Over the last several months, I’ve been working to steadily grow my Instagram presence. I’ve carefully thought about themes for reels, questions for stories, topics for Morning Thoughts, and more. In all this, I aim to be my authentic self and provide value to my followers. And as I hoped, engagement and followers are growing. To those following me - thank you! And if you’re not, I’d love for you to be a part of the Daytime Hero community!
Walter's fame
Well, the other day, I randomly took a 30-second video of my cat, Walter, playing with - ha, loving on)- his new catnip toy. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but he was being cute, and the camera was close by. I quickly put some music to it and threw it up on IG as a reel. It may have taken me a couple of minutes at most to take and post the reel. I didn’t dwell over a moving caption or trending hashtags, I just threw it up there.
i checked the post and That little monster had over 2000 views within an hour. I was shocked! I used 3 hashtags in total, and barely put any effort into the reel. I checked again later and his reel had over 7000 views. The visibility of his reel was crazy amounts higher than what I’m currently running on my own content. I guess folks just can’t skip by that adorably furry face and all his crazy antics. I don’t blame them! But in this discovery, I realized a few things
What i've learned:
Social media is a fickle thing
Social media growth is based on a couple of key components: engagement and algorithms. The algorithms behind the platform are continually adjusting and the trends are impossible to keep up with. There’s no way to predict what will be seen or what will resonate with your followers.
People will almost always choose to be entertained
there is so much complexity and negativity out in the world and fun, mindless entertainment is a lot more palatable than content that forces us to evaluate, think, or learn. I have yet to meet someone who can turn down an adorably fuzzy face.
Not all followers, engagement, or content that comes from social media is valuable
Society has been conditioned over the last 10 years or so to believe that the majority of our social contact and relationship building (and our own personal value) must come from social media platforms. We believe that those with a high number of followers are more credible, regardless of education or expertise.
Social media usually shows the best side of life and/business
not the real sides of life and/business. We may come across someone who has thousands of followers and wonder, “How are they doing that?”. Maybe they locked into the game. Maybe they bought the followers. We’ll never really know, but that’s not for us to worry about.
Most folks out in social media land are just trying to build their following and increase their engagement so that they can grow their brand. Totally understandable! But they may be frustrated by the ever-evolving, always mysterious, constantly moving backends of the platforms. Will we ever be able to lock in on what works??? Maybe, maybe not....So much of that is out of our control.
If you have a focus on marketing your business via social media
my recommendation is to BE YOURSELF and provide quality content. Don’t focus on trends, because trends are just that - trends. They’ll fade and they change. But the authentic you is awesome and folks will be able to connect so much more when they don’t feel like they’re being misled. Quality followers will always be better for business than a higher number of followers.
Now, does this mean I’ll no longer let Walter dominate the day with his adorable reels? Oh, he’ll still be showing up because we can all use a dose of cuteness in our day. But I’m not depending on his content to grow the number of quality followers I have on my chosen social media platform. You’ll still be getting what I hope is valuable content to help grow your voiceover business. And you’ll always be getting the real me.
Equally confused by algorithms,
Christy