularly on Instagram
is through engagement pods which if you haven't seen my very old but still very relevant video
on engagement pods you can watch it here and the fact that I think that they suck, because they do,
but people use them, so they there's a group of people get together and say I'll comment on
your post and you can comment on my post and the idea is that the reach of the post goes further,
the comments drive further engagement, but ultimately engagement pods are a zero-sum game
at best and at worst they actually negatively affect your account because they feed the wrong
information to the algorithm about who they should push content to and this information
ultimately works against you. These are two bad examples of gamification and I don't suggest that
you go after them but today we're going to talk about some really fun and really good examples
of gamification that really just make your content more fun for people to engage with.
So today because we're talking about Instagram and the hot thing on Instagram at the moment is Reels.
I'm coming at this video through the lens of creating Reels so if you're not yet doing it
you can apply most of these suggestions to your posts in your feed but I want you to
start thinking about Reels and if you are already creating reels then these are going to be perfect
for that format. Alright, so, let's get down into some thumb stopping examples
of Reels that are going to drive engagement and our first one is what I like to call interactive
content so what do I mean by interactive content. What I mean by this is creating Reels where the
audience needs to screenshot or tap the screen in order to achieve an outcome, so a specific example
I saw was actually on Tik Tok and I don't have it to show you here but let me explain what happened
so this lady got on camera and she told this story about a conversation that she had with a
particular Hollywood celebrity now she either had it by a dm or text message I can't really remember
but she built up the story in such a way where you needed to actually read the dm or the
text message to not only verify that it was actually real but secondly to
get the high point of the story, the answer to the story, the narrative that she built up,
the the crux of that was within that text message or dm post and what she had done is
about three quarters of the way into that Tik Tok she had posted a screenshot of that conversation
but she'd done it so fast that in order to read it you had to tap the screen at the most perfect
time to, you know, get the satisfaction to be able to close the loop on that narrative. And then she
made a provocative statement at the end to sort of basically tell you that if you wanted to see the
crescendo of that conversation you had to go back and tap it at the exact time.
So I found myself doing it a number of times and I couldn't get it so I ended up
just frustrated and leaving but I didn't hate I wasn't angry about it was kind of fun.
Now you have to think about how can I apply this for my business? So a great way for me to be able
to apply this to my business would be perhaps to talk about a really great social media post that
we created for a client that garnered shares and comments and maybe it even drove revenue in a way
that no other post had done before and I tell that story in a way that people want to know what the
post was right and so then I can put a screenshot of the post or a template of the post really
really quickly into the Instagram Reel and people have to tap on it at the right time in order to
see what it was. If you do this one well you're going to find that it drives engagement regardless
of whether or not there's a call to action because the fun nature of it just compels people to
comment to at least like and if you really want to ensure that you get that comment in the comments
section to really push that engagement then it's a good idea to finish off that video with some
type of call to action. So in the case of the example that I just gave you I might say at the
end of my video: tell me how many tries it took you to see the post or something to that effect,
okay. So that's a really fun way to drive engagement the second way that I want to
talk about today is that gamifying experience that we touched on before but we want to do it
in a really positive way that leaves people happy and isn't an inauthentic expression
of of our brand or our content, okay. So in this gamifying experience what we want to do is create
a scenario where our video then encourages our audience to have to go to the comments in order to
receive the outcome, basically the reason that this works is because if you're already
encouraging people to go to the comments then they're already in the place that they need to be
in order to engage with you so it's not much more extra effort to actually write something
whereas if there's no reason for them to go to the comments chances are they're just going to
scroll through it, right? So an example of this is to create a talking head reels video where you
address a client or ideal client pain point, maybe this is an issue that your clients often have and
then you provide a solution that's tactical and practical but you don't provide it in the video,
like I said you provide it in the post itself underneath in the writing area or you pop it
in the comments as suggested before your call to action then becomes: hey if you're having trouble
with this I have a template for you to use in the comments below and while you're already there
leave me a comment and let me know if this is an issue that you experience.
So not only are you driving them there to actually get the solution and the outcome but you're also
asking them to participate in the conversation and because they're already there it's much easier for
them to take action on that so an example of this is a reel that I just created last night that is
a wheel that just has numbers on right. And you either tap the screen or screenshot the screen in
order to get a number and that number corresponds with the social media prompt that I've actually
put in the post underneath it and it says down the bottom that those prompts are in the comments
below. So this was a really fun way of providing a practical, tactical solution for my audience
but also aiming to drive that engagement now it's pretty fresh so I can't really report back on it
for you but I already have a couple of comments on there and I can say that it's reached well
over 100% of my audience so I highly recommend trying one of these as well. Because a lot of
the reels at the moment aren't strategic they're very easy to scroll through and not engage with
much like the example of billboards and ads that I used earlier. They're just very grey, right? They
don't stand out but in a world of grey if you're neon people are going to stop and look at you. So
I encourage you to be generous in your reels, be generous with your knowledge
and give something away that's of value and then gamify it through that reel and
through the way that you show up in order to have people engage with you more in those comments. So
if you want to check out the reel that I put out last night you can find my Instagram below or the
handles up here on the screen but tell me: have you started using Reels on Instagram yet or are
you about to start? Leave me a comment below and let me know because I'm really fascinated to see
who's using Reels and who isn't yet and you know if you want to go the extra mile
tell me why you are or why you aren't and I would love to hear any results that you've had from it.
So my third and final way for you to increase engagement on Instagram Reels is through what
I call an infinite loop. So I see this a lot in the cooking space at the moment where the first
scene of the reel is the finished product or the finished dish and then you make it through
the reel and the last scene of the reel is the same moment right which actually means they've
cut off just before that point at the end and attached it back to the front.
It sounds really confusing but basically it just looks like a never-ending video and it's seamless
and you can't actually it takes you a minute to figure out that you're actually watching
a looped video. So what this actually does is it creates extra watch time on your video and
while it may not actually compel that moment of engagement watch time is actually a form of
engagement and it informs the algorithm that people are watching this content for longer
which means people are liking your content which makes the algorithm push it out further to other
people. So ultimately we are not just trying to increase engagement for no reason. Increased
engagement helps to elevate the respective culture of our communities, it creates a sense of safety
in our communities where people can see that other people are commenting and they know that
it's a safe place for them to do the same thing and then also creates an environment whereby
people can reach out and comment and interact with you and you can give a personalized response which
reinforces that safety and elevates that trust and people know that this space, your space is
a safe corner of the social media platform that they're on. Now I know content creation
in general is relatively overwhelming for a lot of people, it's why Eleven Lights Media exists,
we create content for many brands and businesses to take away the pain and the overwhelm of doing
it themselves so if you're in that place and you want to be able to do content easier
then I have a content roadmap for you in the description below make sure you download it,
it's free and it's going to help you plan, map and organize your content in such a way that it
takes out the overwhelm for you and allows you to show up consistently in order to grow your social
media. And finally in the video that I have coming for you next week I'm going to be showing you how
to create your own DIY content creation strategy so ultimately this is going to take the brain work
out of deciding the visual format of your content as well as the meat of the content
itself so make sure you keep your eye out for that one and I will see you next week, bye!