The "Right" thing to post for your business on social media.
Something kind of cool happened to me today. And it almost felt like cheating, but it wasn't because, you know, I would never cheat. I have much too much of a guilty conscience for that. And one time when I was a little kid, I bought temporary tattoos from Dollarama. And when I got home, I realized two pages were stuck together and I had actually stolen one. And my dad wouldn't let me bring it back to the store, probably because it was worth 3 cents total. And, um,
That's still weighs on me.
Anyway, this cool thing happened to me today. We're an old friend reached out because she's up for a pretty big social media manager slash community manager job. And I've been a social media manager for many years. I've been a marketing coach for many years. So I don't really know her from that world.
I know her from like the world I lived in before this. And so she was freaking out about this project that they had sent over, you know, when you're in the application process for a job and they send you like a project to do will the project they had sent her was all about analytics and insights. And so suddenly she's got all these graphs and charts and numbers in front of her and she's like, kind of freaking out about it.
So she hadn't called me yet. She called her boyfriend and she was like, oh, I don't know what to do. And he said, well, why don't you call that social media girl? And she's like what social media girl. And he's like that social media girl in Winnipeg. And so she's like, oh Jenna. So she calls me. And my fiance said that that's what I should have named this podcast is that social media girl.
Anyway, let's get into it. She was totally capable of figuring this stuff out, but I think she just got a little bit overwhelmed. So she came to me and she was like, Jenna, can you please help? And I was like, yes, I got you. Let me simplify. What we're looking at here.
Everybody wants to know if what they're posting is right, right. Is this right? Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? Is this working? These are the types of questions that I get asked all the time so the question that this pretty mega organization had asked her was it showed her the insights from three different posts and it said. Were these posts successful? Why or why not?
Listed beside each post was the reach, which means how many humans, the post reached the number of impressions. So that's usually a number that's bigger than reach because it's how many times those people saw the post. So if the reach is one and the impressions is two, that means one person saw the post twice.
So that's why impressions is a bigger number. It also had the engagement rating, but it just said E R, which stressed her out at first because she was like, wait, what is that? But engagement reading just means like percentage of people that interacted with the post based on how many people follow you. So they just turn that into a percentage.
I think an average engagement rating is like, it's, it's much lower than you think it would be. It's like one to 3% or something.
Here. I just looked it up for you so that I wouldn't be lying. One study said 4.7, another study said 1.2% or 4.5%. So anyway, under 5% is a pretty standard engagement rating. If you can get it up from there. Awesome. Sometimes, if you have a very small following, like say you only have a hundred followers, but you know, like every single one of those followers, it's much more likely that you could have a huge engagement rating. Like you could have a 50% engagement rating at that point. And then as you grow and as more strangers, more bots where people who are less involved in your life start following you, then the engagement rating drops anyway.
Anyway, out of these three posts that were put in front of my friend, one of them had massive numbers and she said to me, well, I don't know what they're asking because it's pretty obvious to me. That this middle one. Is the best. This is the one that succeeded. This is the one that has the highest numbers. This is the one that's best. This has the highest reach, et cetera. Right.
And I was like, that makes perfect sense, but this is a trick question. Firstly, they didn't ask you to compare these posts together. They didn't ask you, which one of these posts performed the best. They said, were these successful? Why or why not? And they didn't give us a metric of success and that's key.
They didn't quantify success for us. They didn't tell us what denoted success. So what we need to do in order to determine if they were successful is figure out what would success be. And success doesn't necessarily mean big, giant numbers. These posts also told us what link clicks were generated from each post.
So there was one post that was very clearly designed to sell. Sell something. The caption was selling something, the image was selling something. It was clear that the post was, it was very obviously trying to sell something and it got zero link clicks. There was another post that was not trying to sell something. It was just like a funny graphic, just cute little funny graphic. And it also got zero link clicks, but it got like 300 shares.
So.
Now were those posts successful? You tell me. If the post was supposed to sell something and nobody clicked to the website. That was probably not very successful. If the post was supposed to build community. And. Reach the target audience and be relatable and make you love the brand a little bit more and maybe make you feel seen.
And it didn't get linked clicks. That doesn't matter at all because it got so many shares and it got so much interaction. I got people sending it to each other and laughing and like interacting with the brand. And that's what its job was.
As I was explaining this to my friend, she was getting it so quickly. She'd come into this call, like super overwhelmed and didn't understand what she was looking at. And I think that if she's anything like me, you go, oh, no numbers, oh, no charts. And reading the insights and the analytics on your social media, isn't about math. It isn't about.
Being a statistician. A lot of it is just perceiving that data and taking guesses and actually using the creative part of your brain to take those guesses. In 2017, I got a little scholarship to go to brain station, which is like a tech school in Toronto. And so I did a course there in digital marketing.
I wanted to understand the greater landscape of digital marketing, not just social media and when it came to the social media weeks in the program, I was like, I could teach this, but, um, for the Google insights, I really learned a lot at that time. And there was a Facebook ad section too. And I learned a lot about that, but Google insights, one of the most valuable things that I took away, that I still repeat to people to this day.
It is just go in and click around. You can't break it. That's what they said to us. They were like, just explore it. You can't break it. And the other thing I took away from that class is like, there's no right or wrong way to perceive this data. All we can do is like read it and take guests and read it and take a guess and see if we can make the numbers go up.
If they're supposed to go up.
Okay. Here's where you come in.
When I teach social media to small business owners to help them get more clients from Instagram. One of the very first things I tell you is you need three types of posts to grow your business. With Instagram, you need growth, content, nurture content and sales content. And. When folks start making sales content, they often get really tripped up because it's not getting as many likes and shares and saves as the growth content. I want you to know that's normal
Because the goal of that sales content is website clicks. It's to get people to work with you, it's to get people messaging you and saying, I need more. How do I work with you?
How much do you cost I'm in? That's the goal of that content? So it's okay. If it doesn't get as many likes and shares as the growth content now, If you want to kick things up a notch. One of my most favorite things to do in the world is create sales content that people love to share. I have like tricks up my sleeve for that, but that is jumping right to level six. And.
We don't need to get into that today. I actually, I don't think I will give that away on the podcast because that's all, that's my secrets. That's the stuff you get when you work with.
Let me know if this resonates. Sometimes when those sales posts don't get a lot of clicks and don't get maybe likes or comments or whatever, even if they generate website traffic, even if you made money off of them, there can also be this second tier. Of thinking, oh no. What if somebody else sees that my post didn't do well.
What if Patricia from grade 11 sees that I put a sales post up there and it didn't perform well. Okay. One. Just like. Being realistic about it. If it didn't perform well, Patricia, didn't see it anyway. Like, cause the more attraction a post gets, the more people it's shown to. So if it wasn't your growth content, wasn't getting a ton of likes. It probably never showed up in front of her. Anyway, if it did show up in front of her, it's because she sneaky stocks, you and she secretly watches your stories and she's actually obsessed with you because she wants to be like you because you stole her boyfriend in grade 12.
But also there are settings in Instagram where you can hide your like count. So if that is something that is keeping you from posting sales content, cause you're worried it won't perform well. Or if you are the type of person who puts a post up and then panics and deletes it because it didn't perform well immediately.
I know you're out there. Don't feel bad. You're not alone. People confess that to me all the time. But there are settings you can turn on so that nobody can see any of your likes. So it just stays like completely private. And if that helps you mentally to like, put more content out there, then great. Go ahead and do that.
By the end of this call with my friend, she said, okay. It's been 29 minutes. We said that it would be a half an hour call and I feel super confident and I'm going to let you go. And I was like, okay. And I kinda like tried to like slow it down. Cause I didn't want her to feel like she had to run. And I'm like, just message me on Instagram. If you have any questions.
And she's like, no, I won't because I'm so confident. Now this has been so helpful. So as soon as I heard that, I'm like, all right, got to tell you got to run to my computer and tell you, and I hope you found this helpful too. And I know that I kind of lied in the title of this episode, but the point is there is no one perfect, amazing right. Thing to be posting. And if you take nothing else away from this episode today, please remember that different posts have different missions and they don't all need to go viral. They're all allowed to perform 📍 differently because they all have different metrics of success.
And if you want to hear more about which Instagram insights actually matter.
Check out episode six of this podcast. Which is entitled, which Instagram insight actually matter. Real talk though. And it's one of my most popular episodes. So you won't be alone. If that's something that confuses you and you want to learn more about, . And with that, I'll see you in the next episode.
