Hello, hello beautiful people, and welcome back to my channel.
My name is Ortal Levitan aka workout unicorn on all social media platforms.
In today's video, we are going to cover shout outs.
Should you do them?
Are they effective?
Should you use them for growth?
All that.
I'm gonna break it down for you, but before we get started, if you could do me a huge
favor and give this video a thumbs up and make sure to subscribe to my channel.
It really helps me out with YouTube's algorithm, and it makes sure that you never miss out
on any of my awesome videos.
Let's dive in.
Shout outs, if you guys have no idea what the heck a shout out is, essentially, it is
just you featuring someone else on your page.
It could be a post or a story or whatever, and they do the same for you.
Usually, more often than not, you'll see story shout outs because they're easier.
People can just click through, or sometimes, people don't really want to commit to a post
on their page because you know that's a very expensive marketing space, and so they'll
usually just do it in a story.
Also, the story goes away after 24 hours, and so no harm, no foul.
Now, that's just shout out for shout out.
Usually the way you can do a shout out for shout out is to find other people in your
niche with similar size following, with a similar audience or so you think because you
can't really see their audience unless they share it with you.
You just, "Hey, send me a picture.
Send me what you want me to write.
I'll do the same for you."
That way, you guys get followers.
This is great.
If it's just a shout out for shout out where there's no money being charged, that's cool.
Even if you know their following is fake and they're not actually going to get you the
visibility you want, it's just a feature on your story or on your page.
It's not really that big a deal, so you're not really losing out here.
What I want to address more in depth is paid shoutout.
As you guys might know, there are certain pages, the larger ones, usually if you want
to get featured where you want them to give you a shout out, they'll charge you for it.
There'll be like, "Hey, it's 500 bucks for an instastory shout out."
Now, if you're a small page and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm looking at this person with
like 250,000 followers, and their page is the same as my page, is like the same niche.
I really like what they're putting out there.
I want access to their audience.
I'm willing to pay the 500 if I get a good return on my investment, right?"
That's what you would think.
Sometimes, this is legit.
More often than not, it's not legit.
I'm just going to put that out there.
I don't care.
You all can hate me.
More often than not, you are flushing your money down the drain.
Goodbye.
Never to be seen again.
Let's assume that you found a page that you really, really like, and you're like, "Oh
my gosh, I want to get featured."
They charge $500, $1000, whatever.
You're like, "Okay, I'm willing to pay this."
What are the things that you should look for?
First of all, and these are nonnegotiable guys, I'm not saying this to be a stick in
the moderate to be a pain.
I want everybody to grow on Instagram, but trust me, you don't want to be flushing your
money down the toilet.
First of all, go look at their page.
Go to their following and start scrolling through it.
Do this account look legit?
Are they fake?
Are they real?
Are they active?
Do they look like they're active?
That's the first thing, so go through the following.
See what the following looks like.
Let's say the following looks legit.
Go to their actual page, the actual content.
Look through likes.
Scroll through the likes.
Do the likes look legit?
Are the likes very, very low?
Are they very, very high?
If you go through the actual people liking it, do those look like they come from fake
accounts or real accounts?
Next, go to their comments.
Scroll through the comments.
How many comments are they getting?
If they have, like a million followers, but they're only getting like 10 or 15 comments,
this isn't legitimate.
Something's not right here.
Even if they're getting like 250,000 likes, if the comments ain't there, it's not legit.
Let's say you went through their audience.
It looks fine.
Their likes look fine.
Their comments look fine.
Run the engagement formula.
I included it in a previous post of mine or my Instagram page, workout_unicorn.
You can go check it out.
Shoot me a DM if you want me to send you the exact link to it.
Go run the engagement formula.
Let's say that's fine as well.
Everything looks fine.
Now, before you pay, guys, please, please, please ask them for screenshots of their insights.
I'll tell you exactly what to ask for.
If they're not willing to provide these, do not pay.
I'm telling you, people should have no problem sharing insights.
Anytime a brand collaborates with me or I work with a brand or I get a sponsor, they
always ask me for my insights.
They always ask me for screenshots of my insights, and that's totally fine.
They want to know what they're paying for.
You should do the same.
If you're paying for someone to feature you on their page, do this behind the scenes you
recon.
You want to make sure you're going to get a good return on your investment.
Have them send you screenshots.
You want to get screenshots of their page reach and their page impressions just to make
sure that the number of people landing on their page makes sense.
If they have a million followers, they should have at least a 20% of those people having
profile visits, at least 20% of them being their reach and their impressions.
Now after they send you that, make sure, and this is probably the most important one, the
audience breakdown.
You want a screenshot of the breakdown of the audience, men to women.
If you're trying to attract women to your page, but they have 90% or 80% a male demographic,
you're going to be attracting the wrong people to your page, and so you're not going to get
a good return on your investment.
Make sure they send you a screenshot of their audience insights, where these people are
from and what the ages are.
You want to make sure that the audience that they seem to have, that you want to be paying
for it to come to your page is actually what you're going to be getting, because if they
have ... Let's say you're trying to attract women ages
25 to 30 from the United States.
Majority of their demographic is 90% men from the Middle East, and they're all 18 through
24.
You're going to get new followers, but they're not going to be your ideal followers and then
what's the point?
You might as well just go buy them because they're just going to be worthless anyway.
Does that make sense?
After that, let's say they send you a screenshot of the audience and it is the legit audience
demographic that you want to attract.
Cool.
That is essentially all you need to do.
If all those boxes are checked, you can go ahead and pay and you're more likely to get
a good return on your investment.
Now, if you want to take it a step further, you can ask them to send you screenshots from
previous stories to see what the visibility on their story is, how many impressions they
get on their stories, so you can expect how many people actually see their stories.
10% of their audience is what should be.
For me, I have 250K.
I have at least 20 to 25K view per each story.
Make sure you wanted around that 10%.
A little bit lower is fine too.
Ask them if they can give you insight on how other shout outs that they've done have gone.
They might not have screenshots, but just ask them.
That's all the best case scenario.
Everything checks out.
Now, what usually tends to happen is people don't know to ask these questions, so I'm
not blaming you, but usually what will happen, you'll go to a page.
You'll be like, "Okay, we charge 500 bucks for a 24-hour shoutout.
You pay the money.
Cool."
What ends up happening is that in order to legitimize this transaction for you to not
feel gypped or messaged them and be like, "Hey, I didn't gain any followers because
your entire follower is fake, and I feel gypped.
I want a refund."
What they'll do is you pay them 500 or 200 or 50 or whatever.
They will go and buy 100 to 1,000 fake, really shitty, low quality followers in order to
make it feel legit.
I'm not making this up guys.
People have come to me and told me about this, where they paid for a shout out, they paid
for a feature, whatever.
Then literally, instantly the second that feature went live, within two to three minutes,
they gave 1,000 or 2000 new followers.
They scroll through them and they're all bots, cheap farm bots, where it's like there's no
profile picture.
The name is a bunch of numbers and random letters and none of them are legitimate.
What ends up happening?
Then they go back to the page.
They're like, "Hey, what the heck?"
The page is like, "Oh, blocked."
That's it.
That's basically the end of that.
In order to spare you guys this heartache, I made this video.
If you guys have ever been tricked or something, shoot me a DM.
Let me know.
I really want to learn more about this to help other people avoid making these mistakes.
I hope this video will help you avoid making any mistakes.
Again, if they're not willing to share screenshots or share insights or answer your questions,
they ain't legit.
Trust me, any sponsor that I've ever worked with that gave me money asked me all these
questions.
Asked for insights.
Asked for screenshots.
Some of them even wanted access to my account through third party servers or whatever.
It's fine.
If you're paying, you have the right to ask.
Don't let them make you feel bad about asking.
They're like, "Oh, you should trust me."
No, you should not trust anybody on this app because you can literally buy everything.
I hope that helped.
If you guys have any questions, make sure to leave them in the comment box below.
I'd be more than happy to answer them or shoot me a DM at workout_unicorn.
I answer all my messages.
Of course if there's any content you want me to create, make sure to drop a comment
below.
Let me know.
I love creating content for you guys.
Before you leave, if you could do me a huge favor and give this video a thumbs up, subscribe.
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Thanks so much for tuning in again.
I will see you all next week.