Top 3 Tips To Boost Your Instagram Engagement
I used to travel a lot for my business. And, as a total extrovert, I so much enjoy conversations with complete strangers on the plane. My own personal captive audience stuck next to me for 3-4 hours, might as well get to know each other, right? Well, not always. People love to avoid talking to me. They have their headphones on, they close their eyes, they pretend to be reading something, they don’t make eye contact, etc. I make it a game to see what opening line I can present to either make them laugh or put them at ease so we can get the ball rolling.
Over the years, I’ve heard enough stories to write a book. Something about meeting a stranger who seems very interested in you, that you feel safe with and that you’ll never see again – it allows them to share their deepest and most private information with me. I remember crying with a young woman who had just lost her husband, advising a young and brilliant woman who was in a middle of an abusive relationship that she’s worth more, even a 14-year-old kid flying to his dad’s house for the summer sharing about how to make ton of money picking up golf balls from the course next to the house. I even helped him make a list of brand names and showed him how to categorize them and what to charge people.
What does all of this have to do with Instagram engagement?
Too often the mentality behind social media posts is that as a business, we will post something educational, informative, entertaining, or even just brilliant and we wait for everyone to flood in, make comments, share my information, click on the like button…etc. But, in reality…crickets. What are you doing wrong?
You might be acting like the passengers on a plane. Not actively trying to make eye contact. Not actively figuring out the opening line to start the conversation. Not interested in others (just yourself). Not allowing other people to feel safe. It’s funny, when I tell people of all the amazing folks I’ve met and talked to over the years on the plane, they’ll tell me that they’ve been traveling for business for years and never once had a conversation with anyone. And they wonder why they might be having trouble engaging online!
So, how do you organically grow your Instagram following and engagement? Here are some practical steps to add to your daily social media processes:
1. Engage with other similar accounts everyday. Help promote them, encourage them and develop an online relationship with them. When you engage their posts, it helps them become more visible. Also, other visitors will see you active on the accounts they follow, and they might end up following you as well.
2. Write great captions. This is your opening line to start a conversation. Ask intriguing questions, state interesting facts, be funny, be real, be authentic, be human, share your pain, share your solutions…you’ll be amazed at how many people want to engage with you as well. Oh, and if someone does make a comment, reply as soon as possible. Tag their account as you are replying – this pushes the posts to the top of their followers’ feeds.
3. Post more photos of people including yourself. Sharing information about yourself builds trust and makes it safe for people to get to know you and for them to open up with you as well.
Don’t get discouraged when you are not getting a lot of likes on Instagram – it doesn’t mean people aren’t seeing and engaging. Instagram has found a new algorithm that’s redefining what “engagement” really means. For example, here are some insights for each post that help paint a bigger picture: comments, shares, link clicks, bookmarks/saves, reach, impressions, and followers. Bottom line, if you keep engaging with others, you will eventually reap the benefits from the effort you invested in the relationship.
Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. Give me a call, or even better – let’s sit next to each other on a flight sometime soon!
Top 5 YouTube Channels To Help Your Business
We know you’re busy, and you don’t have time to explore the entire ocean of YouTube to find the resources you need. That’s why BOS Media is here – we’ve done the research for you, and we’re using these emails to deliver the knowledge.
Knowledge gives you power. Simply knowing how to do something can create momentum, ideas, confidence and so much more for your business. Watching someone do something you’ve never done might inspire you to say, ”I think I can do that too.”
Through my continuous education in YouTube University (LOL), I’ve come to rely on a handful of tried and true content creators out there that I’ve learned so much from. So, why not share?
Here are the top 5 channels every business owner should follow:
1. Perfect place to start: Sunny Lenarduzzi has been my own personal go-to for learning about everything YouTube. From growing traffic to increasing subscribers to watching how she creates honest and vulnerable content that shares her life and teaches us how to grow our business. She’s the real deal with over 500k subscribers. Here’s one of her great videos about growing your subscribers from 0 to 100 in 90 minutes. Whoa. Check it out below.
2. I have been following Pat Flynn ever since he started his podcast over ten years ago. His pure desire to truly help others succeed has been so refreshing. He’s authentic. One of the latest contributions he’s brought to my own life is teaching me how to successfully launch a podcast. Below is his tutorial on how to record, edit and publish a podcast in GarageBand. Which is still what I use to this day. Thanks Pat!
3. This dude seriously feels like my close bro who just loves to teach. He knows how to break down complicated technical tasks into an easy step-by-step process. He teaches all things online marketing and growth. He’s actually my go-to for Facebook marketing techniques, tips and strategy. For those of you interested in doing your own Facebook ads, click below for Wes McDowell’s instruction on how to do it right. It’s super current so just follow his advice and you’ll be a Facebook ad expert in 20 minutes. 🙂
4. Neil Patel. You might have already heard about him but if not, this guy is pretty legit. I know this because he not only has a huge following, but everyone I follow keeps talking about what they’ve learned from him. He talks a lot about SEO and how to drive traffic to your website. He’s a bit of a tech nerd, so his content involves some technical mumbo jumbo but it’s still not hard to follow. He loves giving tips and tricks, his content is short and sweet but very, very helpful. This will be a great introduction to some of his content that can help you right away if you want to do some SEO work on your own.
5. Have you ever been on a tutorial site and the person that’s teaching is either too slow, talks too much or takes too long to get to the point? Nathaniel Dodson (tutvid) is anything but that. He’s so efficient in teaching you how to do everything you’d ever want to do on photoshop, lightroom and video editing. He teaches how to photo manipulate, how to do color correction right, how to add sun flare, how to remove background…so much more. You can’t appreciate it fully until you see one of his tutorials. Here’s one on changing colors on apples. So cool.
| I hope this inspires you to KEEP LEARNING even in the midst of your busy schedule. If you want to talk more about any of these topics and how they can help grow your business, give me a call! |
Top 5 Books Every Business Owner Should Read
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Top 5 Podcasts To Help Your Business
BOS Media wants to see your business shine. Last week, we started sharing some of the resources and tools that we’ve found to support you in that.
For today, we’ve got some podcast recommendations. We know there’s so much noise out there – who can you listen to that is trustworthy and genuinely interested in helping you grow your business?
Here are the top 5 podcasts we suggest:
1. How I Built This (Guy Raz) He just knows how to interview successful entrepreneurs, asking them simple, human questions that I really want to know. You get to hear the guests narrate their journey from the beginning, from when they were just starting their business to when their company gets sold for billions of dollars. Great stories and lots of inspiration!
Favorite Episode: the Kenneth Cole interview. He has some profound ideas about branding.
2. Business Made Simple (Donald Miller) We use his resources as our BOS Media Group playbook and I pretty much buy everything they sell. I truly believe in their business model and soak in what they teach as far as marketing and business growth.
Favorite Episode: #189 Three Ways to Grow Your Nonprofit with Storytelling. Emphasis on how storytelling continues to be the biggest and the most important aspect of marketing.
3. Online Marketing Made Easy (Amy Porterfield) Her gift of teaching makes it very easy to follow and you just get a sense that she’s on your side. She shows people how to create courses and how to market them. She’s very down to earth and I really learn a lot from her. I will be following her lead to release our own online course someday.
Favorite Episode: #366 How to Turn Your Expertise into a Successful Course. Testimonial of one of her students following her instruction to launch a successful course.
4. The Tim Ferriss Show (Tim Ferriss) He’s the author of the book The 4-Hour Workweek. He has high-profile guests who seem to take it to another level when they talk to him, going deeper into their expertise and craft. Highly technical and philosophical as well as inspirational.
Favorite Episode: “Getting Punched and Picking Winners” You just have to listen to figure it out.
5. Armchair Expert (Dax Shepard) Okay, this doesn’t have a lot to do with business growth, but it’s super entertaining and intriguing.
Favorite Episode: #290 Adam Grant. This episode is epic in discussing Adam’s new book “Think Again”. You might not know this but Adam Grant is one of my favorite authors (as you can see in the bonus podcast episode below).
Bonus:
6. Make it Matter (Hanju and Bru). This is our Podcast…lol…BOS Media Group. This podcast is really about finding meaning in what we do and really making our life/work matter.
Favorite Episode: #7 Give and Take. We talk about the best practices of doing business that’s worth following and how it can change not only your business, but your life as well.
Hope this inspires you with new learning and growth. Please feel free to reply with any questions – I would love to talk more and support you however I can!
Top 5 Resources To Help Your Business
It’s the ultimate catch-22 for entrepreneurs: being so busy that you don’t have the time to research hundreds of business tools and software that would best meet your needs for productivity and efficiency. Which in turn, makes you even more busy!
Don’t worry – BOS Media is here to help. We did a ton of research and tried a lot of different solutions before we found the tools that we use. Over the next few emails, we want to share them with you.
Starting this week: here are the TOP 5 tools we use to create productivity for our business:
1. Slack: https://slack.com/
When it comes to internal communication, slack really comes in handy. I look at it like text messaging on steroids. It provides quick communication to teams and/or individuals and offers awesome organization as you can create multiple channels for different projects or groups. You can also easily send all types of files, up to 5G in size.
2. Teamwork: https://www.teamwork.com/
We use this as our project management tool due to its intuitive functionality in communicating with our clients. Unlike other project management applications, it offers a very unique and versatile security within a project to control who gets to be part of what conversation. So, within a same project, there could be many different group conversations and sharing of data that others cannot access. This is really brilliant as your internal team can discuss project details before presenting it to the client.
3. Hubspot: https://www.hubspot.com/
Yes, marketing companies needs marketing tools too. We use hubspot to capture leads, track leads, manage our contacts, and analyze and run reports on our marketing efforts. We have only just begun to scratch the surface on the tools available for growth.
4. Freshbooks: https://www.freshbooks.com/
This is our accounting and invoicing software. We use Freshbooks to create all invoices and receive payment. The feature that helps us most is the way it automates the monthly subscription invoicing as well as the reminders for unpaid invoices to our customers. It also captures all the accounts associated with our business, while providing P&L reports and all the business analytics we need to oversee and manage our finances.
5. 17 Hats: https://www.17hats.com/
This is our Quoting and Contract software. We use it to send out all of our proposals and contracts, along with questionnaires. We love the digital signature feature as well as it being the single place where all our signed contracts and proposals are organized and located.
Hope this helps you become even more productive! Reply with any questions, I would love to share in more detail our findings.
