18:17Build Your Tribe · Listicle
7 New Trial Reel Ideas To Go Viral on Instagram
Trial reels only reach people who don't already follow you — seven formats built to turn that stranger traffic into new followers.
July 16thThe argument in one line.
Instagram growth comes down to a narrow niche, a profile that explains it in three seconds, and a high volume of good posts, judged in order by skip rate, retention, then shares.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A small business owner or solo creator posting on Instagram a few times a week with flat follower growth and no clear idea why.
- Someone who has been told to 'add value' and keeps making educational reels that stall at a few hundred views.
- A creator ready to post more often who needs a batching, scheduling and reposting system that does not require filming every day.
- Anyone selling a product, course or service on Instagram who still relies on the link in bio or a link sticker to make sales.
- A beginner who has heard about trial reels, hashtags, best posting times and engagement pods and wants to know which ones actually matter.
SKIP IF…
- You want paid ads strategy; this is strictly organic growth and treats ads as something to try only after content already works.
- You need TikTok, YouTube or LinkedIn specifics; everything here is tuned to Instagram's feed, reels, trial reels and Stories.
- You already run a large account with an optimized profile, a batching system and DM automation; most of the first two hours will be review.
The full version, fast.
Growth on Instagram comes from feed posts, not Stories, and the method breaks into three steps: pick a narrow niche (who plus what), build a profile that explains it in under three seconds with keywords in the name line, then post a lot of good content. The algorithms judge a reel by skip rate first, retention second, and shares above every other engagement. Plan each post for width, depth or conversion on a 60-20-20 split, write hooks that are negative, five to eight words and simple, and favor entertainment over education. Post volume by batching 14 days ahead, scheduling, reposting every 90 days, and running every reel as a trial reel first. Sell through single text-heavy Stories and DM keyword automation instead of link stickers.
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00:00 – 03:28
01 · Masterclass setup and credentials
Frames the four-hour format, suggests consuming it in parts, and establishes credibility: eight years teaching Instagram, a million followers on a live counter, and an academy whose average member grew 15,000 followers in 12 months.
03:28 – 08:14
02 · The NAP method and why niche comes first
Introduces NAP (Niche, Attention-grabbing profile, Post) and argues niche is the foundation because people follow for one reason. Uses the tree-trunk analogy and the one-hit salad recipe example.
08:14 – 19:20
03 · Six niche misconceptions
Niche is who plus what, not an industry or product; you stand out within a niche but are not the niche; you can pivot once moving; you can talk about several things; outsiders will still follow; you don't need total clarity before posting.
19:20 – 23:47
04 · Two ways to choose a niche
Option A: post about every interest and watch both your enjoyment and the aggregate engagement data, not one friend's comment. Option B: pick the obsession you already have. Either way, the only wrong niche is no niche.
23:47 – 30:06
05 · Researching a niche with Poppy AI
A four-step board: voice-note brain dump of your life and skills, competitor profiles, your own posts, then gap analysis. Commit 90 days to six months, since Instagram favors 'breaking' accounts early.
30:06 – 34:37
06 · Profile picture and username
Bright, one focal point, close-up face for personal brands or an iconified logo for businesses, high contrast against the background. Usernames should plainly say who you are; keywords in a handle can cheapen the brand.
34:37 – 39:39
07 · The searchable name line
Nobody searches your name, so the name field should carry search keywords. Stories of hiring a San Francisco videographer by search and a 'balloonist' who started getting bookings after switching to 'corporate balloon art' via Google Trends.
39:39 – 44:04
08 · A four-line bio that converts
Line one states the niche, middle lines add clarity and credibility, line four is a call to action. Skip non-niche fun facts. Highlights are watched by under 1% of visitors and barely matter.
44:04 – 47:05
09 · What to post: reels vs carousels vs images
Feed posts drive growth; Stories don't reach non-followers. Reels give the most total and disconnected reach, carousels the most connected reach and engagement, single images trail both.
47:05 – 54:41
10 · How the algorithms rank posts
Several algorithms adjust daily. Each reads skip rate, then retention, then active engagement, ranked saves (lowest), reposts, comments, likes, and shares (highest), because shares create conversation and better-matched viewers.
54:41 – 1:04:04
11 · Width, depth and conversion content
Every post aims at reach (optimize for shares), depth (optimize for comments) or conversion. Run 60-20-20 weighted toward your current season, shifting to depth before a sales period. Production value works only at the cinematic or raw extremes.
1:04:04 – 1:12:38
12 · Writing better hooks
The negative 5-8-5 hook: a negative word, five to eight words, fifth-grade reading level. The visual matters more than the words, so keep three or fewer elements, match the topic, and add one unexpected element.
1:12:38 – 1:24:39
13 · Fixing reel retention
Use the miniskirt rule for length and entertain before you educate. Reads five common retention graphs and gives fixes: refresh the visual cover, swap hooks, open loops, re-hook at 4-7 seconds, cut the setup, change something every two seconds, drop end-card asks.
1:24:39 – 1:36:18
14 · Making shareworthy posts
SHARE covers the elements (Simple, Hook, Authentic, Relatable, Entertaining), with authenticity defined as shrinking the time from idea to post. TRIBE covers the types: Timely, Relatable, Inspiring, Beckoning, Edgy.
1:36:18 – 1:42:14
15 · Formats beat topics
A boring topic in a great format beats a great topic in a boring one. Study formats, find repeatable ones that perform and that you can sustain, then eventually create your own. Examples: the trophy reel and the generations reel.
1:42:14 – 2:02:36
16 · Poppy AI walkthrough for viral formats
Screen demo: pull top-10 outliers from five-plus creative creators in any niche, add your own profile and a brand voice doc, connect everything to a chat, ask for unused formats, then request shot-by-shot storyboards. Includes the Poppy and Storyblocks sponsor reads.
2:02:36 – 2:09:02
17 · How often to post
Done beats perfect and quantity breeds quality. The rule is 'the more you post, the more you grow'. Start from a sustainable baseline measured over your last 90 days, and stop chasing perfect posts, the main cause of burnout.
2:09:02 – 2:19:57
18 · Batching and scheduling
If you don't have 14 days of posts ready, take 14 days off posting to build the backlog. Daily inspiration capture, semi-weekly sorting, one weekly filming session starting with easy reels, delegated editing, then a scheduling tool.
2:19:57 – 2:27:32
19 · Upcycling and reposting
Every idea gets at least three formats, and every post is duplicated in the scheduler 90 and 180 days out, unchanged. That means 40 ideas fill a year, and the weekly job becomes spot-checking a pre-filled calendar.
2:27:32 – 2:48:32
20 · Tactics that hurt and tactics that don't matter
Hurts: bought followers, follow-unfollow, rewatch bait, engagement pods, AI slop. Doesn't matter: best posting time, hashtags (except local businesses), cold outreach and engaging with others, trending audio, short-lived tricks.
2:48:32 – 3:02:09
21 · Five strategies that work
Audience over algorithm (Google Trends, AnswerThePublic, Poppy, comment sections, past data), detach from results, systems over discipline over motivation, stick with it, and post a lot of good posts.
3:02:09 – 3:16:57
22 · Trial reels for testing and distribution
Trial reels reach only non-followers, unlock around 200 to 1,000 followers, cap near 20 to 25 a day (keep it to five) and reject duplicates. Use them to iterate on skip rate, retention and shares, or to post every reel as a trial first, then feed, then a modified trial.
3:16:57 – 3:31:18
23 · Instagram Stories for connection
Stories reach only followers and get about a third of reel views, but they build trust and move people into DMs. Less is more, screenshot useful DM replies to normalize messaging, point feed posts at Stories, and document rather than create, three to ten a day.
3:31:18 – 3:45:03
24 · Story conversion and story-view killers
The STD formula (Single, Text-heavy, DM keyword) once or twice a week, and the STD hidden-E variant with a hidden emoji prize story. Views die from long talking-head videos, reshared posts, too many frames and link stickers.
3:45:03 – 3:46:53
25 · DM automation with ManyChat
Comment or reply keyword automation turns interested buyers into engagement that boosts the post. Start with one keyword and one freebie.
3:46:53 – 3:55:18
26 · 30 rapid-fire questions
Shadowbans aren't real, TikTok reposts are fine without watermarks, Instagram doesn't pay creators, you need zero followers to earn, ads only after organic works, leave bot followers alone, collabs are underrated, going live is low value, and don't hide likes.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A niche is the who plus the what together: fitness is an industry, but 30-minute no-equipment home workouts for moms over 30 is a niche.
- People follow an account for one reason at first and only fall for the rest of the personality later, so a broad account never gives them that first reason.
- Your Instagram name line is searchable and can be anything, so 'San Francisco videographer' gets found while a brand name like 'Bay Area Productions' does not.
- Keep a bio to four lines because Instagram truncates the fifth behind a 'more' link almost nobody taps.
- Fewer than 1% of profile visitors ever open your highlights, so they belong at the bottom of the to-do list.
- Skip rate separates a poor post from an average one, retention separates average from great, and shares separate great from viral.
- Saves are now the weakest engagement signal because most people bookmark posts and never return to them.
- A viewer who arrives through a friend's share is higher quality than one the algorithm guessed at, because friends know us better than recommendation systems do.
- Asking viewers to like a reel produces fewer likes on average, and an end-card ask for a like or follow often causes the retention cliff at the end.
- Content performs at two extremes, fully cinematic or fully raw phone footage, and the half-edited middle with gimmick transitions is what flops.
- The best hooks use a negative word, run five to eight words, and read at a fifth-grade level.
- Educational content only has value if people pay attention to it, so entertainment comes first even for business accounts.
- On Instagram, a boring topic in an engaging format beats an exciting topic in a boring format.
- With three formats per idea and each posted three times 90 days apart, 40 ideas are enough to post every day for a year.
- Posts that had zero hashtags performed best on average in a recent study, and Instagram now caps captions at five.
- A reel posted as a trial reel first and then to the feed counts as original both times; the reverse order flags the trial as a duplicate.
- The fastest-rising predictor of whether someone buys since 2020 is how much they trust the business, and Stories are where that trust gets built.
- A link sticker suppresses Story views because interested viewers tap away and uninterested ones skip, leaving zero engagement either way.
- You do not rise to the level of your motivation; you fall to the level of your discipline, and below that, to the level of your systems.
Narrow the niche, then win skip, retention, shares.
WHAT TO LEARN
Growth comes from a narrow niche explained in three seconds and a steady volume of good posts, each judged in order by whether people stop, stay, then share.
02The NAP method and why niche comes first
- Define your niche as who plus what together, like 30-minute home workouts for moms over 30, because people follow for one reason before they love the rest of you.
04Two ways to choose a niche
- Commit to a niche for at least 90 days and ideally six months, since Instagram gives newer 'breaking' accounts extra reach while it tests their audience.
- Judge which topic to pursue by aggregate views and engagement across posts, not by one enthusiastic message from a friend.
07The searchable name line
- Put search keywords in your Instagram name line rather than just your name, using Google Trends to pick the phrasing people actually search.
08A four-line bio that converts
- Write a four-line bio: niche, then clarity, then credibility, then a call to action, and treat highlights as the lowest priority on the profile.
09What to post: reels vs carousels vs images
- Reels reach the most non-followers, carousels earn the most engagement from existing followers, and single images usually trail both.
10How the algorithms rank posts
- After skip rate and retention, shares outweigh likes, comments, reposts and saves, so aim posts meant to grow at being sent to a friend.
11Width, depth and conversion content
- Give every post one job, reach, trust or sale, and weight the mix 60-20-20 toward whatever season you are in.
12Writing better hooks
- Write hooks with a negative word, five to eight words, at a fifth-grade reading level, and treat the opening visual as more important than the words.
- Keep three or fewer visual elements in the opening frames, match them to the topic, and make one of them unexpected.
13Fixing reel retention
- Read each reel's retention curve: an instant drop means a weak first frame, a cliff after the hook means a weak hook, and an end cliff means cut the outro.
- Use open loops, a re-hook around four to seven seconds, and a visual change every two seconds to keep viewers past the 'I got it' moment.
14Making shareworthy posts
- Shareable posts are simple, hooked, authentic, relatable and entertaining, and relatability comes from specific detail rather than general statements.
- Authenticity shows up as a short gap between having an idea and posting it, so heavy editing and AI polishing tend to sand it away.
15Formats beat topics
- An engaging format can make a boring topic work, so study other creators' formats and keep the repeatable ones you can produce easily.
16Poppy AI walkthrough for viral formats
- Find formats by pulling top-performing outlier posts from several creative accounts in any niche and comparing them to what you don't yet do.
17How often to post
- Posting volume is the lever you fully control, and more posts means more data about what works.
- Set a sustainable baseline from your actual output over the last 90 days and cut perfectionism, the most common cause of burnout.
18Batching and scheduling
- Build a 14-day backlog before posting again, then run daily idea capture, a weekly filming session and scheduled publishing.
- Start filming sessions with the easiest pieces and never rewrite scripts mid-session, and hand off editing when it becomes the bottleneck.
19Upcycling and reposting
- Turn each idea into three formats and repost each one 90 and 180 days later, so roughly 40 ideas cover a year of daily posts.
- With the calendar pre-filled by reposts, timely posts slot in by pushing the backlog back instead of forcing daily creation.
20Tactics that hurt and tactics that don't matter
- Bought followers, follow-unfollow, rewatch bait, engagement pods and AI-generated slop all damage reach over time.
- Posting time, hashtags, trending audio and engaging with other accounts barely move distribution; content quality and volume do.
21Five strategies that work
- Research your audience's own words with Google Trends, AnswerThePublic and competitors' comment sections instead of chasing algorithm updates.
- Detach your mood from each post's results and rely on systems, because motivation fades and discipline breaks when life interrupts.
22Trial reels for testing and distribution
- Post every reel as a trial reel before the feed, since the reverse order gets the trial flagged as a duplicate.
- Keep trial reels to about five a day and change the first seven seconds or so when reposting one, since that is where duplicate checks focus.
23Instagram Stories for connection
- Use Stories for personal, documented moments that build trust, posting three to ten a day on most days and nothing when there is nothing interesting.
- Screenshot useful replies to common DM questions and post them to Stories so messaging you feels normal to followers.
24Story conversion and story-view killers
- For sales, post one still, text-heavy Story asking for a specific DM keyword, because DM replies are the strongest signal for Story reach.
- Avoid link stickers, long talking-head Stories and reshared posts, which all lower Story views for the day.
25DM automation with ManyChat
- Replace link-in-bio selling with keyword DM automation so interested buyers also count as engagement that lifts the post.
- Start with one keyword tied to one free resource before building more complex automations.
2630 rapid-fire questions
- Shadowbans aren't real; sudden reach drops come from rule violations or weaker posts, not hidden penalties.
- Instagram does not pay creators directly, and small accounts can still earn through UGC, affiliate sales and their own offers.
Terms worth knowing.
- Skip rate
- The share of viewers who scroll past a reel almost immediately instead of stopping on it. Lower is better, and it is the first signal Instagram uses to decide whether a post deserves more reach.
- Retention rate
- The percentage of viewers still watching at the end of a reel, or still swiping at the last slide of a carousel. Above 50% at the end is a strong general target.
- Connected vs disconnected reach
- Connected reach is views from people who already follow you; disconnected reach is views from non-followers. Reels drive the most disconnected reach, while Stories have almost none.
- ICP (ideal customer profile)
- A specific description of the person a business most wants to attract and sell to, such as moms over 30 who want to work out at home.
- Trial reels
- An Instagram reel option that shows the video only to non-followers first, letting creators test a reel or reach new people without posting it to their existing audience.
- Outlier score
- A comparison of one post's performance against that account's average. A 3.3x outlier did more than three times the account's usual views.
- Engagement pod
- A group chat of creators who agree to like and comment on each other's posts immediately after publishing to fake early engagement. It tends to decay and hurt reach over time.
- Rewatch bait
- Very short reels packed with more on-screen text than anyone can read, or with a hook that says 'read the caption', built to fake replays. Instagram now ranks these lower.
- Zeigarnik effect
- The psychological pull to finish something incomplete. Announcing a numbered list keeps viewers watching because they want to hear every item.
- Upcycling
- Turning one idea into several formats (talking-head reel, carousel, B-roll reel) and reposting each version months apart so a small pool of ideas fills a daily schedule.
- DM automation
- Software that sends an automatic direct message when someone comments or replies with a keyword, such as 'comment GUIDE and I will send it to you'. ManyChat is the best-known tool.
- Collab post
- A single Instagram post published jointly by two or more accounts so it appears on each profile and reaches each audience.
- Close friends story
- An Instagram Story visible only to a hand-picked list of followers, used for personal updates that are not meant for the public audience.
Things they pointed at.
01:51channelInterview with Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram (Build Your Tribe podcast)
2:11:22toolInstagram Edits app
2:40:38linkSocialPilot hashtag study
Lines you could clip.
18:15
“If you're trying to be liked by everyone, you'll be loved by no one.”
23:31
“The only wrong niche is no niche.”
35:04
“Ain't nobody searching your name. Nobody knows you yet.”
1:02:57
“Don't wade in the shallow waters. Dive into the deep end and fully commit to professional cinematic editing or stay out of the pool altogether and just yap.”
1:11:08
“Education is only valuable if people are actually paying attention.”
1:35:29
“Enragement equals engagement.”
1:37:37
“On Instagram, formats beat topics.”
2:02:43
“The more you post, the more you grow.”
2:09:48
“If you do not currently have 14 days of posts that are already done, created, edited, scheduled, and ready to be uploaded, then I want you to take the next 14 days off of posting.”
2:23:23
“If you want to post every single day, one time per day for 365 days, you only need about 40 unique ideas.”
2:48:55
“Audience over algorithm, psychology over technology, and humans over hacks.”
2:58:25
“You do not rise to the level of your motivation, but you fall to the level of your discipline and even more so you fall to the level of your system.”
3:47:21
“Am I shadow banned? No, there's no such thing as shadow ban. Make better content or post more content.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
This is your full Instagram masterclass. In this video, you're going to learn everything that you need to know to grow on Instagram. And when I say grow, I'm not just talking about getting more followers.
I'm talking about increasing your views, your engagement, your sales, your community, and your customer base all organically on Instagram. And yes, this episode is four hours long. So buckle up.
Trying to complete this entire episode from start to finish is admirable and pretty noble of you. But in my opinion, it's actually going to be better for you to break this up into smaller parts throughout the episode i'll insert good stopping points and even points where i recommend that you take a break and implement what i was just teaching so that you can learn as you go instead of drinking from a fire hose and then trying to implement your 17 pages of notes when you're done with the episode also of course this is public this is free information you can keep coming back to this video over and over again and keep referencing it because what i'm going to be teaching you today isn't about trends it's not about how the algorithm works exactly in this moment it's about how to win in the long run on Instagram.
And I have designed the majority of this episode so that you can consume it audio only if you need to. There will be parts where I give visual demonstrations, where we show screen recordings, and where I have just things that you should want to see and that will help you if you actually look at them visually. However, if you want to listen to this on a long drive, if you want to throw this on in the background while you're doing chores, that should be totally fine.
And you're still going to get the vast majority of the value today. But before we even get into said value, who the heck am I that you're about to be learning from? First and foremost, hello, my name is Brock Johnson, and Instagram has been my full -time job for about the last seven or eight years.
Pretty much my entire professional career has been focused on helping people grow on Instagram. I started teaching people how to grow on Instagram back in 2018, and since then, I've amassed over a million followers. This is a real -time follower tracker, so throughout this episode, hopefully that number is going to continue to tick up, and you can watch that in real time to verify my legitimacy.
I call myself an Instagram c***. and in 2025, I became the first and only Instagram coach to get to interview Adam Lazeri, the head of Instagram himself. And yes, that interview is actually available on this podcast as well.
So if you're not already, make sure that you hit the subscribe button. And then after this episode, you'll probably be recommended to watch that one next. With the help of my mom, who has nearly a million followers on Instagram herself, we co -founded the Instaclub Hub, which is the number one Instagram growth academy in the world.
We've helped more than 50 ,000 creators and small business owners who have taken part of our Instaclub Hub grow on Instagram. And in fact, our average Instaclub Hub member has grown by more than 15 ,000 followers. in the last 12 months.
Think about that for just a second. The average person who's in our community gains more than 15 ,000 followers per year. So the strategies that I'm going to be sharing with you today aren't just theory.
They're not just something that works for me. There's something that has been tried and tested and proven to be effective on the vast majority of our students in our membership. With that being said, though, there are always going to be exceptions.
What I'm going to be sharing with you is general recommendations, best practices, best fit, things that work for most people, but there is no one size fits all. The algorithm is always changing.
Every audience is a little bit different. Every creator, business, and brand is a little bit unique. And so it's my job to give you what works for most people.
It's my job to do the research and to tell you, hey, here's what should work. And then it's ultimately your job to implement and find, does that actually work for you? Or is something else going to work for you?
But it's my job to give you that basis so you at least know what your first step can be. And the method that I'm going to be teaching you today is the same method that we teach our Insta Club Hub members, just boiled down or summarized into one succinct video. And it's what I like to call my nap method.
Because while growing on Instagram will never be as easy as taking a nap, hopefully by the end of this video, you recognize that growing on Instagram is as simple as taking a nap. So let's get into the NAP method. And I know that immediately I'm going to annoy a lot of you because the N in the NAP method is niche.
You have to pick a niche. Niche is the foundation of growing on Instagram. And according to the studies of our incoming Instaclub members, 93 % of people get this wrong.
Or more specifically, 93 % of our incoming members who report, yeah, I'm good. I know my niche. I've already niched down.
I've already picked my niche. Upon further investigation, they actually haven't quite niched down enough or maybe they haven't even niched down at all.
But the niche is the foundation. We can't talk about what kind of lumber we're going to buy to build this home. We can't talk about the flooring or the cabinets or the tile or the marble or anything else that's going in this beautiful home that we're going to be building if it is built on a shaky foundation.
You will struggle to even get off the ground. You will struggle to ever grow. if you are not niche down and the reason why is simple human nature i want you to stop thinking about yourself as a creator or a business owner for just a second and i want you to think about the way you consume content you follow people on instagram because one reason initially now eventually you might love a creator and you love all these diverse aspects of them and you love that they're into football and pokemon and they love dogs and you love all these different things about them but you don't know all of that at the moment that you press follow Instead, you follow them usually just for one, maybe two reasons, but really just one primary reason.
And that essentially is what their niche is. That's what they are known for. And before you get scared, you can expand later and you will expand later and your audience will want you to expand and diversify and talk about a wide variety of things.
But when you're first getting started, the easiest way to pick yourself up off the ground and get that snowball rolling downhill is to niche down. I would also argue that the more you niche down, the easier it is to gain followers, at least early on. And the analogy that I like to use here is that niching down is like .
If you try to branch out and go in all these different directions and talk about all of your interests and passions and hobbies from the get -go, from day one, then you're never going to become known for that one specific thing. And to stick with the tree analogy, you're never going to get off the ground. You're just going to be a bush or a pile of vines spreading out.
You're not actually going to be this big, strong beetle. tree so instead we're gonna build that trunk we're gonna build the foundation however you want to think about it whatever analogy you want to use we're going to niche down and then we can start to sprinkle in all of our interests and passions and hobbies and then we can start to branch out as we grow and as our community builds and as people want to know more about what makes us unique But again, if you start branching out too soon and you do start to get followers, then they're going to be only interested in one of those topics, but not the other four that you're posting about.
For example, let's say you make a great post about what you had for lunch. It's this really creative recipe and it looks really engaging and it looks really delicious. And then people follow you from that recipe, but then you're not really a recipe creator.
You're not really a food blogger. And so the rest of your posts are about fitness or they're about your family or they're about your pets or they're about all these other interests that you have. Well, then all of the people who followed you from that initial food video are either going to be unengaged because they're like I don't care.
That's not why I showed up here. I showed up because you had that really great salad that you made for lunch. I don't care about your dog training.
I don't care about your fitness tips. Or more than likely, they're never even going to follow you in the first place because they saw that great salad recipe and they clicked on your profile and they were like, oh, this was just a one hit wonder. I'm not going to be a fan or a follower of this person.
I liked that one post. I'm going to get that one recipe. I'm going to make this salad, but I'm ultimately not going to keep coming back for more because there isn't more to come back for.
Pretty much all of the biggest creators in the world were known, at least initially, for one thing, and that is what allowed them to explode. That's what allowed them to build their reputation.
That is what allowed them to grow their following. I mean, even Kim Kardashian, who's arguably one of the most famous people in the world, arguably one of the most famous creators of all time, if you could call her that. She's definitely one of the most famous influencers of all time.
I think that's a much more fitting definition. She was initially known for one particular video with Ray J, if you're picking up on and putting down. Also, just so you understand where we're headed with this, your niche is ultimately what your feed will be focused on.
On one hand, I don't want to get too technical, and then on the other hand, I hope this isn't too simple, but your feed is the photos, the carousels, and the reels that you post on Instagram. So basically, anything that you would post that would show up on your profile besides your Instagram stories or Instagram Live. Those posts are ultimately going to stem from your niche.
vast majority of the time but don't worry we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves we're going to talk more about posting what to post how much to post and all of that later on But before we do, it's important that I cover six misconceptions around this idea of niche. Misconception number one is that your industry or your topic or even your ICP, which stands for ideal customer profile or your target follower, none of those things are necessarily your niche.
Additionally, what you sell, if you already have something to sell or your product, that is not necessarily your niche. Instead, I define niche and for the purposes of our conversation today, let's think about niche as both the who and the what at the same time. What are you going to be talking about?
What is that topic? What is the category or focus of this account going to be? And then also at the same time, who is the intended audience?
What is the ICP? Who do you want to be attracting to your profile? For example, fitness is an industry, but fitness is not a niche.
Instead, a niche might be 30 minute at home workouts with little to no equipment. That's the topic. And then the who would be moms over the age of 30.
My topic that almost all my posts are about is growing on Instagram. However, my niche is helping small business owners and content creators. That's my who.
And then my what is helping them grow on Instagram organically. Misconception number two is that you are the niche. And I don't think that this statement is necessarily wrong, but I do think that the way that it's been interpreted by a lot of people is incorrect.
And I think that incorrect interpretation of you are the niche is that I can just post about anything. I can post about all of my different interests and passions and hobbies. I can post about everything that makes me a beautiful, unique butterfly, and that will help me grow my audience.
And nine times out of 10, that just isn't the case. Instead, I believe that all of your interests, passions, and hobbies, your quirks, the things that make you a unique, beautiful butterfly, those things do make you stand out within your... niche, but those things ultimately are not the niche.
So let's go back to that fitness example that I gave a moment ago. If the topic is fitness, but then the niche is helping moms over the age of 30 get fit with 30 minute or less at home workouts that don't require any equipment, then your interests and passions and hobbies can still appear in the content and help you stand out in a few ways.
Like for example, if your personality is super bubbly and enthusiastic, that is going to come through in your content, but that isn't necessarily your niche. That's just part of what makes you stand out and part of what makes you unique compared to anyone else who's posting fitness content.
Maybe you're an absolute dog lover and you have seven rescue dogs. It's not like you're going to suddenly make 50 % of your posts about rescuing dogs and dog training and dog behavior. But as you are giving these fitness tips and as you're making content about at -home workouts for moms over the age of 30, maybe your dogs are running around.
That makes you more relatable. That's more genuine. That's more real.
That allows people to get to know you on a deeper level. And that's one of your interests and passions, but that's not ultimately what your account is all about.
That's a piece of you. That's something that's in your content, but that is not the focus of your content. Again, ultimately, as the consumer, we follow people for one, maybe two reasons, and then we fall in love with them for all of those other interests and passions and hobbies, but that's not what gets us in the door initially.
I kind of think of it like dating, right? When you first meet someone or you ask someone out on a first date or you're going on a first date with someone, you don't know all of those things yet. You don't love them yet.
You don't know all of their interests and passions and hobbies. There was a few things that made you agree to the first date or there was a few things that caught your attention and made you interested in even asking them on a first date. Maybe there was one shared interest.
Maybe you were at the same location doing the same thing. Just like dating, when you're choosing someone to follow on Instagram, there's a little bit of judging a book by its cover going on because you just don't have time to read the entire book initially. You're choosing to follow someone based off a couple of posts and whether or not those couple of posts pique your interest.
Misconception number three is that you're stuck with this niche for the rest of your life and that couldn't be further from the truth. Like I mentioned earlier, as you grow, your audience will want you to expand. They will want to get to know more about you and you will probably want to share more about yourself with your community and so you're naturally going to start incorporating more of these interests and passions and hobbies.
You're also not stuck because something we'll talk about in just a little bit is that you can change and you can pivot, but it's much easier to change direction once you're already moving. If your car is still parked in the driveway, it's really, really hard to change lanes. But if you're already on the highway, it's much easier to throw in your blinker and get over.
I mean, take me as a great example of this. My initial niche as a content creator or business owner was helping moms keep their teens safe on Snapchat. i was basically a paid snitch and this was back in 2016 before instagram stories way before tick tock and when snapchat stories were all the rage they were all over the news and everyone especially parents especially moms were really concerned about what was going on on snapchat and so i recognized that that was a problem that was something that the market was talking about that was something that just like the general population cared about and it was something that i felt i had a unique skill set to solve i want to be clear here that i didn't think this was my calling i didn't think this is what i'd be doing for the rest of my life.
This was just something that gave me a starting point. This allowed me to start building my audience and start making revenue, start building a business that I knew I could then pivot or change in the future. And so as a 19 year old at the time, I was like, Hey, well, I know how to use Snapchat.
I don't really know anything about parenting. I know some things about how my parents parented me, but I don't really know anything about parenting. And so my philosophy was if I could teach other moms specifically how to use Snapchat, they would understand.
it much better. And when we understand something, we're much less scared of it. And we can be much more practical about how we approach it.
And as I assumed, how they would parent their kids. So I initially began building my audience, not even on Instagram, but on a completely different app on Snapchat and doing it through Snapchat stories, giving tips, giving advice, teaching these moms how they could use Snapchat, what was going on, what were their kids up to on Snapchat.
Like I said, I was a paid snitch. But then as time progressed, all of these moms started following me. They started learning to use Snapchat.
And many of them were small business owners. Many of them were in network marketing or they had their own boutique or whatever. And they saw that I was building my business, which to give you a peek behind the scenes, it was a course.
It was basically a $20 video guide teaching them how to use Snapchat. And they saw that I had used Snapchat to start to build my personal brand and to start to build my business and make sales. And so I started getting a lot of questions from these moms about, hey, Could I use Snapchat to grow my network marketing business?
Could I use Snapchat to make sales? Could I use Snapchat to grow as a mom influencer or mom blogger or a fitness creator? And so I started taking a lot of what I had learned growing my own business and just started giving tips and teaching them.
And naturally, my niche changed. Because I was listening to my audience, I was able to pivot and I was able to kind of rebrand organically over time. Then a few months later, Instagram released Instagram Stories.
And I believe it was Kylie Jenner who led this massive... Exodus saying, Hey, we're all going to move from Snapchat stories back to Instagram. So we can just post Instagram stories and we don't have to be on all these different apps.
And so all of these moms who were following me agreed, they were like, yeah, I don't want another app. I don't want to have Instagram and Snapchat. So I will just go back to Instagram and use Instagram stories.
So I followed suit. I went with them to Instagram stories. And I very quickly realized that a lot of what I taught for Snapchat stories applied to Instagram stories.
And this makes sense because if you remember Instagram stories, especially in the early days, were just a complete copy of Snapchat stories. So I transitioned my business again.
I changed my niche again from Snapchat stories for building a small business or growing as a creator to Instagram stories as my focus. And my who was still small business owners, network marketers, and content creators. And then fast forward about eight years later, here we are with about a million followers, still focused on Instagram, but there's definitely been a lot of changes along the way.
Misconception number four is that you can only talk about one thing. And that's not true for three reasons. Number one, like I briefly mentioned earlier, you have your Instagram stories where you can let your freak flag fly.
We're going to talk about that at the end of today's episode. But on your Instagram stories, you can talk about pretty much anything and everything. And people kind of expect you to break out of your niche on your Instagram stories.
The second reason that you're allowed to talk about more than one thing is that while I recommend having the majority of your feed posts relating to your topic, you can definitely make feed posts about your... other interests and passions and hobbies. And I believe that's actually a helpful strategy in a good way to get people to give a shit, to get people to care, because then you're not just the person who makes great salad recipes, but you're the person who makes great salad recipes and has that daughter who is in middle school and has been beefing with her mom.
And so the other moms who follow you can kind of relate to you on a deeper level and they feel like they trust you. And the third reason that you're allowed to post about more than one thing is that while that one thing is your niche, there are different components of it, right? There are different pieces.
I think we would all agree that no matter how specific we get with our niche, there are different topics even within that. We can always go a level deeper, right? Even if you're specifically helping moms get fit from home in less than 30 minutes a day with no gym or equipment needed, there's a lot of different things that you could talk about.
You could talk about strength training. You could do an entire video just about leg training. You could do a post about...
exercises that can be done during commercial breaks. You can talk about healthy meal planning or healthy meal planning on a budget. Or healthy meal planning on a budget for a family.
There's always topics within topics within topics. And so no matter how much you've niched down, you're never limited to just talking about one thing. Misconception number five is no one outside my niche will follow me.
Or I don't want to get too specific because I don't want to exclude people. That's what I oftentimes hear from clients that I'm working with. And the reality is that's just not going to happen.
Even if all of your posts are specifically for moms in their 30s, helping them get fit from home in less than 30 minutes a day. with little to no equipment, you're still going to have moms in their 20s. You're still going to have women in their 30s who are not moms.
You're still going to have moms in their 40s. You're still going to have men following you. You're always going to attract people who are outside of your niche.
But if you do not have a specific target demographic to begin with, then you're just going to be kind of vanilla. You're just going to be floating around and no one's really going to want to follow you. You're not going to be that specifically beneficial to any specific group.
I've heard this great quote that when you're niching down, the goal is not to be everyone's cup of tea. which is impossible, by the way. The goal is to be one person's shot of vodka or one person's glass of Diet Coke with the little tiny balls of crunchy ice like they have at certain fast food restaurants.
Basically, if you're trying to be liked by everyone, you'll be loved by no one. And so instead, I want you to get really specific about who you want to love your page and people who are adjacent or who are outside of that group will still end up liking and following your page as well. And then the sixth and final misconception, which leads us into our next segment, is that you need to be crystal clear about your niche from step one before you even start posting.
And that's not necessarily true. I do believe that you're going to want to get crystal clear about your niche before you start growing. Or to say it another way, it's going to be very, very tough to grow if you're not clear on your niche.
But you don't have to have it like tattooed on your forehead set in stone before you make your very first post. And so like I said, we're about to transition into the next segment where we talk about how to niche down. I think you understand now why it's so important to niche down.
But if you want to take a break, this is a good moment to press pause. This is a good moment also to brainstorm or to think about what is your niche? What might you want your niche to be if you haven't gotten started yet?
Could you niche down even further? Because regardless of who we are, going through this process is a great practice to just make sure that we have a solid foundation for growth. All right, so how do you niche down?
I think there's really two ways to go about this or two options. And which one you choose is going to be based off of your life experience. I don't really want to tie this to an age and say like, if you're over the age of 30, then pick option B.
If you're under the age of 30, pick option A. Because there are people who are... 20 who have amazing lived experiences and who have gone through some stuff and who have learned a lot and who are maybe not even experts because i don't think you need to be an expert in a niche in order to pick it but they have just a ton of experience or love or it's been like their fascination their entire life and then there are people who are 50 who haven't done those things and so it's tough to put an age on it but generally speaking the two options are as follows option a is to start posting about anything and everything that you think could be your niche start posting about all of your interests and passions and hobbies.
And the goal here is not like to go viral. The goal is not to grow your audience. The goal is really just to find your footing and to find what you like, find what you enjoy.
See if there's like one or two or maybe three topics that you're like, yeah, I feel like I could create so many posts about this. For myself personally, yes, helping people grow organically on Instagram is my niche currently. But some of my other interests include snowboarding and Pokemon and football and my dogs and being outdoorsy and hiking.
and living in Utah. I'm also an avid breakfast burrito connoisseur, I have one every single day, in fact it's what is currently in my stomach digesting as I'm speaking right now. And I'm sure if I wrote it down, I would have a list of tens, if not hundreds of other interests and passions and hobbies.
And so if I was just getting started today, I could create content around each of those different topics and see if any of them really light my fire. Maybe I make a post about snowboarding and I'm like, oh my God, I love that. Like that was so fun.
I felt like I was so creative. I felt like I was in the zone and I felt like I create so many more posts about snowboarding. Pay attention to that.
The second thing that I want you to pay attention to as you're posting and as you're starting to just throw things against the wall and experiment. and do cool stuff is what are people responding to? What is your audience interacting with?
What are people actually engaging with? And I want you to pay attention to what are they... actually engaging with what videos or topics are actually getting views what videos or topics are people actually liking and commenting on i think a mistake that a lot of people make is they overweight what one person specifically said so even though seven out of their ten posts about snowboarding did really well and got great views and comments they got one message from their best friend from high school who was like oh my god i loved your baking video and we overweight that one comment and it makes sense why it's because it's more qualitative right it's something that someone actually said to us and so it feels more real but then we overweight that so we start making a bunch of baking videos and they don't perform as well so pay attention to what are people actually engaging with not what is your bestie from high school telling you that she loved or what is that one person messaging you telling you oh my god this video was so great I loved it so much make more of these pay attention to that but ultimately put more stock and weight into what are people actually engaging with
And one thing that I briefly mentioned here is doing cool stuff. I think that if you're someone who is maybe a little bit younger or who has a boring, mundane life by your own definition, I want to encourage you to start challenging yourself. Start getting out of your comfort zone.
Start trying new things. Start trying to pick up new hobbies or new skills because it is those challenges that make your audience interested. It is those challenges that make your life more interesting.
I mean, not to get philosophical or to stand on my soapbox here, but if every single day looks the exact same for you and you feel bored in your life then it's going to be hard for your audience to not feel bored watching Again, all of that was option A for how do you pick your niche.
Option B is if you're someone who, again, maybe you're a little bit older, maybe you're just someone who has more lived experience, maybe you're someone who you already know what you're obsessed with, you already know what you geek out over, what your hyper fixation has been for the last decade. And so I want to encourage you to just pick something.
And regardless of which option you go with, option A or option B, ultimately that's what you have to do is you have to just pick something. Oftentimes people are worried about picking the wrong niche or what is the right niche. There is no right or wrong.
The only wrong niche is no niche. And so instead, I think the best way to find your right niche is to just pick something like I did with helping moms keep their teens safe on Snapchat. And then you can learn about yourself.
You can learn about your audience. You can grow. You can pivot.
You can rebrand. You can change. But those things are only possible once the car is already in motion.
So just pick something. One tool that I do want to recommend, and this is a tool that I'm actually going to recommend a few times throughout today's episode that can be helpful in niching down or picking your our niche is Poppy AI.
Poppy AI is, yes, an AI tool, but it's more than that because it's not just a chat bot. It's kind of like a whiteboard where you can bring all of your ideas together. You know, in those crime movies when the detective is doing an investigation and they have like all these pins of different photos and news clippings on a wall and a map, and they have like red yarn tracing things to each other and connecting things.
That's kind of how Poppy AI works. And so if you're someone who's a visual learner or someone who really appreciates having things kind of laid out in front of you, Poppy AI is great for that. But specifically, Specifically, here's how you can use Poppy to help you pick your niche or niche down further.
First off, you're going to create a new board in Poppy. And then the cool thing about these boards in Poppy is that they're not tied to just one platform. It's not tied to just Instagram reels or YouTube videos.
You can pull in pretty much any link, any article, any text, anything that you want, any piece of media, you can pull it into this board and have it all in one place. So specifically, here's what I'm going to recommend. Step one, create a new board.
Step two, add a brain dump of your voice to that board. Go for a walk. Go for a long drive.
Work out. Go do something that isn't in your home. Oftentimes, the best ideas come when we're out and about in the world and we're not just sitting in that same spot where we sit all day long.
And record a voice note on your phone. Literally, whip out your phone and start the voice recording and just yap. Just talk about all of the different skills you have, all of the different life experiences you lived.
Give it your whole life story if you want it to. Talk about your hobbies, your passions. Talk about the things that your friends rely on you for.
Talk about your personality. All of that. Just brain dump.
I don't care if it's five minutes. I don't care if it's five hours long. Just brain dump your voice.
Then you can pull that audio or the transcript of it into Poppy and Poppy will instantly know pretty much everything that it needs to know about you. It's kind of like giving it the information after you've done this experimentation phase of posting about all these different topics. So that's step two is to do that brain dump and then bring that brain dump into Poppy.
And then step three is kind of like competitor analysis or competitor research, where I want you to find different people who are in the niche that you think you might go with. Or even if there's like two or three different niches that you're kind of between, go to accounts, popular creators, popular pages, popular brands who are in that niche and just copy the link to their page and bring it right into Poppy.
That way, Poppy has an even better understanding of what's already out there. What are other people in your industry up to? And I think this is really key because it will help you identify where there are gaps in the market.
What are some things that you talked about in your voice note that differentiate you from the other top creators in your niche? Then the final step in using Poppy and part of this process is to bring in your own content. You can just copy the link to your own Instagram if you've already been posting or if you've been experimenting on other platforms or just experimenting with a few posts here or there.
You can bring all those into Poppy as well so that it can do this outlier research and find what are your current best performing topics as you've been in this throw spaghetti against the wall phase. But ultimately, like I said, you just have to pick something. You just have to decide.
You just have to commit. And once you commit, I want you to commit for at least 90 days, ideally more like six months.
And that's because it takes time. Now, if after like a month or even after a few weeks, you're like, oh my God, I just hate this. I just can't do this anymore.
I give you permission to stop at that point. But if it's not that extreme, if it's like, hey, maybe I'm not loving this. Maybe I'm not getting great engagement.
Maybe things aren't working out the way I thought I would. Maybe I'm not growing as fast as I initially hoped. Stick with it.
for at least 90 days, but ideally six months because that gives you time. That gives the algorithm time to help you find the right people. That gives your audience time to find you.
And one quick algorithm note that I do want to make here, one of the things that the algorithm actually optimizes for is what they call breaking content. And this comes directly from Adam Moseri himself, the head of Instagram. One of the four key things that they're looking at is breaking.
And when I first heard him say breaking, my assumption was like breaking news or like breaking trends. No, it's actually breaking out. So they're looking for smaller creators, newer accounts, people with a lower audience, people who have traditionally not had a massive audience or views or anything like that.
And they're looking to see if those people can break out and seeing if those people might actually have interesting content for a larger audience, for more people. And so I, again, want to encourage you in these early days, stick with it because Instagram oftentimes will reward you in these early days and give you disproportionate reach or give you more views than you might have.
otherwise deserved or earned because they're trying to see, hey, would this other audience actually be interested? Hey, would this group of people actually like your stuff? And so just keep sticking with it for at least 90 days, if not six months.
Right now is another great stopping point because this is the end of the N. This is the end of the niche segment. We're about to move on to the A.
So if you know that niching down is something that you need to do, which I would argue is pretty much everyone, I would suggest pausing right now, signing up for Poppy, which is linked down in the show notes below this episode, and just starting to ideate, starting to game plan, starting to kick around different ideas of how you could niche down or what your niche is to begin with.
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Just $3 for your first four months by visiting freshbooks .com forward slash podcast. But with all of that being said, let's move on to the A in the NAP method, which stands for attention grabbing profile. The attention grabbing profile is the first piece where we're actually going to open Instagram.
I mean, sure, I guess so far if we've been like throwing things against the wall and posting. you could have already set up your profile. But now that we have niched down, now that we have picked what our niche is going to be, at least initially, we're going to optimize our profile accordingly and make sure that when people show up on our page, they know what our page is all about.
And that is what an attention -grabbing, optimized profile is able to do. Fortunately, if you've already set up your Instagram account, pretty much everything that I'm going to share with you right now is editable. It is changeable.
So no need to worry about that. Let's get into it. The first piece of an attention -grabbing profile is the profile picture.
The profile picture is the area where you have the most control or customization as to the look of your profile and what might distinctly make you stand out from anyone else who's in the comments section or anyone else who is seeing your profile as they're scrolling through the search or the different profiles that they could potentially click on.
And so some general recommendations for your profile picture is number one, brighter is better. Generally speaking, brighter profile pictures get more clicks. number two you only want one focal point in the profile picture so if this is a personal brand or an instagram account that you are creating for yourself as the primary person who people are following then you want just your face a close -up well -lit selfie if this is a business brand and this instagram account is going to be representing an actual company then you want a logo but pro tip make sure that your logo is iconified or that it's made in an icon style so that it's easily recognizable when shrunk down itty bitty super small.
I think the easiest way to think about this is Google versus the Rainbow G. When Google makes their profile picture on social media, they're going to use the Rainbow G and not the full word Google. Nike is going to use the swoosh, not the word Nike.
The icon is just easier to see, it's more recognizable, it's more memorable, and thus it'll get more clicks. Another pro tip for your attention grabbing profile picture is to remove the background or at least make the background blurry or at least, at least, at least make it so that there's a high contrast between the focal point of the profile picture, whether it's your face or the logo and whatever the background is behind it.
In fact, that's one thing that I don't necessarily love about my profile picture. While my background is yellow and I like the yellow because it's bright, it's energetic, it's attention grabbing. And I think that those things fit who I am as a person and fit my brand.
I don't love that my skin tone kind of makes me blend into the background so I have added this little drop shadow to kind of pop myself off of the background but really if color psychology was different and if it was like blue that was the most attention -grabbing color then I probably would have made my background blue and I would have been a higher contrast between my skin in the background the next piece of the attention -grabbing profile is the username now the username is one of one what I mean by that is that once you have a username no one else can have that same username similarly if anyone else has already taken a username you can't take that one for yourselves.
So if you're someone with a relatively uncommon first or last name, or if you're someone who is creating an Instagram account for your business of which there is no one else with that same business name, then you're in luck. Your username can just be your first and last, or your username can just be your business name. If you're someone like myself who has Johnson as their last name, which is one of the most common last names in the world, then you're going to have to get a little bit more creative with what your username is.
But ultimately, I recommend that your username should very plainly represent who you are or what the account is going to represent. So for example, my Instagram is all about me.
Sure. It's technically like the niche is all about growing on Instagram, but like I'm in every post, it is me who you are following. And I am the one who's teaching you about growing on Instagram, but ultimately you're following me.
And so that's why I'm in the profile picture. And that's why my username is my first and last name. Now I added the number 11 into my username because that's very important.
That's a family number for us. That's something that's more than just a lucky number. It's something that goes back to.
generations. And so I included the 11. Some other ideas that you could use is a period in between your first and last name and underscore in between your first and last name, the word the in front of your first and last.
So you could do the Brock Johnson. You could also add the word official onto the end. So Brock Johnson official.
You could even explore including some sort of niche related keyword into the end. So if I was like a fitness coach, I could do Brock Johnson fitness or Brock Johnson coach. Adding a little keyword like that to your username can be a good thing because it aids your searchability.
However, it can also sometimes hurt your overall brand or image because it might make your username really long and hard to remember. Or it could just affect the perceived value of your brand. For example, let's say Nike's Instagram handle was like Nike .fitnessapparel4athletes.
You would be like, well, why is that their username? Like, was Nike already taken? And so it's not a big deal here, but I don't always recommend including a keyword into your username.
Instead, I always, always, always recommend including keywords in your Instagram name. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they're setting up their Instagram profile. Of course, you set your...
username as whatever your username is going to be. We understand that. We make our profile picture and then it says, what's your Instagram name?
And you're like, oh, well, my name is, and you type your first and last. Here's the problem. Ain't nobody searching your name.
Nobody knows you yet. You are not recognizable. You are not being searched for unless you are like a top 1 % A -list celebrity.
And so instead, what you need to do on this line is include keywords or SEO friendly search engine optimized. keywords and phrases that allow people to discover you on Instagram search. So what you can do is you can include your first name and a hyphen.
You could even include first and last and a hyphen, but then it's really essential that on this line, you include these keywords. You include terms and phrases that people are actually searching for, things that people are actually looking up. That way, when people search on Google or ChatGPT or Clod or any other AI model, or when they're searching right on Instagram, they're able to find you.
If instead you are just Brenda Smith, no one's going to find you. But if you're Brenda hyphen fitness coaching for women over 30, then you're going to be much more discoverable and you're going to show up in way more search results.
My favorite all -time example of this is actually the story of how I found my videographer, the team who produced my interview with the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, which again, I talked about that earlier and you can watch that when we're done here. I met with the meta team and I met with Adam Mazary's team and they were like, okay, we're planning.
Here's the date. Here's the time. Here's the location for the interview.
They said, here, just send us the contact info for your videographers, your video production team for the podcast, and we'll coordinate like getting them a loading dock for all their equipment and all that stuff. And I was like, okay, cool. Sounds good.
We ended that Zoom call and I was like, oh my gosh, I don't have a video production team. I mean, like literally this episode that you're watching right now, however long this episode is, is filmed in my home office. My dog is sitting right here.
I have my camera right here. I have my computer right here with my notes and I have my backup camera, which is literally just an old iPhone. I don't have a fancy production team.
So I had to find one, right? And so what I did was I went to Instagram, of course, and I searched. san francisco videographer or san francisco video production and i found a short list of like maybe eight to ten different companies eight to ten different individuals who had those services and then i went through a couple of their pages i looked at what they post i looked at examples of their work i looked at their portfolios and i ultimately picked one who i hired here's the kicker I bet there was some video production team out there who would have done a better job, who would have made my life easier.
Not that the team that I hired made it difficult by any means. They were great. But there was a team that probably would have made it easier, would have costed less, would have done it quicker, would have, like, it would have been better, right?
But I have no idea that they existed because their Instagram name says WaveWin Media or Bay Area Productions, right? I have no way to know to search that. I have no way to find them.
But instead... I was able to find the team that I did hire because they had San Francisco video production or San Francisco videographer in their searchable name, thus making them discoverable, thus making them the team that I ultimately hired. And that is why this searchable line is so important.
And this line is extra powerful because you can write whatever you want. You have more characters. I believe you have over 50 characters that you can use on this Instagram name line.
And you don't have to worry about using the same thing as someone else. Literally every single person on Instagram could change their Instagram name to the exact same thing and it wouldn't matter.
The algorithm doesn't care. Instagram doesn't have any rules about what goes on your name line, at least not any rules in terms of you can't copy someone else. So you're welcome to use whatever searchable terms, phrases, or SEO keywords that you want.
My pro tip here is to go to googletrends .com and type in a few different ideas as to what these keywords or phrases could be. And you're going to get real search history, real search data as to what are people actually looking up. For example, one of my favorite funny examples of this is I was working with one of my students once and she said that she's a balloonist.
And that's what her Instagram name line said. She said, I am a balloonist. And I said, what is a balloonist?
Does that mean that you do hot air balloons? Does that mean that you do balloon art? Does that mean that you do balloon sculptures?
Does that mean that you like make balloons? What's a balloonist, right? And she said, oh, well, I do corporate balloon installations for like big events.
I said, oh, okay. So we went to Google Trends and we typed in balloonist and we typed in corporate balloon art. I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out which one of those was more heavily searched for.
It was the second one. And so we made that her Instagram name line and thus she appeared in more searches and she almost immediately started gaining more followers and getting more bookings because it was just obvious what she did and it was easier for people to find her. The next piece of your Instagram profile is the bio.
And the bio is really where you make your elevator pitch. The big mistake here is that people try to get too cutesy with it. They try to put too many cliches, too many meaningless phrases and expressions.
People are just skimming your bio. And so your goal here is to be super concise, super clear, and plainly tell someone why they should follow you. What is someone to expect from your profile?
The general outline that I recommend following is line number one of your bio plainly states your niche. Who are you posting for? What are you posting about?
That's usually the simplest definition as to why someone should follow you. If they fit that demographic, if they're looking for that problem to be solved or that topic to be addressed or whatever. then they're going to press follow.
Lines two and or line three, it depends. We'll just call it the middle lines here. That's where you add either clarity or credibility.
That's where you tell people how long you've been doing this. If you have any sort of certifications or any sort of background, any sort of credibility, this is also where you can get a little bit more specific about what your niche is. For example, maybe line one says, I help moms in their 30s get strong from home.
And then the second line says, no equipment needed, no gym membership. So it's kind of like clarifying what that niche is. And then the third line is where you give credibility.
I lost 75 pounds and I'm a mom of three. And the fourth and final line, which yes, I only recommend four lines because if you go more than four lines, Instagram will truncate the fifth line and anything below it. And it will just say dot, dot, dot more.
And ain't nobody reading the dot, dot, dot more. It's just like a website. Like no one's scrolling all the way to the bottom.
It's really just those first four lines, what's above the fold, so to speak. And so the fourth line is where you put a call to action. Now you might not have a business or product ready to go yet.
You might not be ready to make a sale or direct people to a link just yet. So when you're first getting started, the call to action might be follow based. It might be follow for daily workout ideas, or it might be watch my Instagram stories for behind the scenes.
Eventually your call to action might be click the link for my free masterclass or send me a message with the word webinar and I will send you my webinar. Basically, line one niche, line two and or three, basically the middle lines are about credibility and clarity. And then the final line, which is typically going to be your fourth line, is a call to action.
But really, this is your elevator pitch. There's no need to include the non -niche fun facts that you're a Virgo, you're a wine lover, you have three dogs, you got married to your husband on XILVXLIIXXX, you were Miss Teen Arkansas. None of those non -niche fun facts matter just yet.
You have a few seconds to study show. less than three seconds to convert someone from a viewer into a follower. Less than three seconds, people are going to decide, am I going to follow this person or not?
And so your bio needs to be as clear and concise and succinct as possible. And then the final piece of your profile, which you might've been wondering about is the highlights. The highlights are the least important.
Highlights, just so you know, are basically collections or curated collections of past Instagram stories. So you could be like, hey, over the last year, I've posted a lot of stories about my super cute dog and it grows. up from puppyhood onward.
And so I'm going to put all those in a collection so that if anyone wants to come back to my profile and watch all of my stories about my puppy, they can watch it right there. But the reality is less than 1 % of people who view your profile are ever going to watch your highlights. So they're just not important.
I say, put them at the bottom of your to -do list. And if you have nothing else to do, if you're chilling, watching TV, and you want to kill some time during a commercial break, update your highlights or make your highlights optimized. But it really isn't going to make much of a difference in terms of conversion.
someone from a viewer to a follower follower to a customer super fan engager anything like that highlights really don't matter if you showed me your instagram profile and you didn't have highlights i could still give you an a plus if the other things that we've already talked about were optimized and attention grabbing that just about covers the n and the a of the nap method and the great thing about the n and the a is as i've said yes they can be adjusted they can be changed you can always pivot your niche you can always rewrite your bio and in fact i rewrite my bio to this day all the time.
The nice thing about the N and the A is that once they're set, you don't have to keep going back to them. It's not like work that you have to do every single day or week. It's more of something that you can change, but something that you really don't ever have to, especially when you get started on the right foot, first and foremost.
Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the P. The P is really where the work lies. We are pushing P, and the P that we are specifically talking about right now is posting.
Step number three, in the NAP formula, in the NAP method is to post. And that is how you're going to grow on Instagram.
Thank you so much for watching everyone. I'll see you next. No, no, no.
I'm just kidding. It is post. The P is post, but we can't just post anything.
There's strategies, there's nuance, there's intention. There's what makes a good post. There's how much to post.
There's what to post, where to post, when to post, how to post. There's so many questions about posting, but ultimately growth on Instagram comes from posting. It's as simple as that.
That is what you need to know. In order to grow, it all comes down to the posts that you're making.
So with that being said, the three components of posting that we're going to focus on right now are number one, what to post. Number two, how much should you post? How frequently should you be uploading?
And number three, what strategies should you be using? Let's begin by talking about that first one, what to post. First of all, as I've already said numerous times today, growth comes from feed posts.
You will not grow by posting stories. Again, we're going to talk more about stories in a little bit, but stories do not have what's called disconnected reach. Stories only have connected reach, which is a fancy way of saying views from followers or views from non -followers.
Disconnected being views from non -followers, connected being views from followers. You get it. Stories only get viewed.
by your followers with rare exceptions. The only real other time that someone is going to view your story who is not already a follower is if they come across one of your feed posts as they're scrolling on Instagram and they click on your profile and they want to take a quick peek at your stories before following you. That's really the only time that someone would be a story viewer who isn't a follower.
So again, there's just a long -winded way of saying that feed posts are what drive growth. What I'm about to say is a little bit of an oversimplification, but I think it's helpful just to kind of start from this place. And this is reels on average get you the most total views.
or the most total reach. Reach and views are almost the same thing. Reach is technically the number of people who saw the post.
Views can count multiple times if one person rewatches your post, but usually they're pretty apples to apples. So Reels will give you the most total reach and the most disconnected reach. That is the most reach to new people, non -followers.
Carousels, on the other hand, which are those slideshow posts, those will get you the most connected reach, so the most reach to your existing followers. And they actually average more engagement, more likes, comments, saves, and shares than reels on average. And then the third final and usually lowest ranking in terms of pretty much any category is single images, just static single posts, whether it's a graphic, a quote, an image, whatever it may be, the things that were Instagram's bread and butter.
And the only kind of thing that you could post in the early days of Instagram, those are usually worst in terms of performance. So only based off everything that I just said, you can already start to get an idea as to how strategies might adjust. If you really want to grow and reach new people, then you might want to lean into reels.
If you really want to engage your existing community that you've already built, then you might want to lean more into carousels. But don't worry, we're going to talk about strategies in just a minute. Right now, let's talk a little bit more about how the algorithm actually works.
And to say algorithm is actually incorrect because there are actually multiple algorithms operating on Instagram at the same time. distinct algorithm for your home feed, the reels tab, the explore page, the stories up at the top, there's an algorithm deciding which order those are in. And there's probably a few other algorithms that I'm forgetting.
But to say there is one singular algorithm is incorrect. And it's actually interesting because you can curate the way your algorithm looks as a consumer. And with a little bit of fine tuning and refinement, you can actually get served different kinds of content depending on where you look.
For example, if when you're scrolling through the reels tab, if you only engage with videos about over time you're going to see more and more videos about cats in that reels tab but that doesn't necessarily mean that on the explore page you're only going to get cat content because if on the explore page you only ever like videos about dogs then your explore page algorithm will adjust and show you videos and content about dogs on your explore page just sharing this as an example because yes like I've said multiple times there are multiple algorithms and not only are there multiple algorithms but each of these algorithms changes pretty much every single day Rarely do they have a complete overhaul.
Rarely is ranking significantly being altered, but every single day it's being adjusted and fine -tuned and it's responding to how the audience, how the average Instagram user, how your followers are changing their behaviors, how they're changing their interests, how they're scrolling and what they're scrolling and what they're staying and what they're viewing on, what they're engaging with.
All of these things are constantly in flux. And so the algorithm is quite literally always being changed. But the ultimate goal of all of these algorithms is to serve people with the content that they want to watch and that will get them interacting with each other.
Whether that's interacting with the creator of the content, interacting with other people in the comments, or interacting with their friends, family, and just other people through shares. Instagram wants to facilitate not just a platform where we're addicted to our phones and scrolling, that's part of it, but they also want us scrolling and interacting with each other in the process.
But a lot of what I've been sharing about the algorithm has been abstract. So let's talk about what it means. in practice tactically speaking what does the algorithm care about number one first and foremost the algorithm cares about skip rate or the percentage of people who are stopping their scroll and not skipping your content immediately The lower the skip rate, the better because it means that less people are skipping your video.
Skip rate is the differentiator between a below average or a poor performing video and an average performing video. If you can just improve your skip rate, you will improve your views and you will at least get to where you think that you should be in terms of average. The next thing that the algorithm looks at is retention.
So great, you stopped their scroll. They didn't skip your video. But now are you retaining that viewer?
Are you getting them to watch till the end? Are you getting them to stick around for at least a significant chunk, if not the entirety of your reel? And I say reel, but it also goes the same for carousels.
Are they swiping all the way to the final slide of your carousel? Or are they deciding to scroll after the fourth slide? Retention is the differentiator between an average video and a great video.
If you have a low skip rate, which is good, but then your retention isn't great, you're just going to be stuck at average views. If you have a low skip rate, but a great retention rate, people are sticking around until the end, then you're going to get great views. It is worth noting that both of these two forms of engagement, skip rate and retention, are pretty passive, right?
Skip rate just requires the user to not scroll, to sit there passively and keep watching. And retention, similarly, just requires that they sit there and they keep watching your video. Instagram, contrary to what some people believe, they do not like tracking your eyes.
They're not making sure that you're actually watching the reel. They're not that advanced. The processing power and the amount of data that they would need, it's not a thing.
But all of this to say, yeah, both of those are passive. Then the final thing that the algorithm is looking at is active interaction or engagement. So great, you got someone to stop their scroll.
Great, you got them to watch till the end of your video. But then what happened? Did they get to the end and then they just scrolled?
Or did they get to the end and they liked? Did they get to the end and then they liked and then they shared it with a friend and then they commented something? and they save the post for later.
Generally speaking, the more interaction, the better, but not all interactions are created equally. Saves are usually the least important, and this is a change from pre -2020. From about 2018 through 2020, saves were the best form of engagement.
Saves were relatively new at this time, and so Instagram heavily weighted the value of a save. And if someone saved a post, they would show your post to a lot more people. But now, Instagram has paid a little bit more attention to user behavior, and they've realized and think about yourself right now, you have probably saved dozens, if not hundreds of posts that you've never looked at again.
So much content that you've saved that you've hit that bookmark button on and you've never come back to it. You've never talked about it with a friend. It's no one else has seen it.
It's just in some random folder that you hope to get to one day. And so that's why saves are usually the least impactful. They still matter.
I'm not going to say they're worthless and they're oftentimes a sign that your post is very valuable or very educational if it's getting a lot of saves, but ultimately the algorithm waits saves. the least heavily. The next step up on the ladder in terms of what the best form of engagement is, is a comment.
Now there's a wide diversity of how much comments can impact your posts because not all comments are created equal. If someone comments the heart emoji, that's a lot less valuable than if they comment a four paragraph essay with a lot of questions that creates conversation and controversy and other people are responding to them.
And now there's like conversations going on in the comment section. Those two things are not created equally. So generally speaking, comments are third on the list in terms of engagement, but they can really vary depending on the quality of the comment.
Next on the ladder in terms of the best form of engagement is likes. Now, likes are not something that I necessarily recommend optimizing for because there are actually multiple studies that have shown that asking people to like your posts leads to less likes. It's kind of like what came first, the chicken or the egg sort of situation where the more views a post gets, the more likes it gets, the more likes it gets, the more views it gets.
So likes are important, but they're not necessarily something that I want you to optimize for instead. What I do want you to optimize for is something that we're going to talk about a little bit later is shares. shares are the best form of engagement.
And this makes sense when we remember what Instagram's main goal is. Their main goal with their algorithms is to show you posts that number one, you want to watch. That means that it'll have a low skip rate and a good retention rate.
The second driving factor is they want cultural relevancy. They want people talking about what they saw on Instagram. They want Instagram to have a cultural impact.
They want people interacting with each other because of the content that they're seeing on Instagram. And the way that that is facilitated, is through a share whenever you tap that little paper airplane button and you share a post to your story or you send it to your buddy or you send it to your mom or you send it to your spouse you send it to your group chat it facilitates conversation and it gets people back onto instagram and so a share is the best form of engagement and i don't think that's going to change anytime soon quickly i did want to mention that reposts are like shares but they're weighted far less heavily in fact if i was to put reposts somewhere on this ranking system i would put them just above saves but they're really not that The way that a repost works fundamentally is it's kind of like saying, hey, algorithm.
I want my followers to potentially see this post because I just reposted it, but the algorithm still has to consider if they would want to see it. So it kind of does give it a nudge. It gives the post preferential treatment and the algorithm spends a little bit of extra time basically considering would my followers want to see this post?
But if I repost something that's about snowboarding and none of my followers care about snowboarding, then they're probably not going to see the post. So reposts and shares are definitely different. Reposts are near the bottom and shares are at the top.
With this knowledge about the algorithm in mind and the way that different forms of engagement work, I believe that each post should have one of three goals. And those three goals are width, depth, and conversion.
Width being casting a wide net. Think about viral. Think about getting a lot of views, getting a lot of reach, reaching a lot of people, bringing new eyeballs.
That is a width post. And based off everything that I just said, posts where your goal is to go viral, to reach a lot of people, to bring in a new audience, posts where your goal is width should have a focus on shares. Again, shares will help you get more views.
And I should have mentioned this earlier. Shares don't just help you get more views. They help you get better views.
Because let's think about this for just a second. Let's say I have a post that's going viral. The algorithm is going to show it to people who it thinks would be interested in the post.
But the algorithm is wrong. The algorithm is not always perfect. Think about how many times you've seen a post that is viral from someone who you don't follow and you actually weren't really interested in it.
Happens all the time. Maybe if it happens every day. Now let's think about posts that were sent to you by your best friend or posts that were sent to you by a loved one or posts that were sent in your group chat.
My guess is that those posts are right a much higher percentage of the time. Or to say it another way, those posts are funny, relatable, valuable. You enjoy those posts.
You have a better retention rate. You're more likely to engage with those posts a lot more frequently than just what the algorithm shows you. And that's simply because usually our interpersonal relationships, our friendships, our family, and our loved ones, they know us better than the algorithms.
And so a viewer that the algorithm provided you with is usually lower quality than a viewer provided to you through a share. But again, if your goal is to go viral, cast that wide net, then we want to optimize for shares. If your goal with your post is not width but depth, casting a deep net, aka building trust, building community, allowing people to get to know you on a deeper level, allowing your audience to give a shit a little bit more about you, casting that deep net, not trying to go wide, not trying to go viral, but really trying to make sure that people know who you are deep down, then you want to optimize for comments.
You want to optimize to get people talking. And we're going to talk about all these things in just a moment. We're going to talk about how do you optimize for shares and all this good stuff.
But generally speaking, If your goal is depth, then we want to optimize for comments. We want to get people talking.
These are the posts that are usually a little bit longer. They include more storytelling. They include more details.
They include more nuance, more backstory, things that like a stranger might not understand, things that a stranger might feel like, wait, I need more context. Who is this person? What's their background?
They might feel a little bit more confused. Those are the kinds of posts that don't go as viral. They don't reach as many people, but they build depth and they build quality of connection with the followers that you are.
already have. And then again, the third possible goal for your content is conversion, right? Whether you are a content creator doing a brand deal, you are a business owner who's trying to If you ever have any sort of promotion, ad, discount, sale, anything like that, those are the conversion posts.
Converting someone from a follower to a customer. And I say customer loosely because this could even be if you're someone with a podcast. Converting them from just a short -form content follower, someone who just follows you on Instagram, to someone who's watching your long -form content, whether it's a podcast, a YouTube, or long -form content on Instagram.
And again, all this is under the umbrella of what to post. And in just a little bit, we're going to talk about how much or how to post. want to quickly give a sidebar as we're talking about width versus depth versus conversion content and say that generally speaking i recommend following the 60 20 20 rule for these three types of content so if your primary goal is growth if you're in a season where you want to attract more followers you want to grow your audience if you're in the early days and you're just getting started on instagram you're going to be in this phase then 60 of your content is going to be about width casting that wide net 20 % of your content is going to be about depth, casting the deep net and building connection.
And then 20 % of your content is going to be about conversion. Of course, if you're in the very early stage and you don't have anything to convert people to yet, you don't even have an email list or a product or a service or a podcast or anything like that, you have nowhere to send anyone yet, then you can take that remaining 20 % and divide it equally.
So it would change from the 60 -20 -20 to the 70 -30. If instead you're in a season where you want to build depth of connection with your audience, which is a season that I recommend shifting into prior to a sales season. So every October I shift my content away from width and I stopped trying to attract a bunch of new people.
And instead, every October I cast a deep net so I can really build connection and trust with my audience because every November, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, all these sales periods start happening. And I really want people to trust me during that period because it's. much easier to make a sale once someone already has a trust and a knowledge about you.
So every October, I shift from 60 -20 -20 focused on width to 60 -20 -20 focused on depth, where 60 % of my content suddenly becomes more about storytelling, more about allowing my audience to get to know me, more about building that deep, strong bond with my followers, that community with my followers. And then 20 % is still about casting the wide net, and the other 20 % is about converting.
Then, of course, the third season that you can be in is the season of conversion. Whether it's the Black Friday, Cyber Monday holiday sales period, or it's just you have a launch or a new product or a sale, or you need to kick up revenue and you need an influx of cash into your business, then you can adjust into 60 -20 -20 with a focus on conversion content.
So with all that being said, let's talk about what makes a good post on Instagram. Let me begin by saying that it is not a fancy camera. It's not a fancy set.
It's not better editing. It's not usually the aesthetics or anything like that that you can buy or that you can just slap onto a video. Instead, I believe that there are only two extremes that are going to work and that define what makes a good video and that are going to be performing well as we move into the future, especially with the rise and the spread of AI content.
And I've created this little inverse bell curve graph to help illustrate what these two extremes are in terms of content that are going to work well. On the x -axis down at the bottom, we have production value, which I do want to be clear, production value is different than the value of the content. The value of the content is like how entertaining or how...
educational was the content that's not what we're talking about when i say production value i mean lights camera action editing and the y -axis is views like i said this is an inverse bell curve so on the far end of the spectrum we have the super professional content highly polished highly and lit highly scripted cinematic oftentimes requiring an entire production team scripting and writing i've met content creators who were former hollywood producers people who worked on big budget films and music videos for some of the most artists in the world.
And now they're taking all of that, all of the gear, all of their expertise, and they're applying it to reels. That's one extreme that is going to work because when people see it, it's that insane. It's , right?
It's the content that when you see it, you're floored. You don't care what the topic is. You're going to keep watching because it's that beautiful.
It's that cinematic. It's that professional. And that's not what we're used to seeing from 99 % of people on Instagram.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have the super raw content, the unpolished, the authentic, the imperfect, the yapping content, the content where there's a blooper, the content where you said a word wrong, the content where it feels real and genuine. That is going to be performing well also in the future. That content is usually just filmed on your phone.
Oftentimes there's not even like a fancy light or even a microphone. It's literally just a handheld walking and talking video on your phone. These two extremes are the two kinds of content that are going to be performing well in the future.
These two kinds of content are good in my opinion, but most people fall somewhere in between. Most people are doing some editing. They're writing a script and then they're putting it into chat GPT.
They're trying some weird gimmick or hack or some weird psychological trick that they heard about in some pod. They're trying to mix some AI with their content. They're trying to add a little smoke transition here.
They're trying to add a cheeky little edit there and this just doesn't work. So my recommendation for you is go all in or don't go in at all. Don't wade in the shallow waters.
Dive into the deep end and fully commit to professional cinematic editing or stay out of the pool altogether and just yap, be authentic, genuine, be yourself because that is what people want on social media. I hope that this is a word of encouragement for so many of you that you no longer have to be perfect in order to grow on Instagram.
People don't care about the filters, the aesthetics and how perfect you look, especially in a world of AI, especially in a post 2020 world where everyone is asking. Who can I trust? Where can I get my news?
Where can I get my information? Where can I get my content from a source that's genuine, that's being honest with me, that doesn't have some sort of hidden motive or anything like that? Just who's going to be real with me?
And so I want you to be that for your audience. I want you to be that for the people who are going to be following you by embracing the imperfections because it is those things that make you human. Embrace the rawness.
Embrace the authenticity. Embrace the mistakes. Embrace those things.
Include them in your content. Include all of your quirks, your personality traits. your weird habits, all of that, include that into your content, include that into who you are on Instagram, and your audience will appreciate you for it, and your post will do better because of it.
Regardless of whether you're making professional, cinematic, highly edited content, or super raw, authentic, genuine content, and regardless of whether any specific post has a goal of depth, width, or conversion, what ultimately is included in a good post? Number one, a strong hook. Like I talked about earlier, skip rate is the basis of whether or not your post is even going to get average views or whether you're going to be stuck in the 200 view jail.
So you have to start with a strong hook. What makes a strong hook? I'm glad you asked.
I recommend following the negative 585 strategy. And that strategy is as follows. Negative, meaning if possible, use the word no, don't, stop, avoid, lose, quit, any sort of negative word in your hook.
If you were a rock climbing coach, instead of saying three ways to become a better rock climber, you could say three mistakes to avoid in order to become a better rock climber. Humans have an inherent negativity bias, and so they're more likely to pay attention to content that starts with a negative hook. than its positive counterpart.
The next piece of the negative 585 strategy is the 5 -8, and that is five to eight words long. The best hooks on average are between five and eight words long. Can you go a little bit shorter?
Sure. Can you go a little bit longer? Sure.
But generally speaking, trying to stick in that five to eight word window is ideal. It helps you be concise, succinct, and avoid overcomplicating things. And then the final five in the negative 585 is fifth grade reading level.
Keep it simple. it down there's another marketing principle called and that applies here and the drunk grandma rule is that you want your content you want your hook you want every word that you say in your post to be so simple and so easy to understand that even a drunk grandma could make sense of it and this exists because let's be real most people are not paying attention Not only are literacy rates and media literacy at an all -time low, but people are more distracted than ever before and have a shorter attention span than ever before.
So when you use fancy vocabulary, complex lingo, when you use insider terms and topics that no one will understand unless they're an expert like you are, you lose people. You confuse people. And when you confuse, you lose.
So dumb it down, keep it simple, keep it at or below a fifth grade level, and just try to make your posts easier to comprehend. but especially try to make your hooks easier to comprehend. My second tip for improving your hooks is to remember that the visual is more important than anything else.
The visual of what people are actually looking at is more important than the text you're saying, the words of your hook, any text written on the screen, any audio that's in the background. The visual is most important because our brains are going to visually take in your reel and decide, they're going to judge a book by its cover, whether or not they're going to scroll or whether they're going to stick around and not skip your video.
those first few frames, not even those first few seconds within the first few milliseconds of the video, those first few frames is when we're going to decide. And so the visual needs to do most of the talking in order to improve your visuals. There's a few things that I want you to consider.
Number one is the rule of three, and the rule of three when it pertains to the visual of what is on the screen in your reels or what is on the screen in your carousels is no more than three elements. It's okay if you have two or even just one focal point, but you don't want to have more than three things that someone could potentially be looking at at any given time on your post.
For example, let's say you were making a cooking reel. One element might be you cracking an egg. You could split those two apart and say that you are one element and cracking an egg into a bowl is the second element, but for this argument, let's just say that's one element.
The second element might be the set, the kitchen that you are standing in. The third element might be the text title up at the top of the screen. But where you start getting into trouble and you start confusing people is when there's more elements.
All of a sudden you have closed captions down at the bottom, and you have a sticker, a gif, that you've added in the upper right corner, and you have something going on in the background that's supposed to grab my curiosity, like a vase of flowers that's tipping over, or a pot of water that's about to boil. Once you surpass three visual elements in the hook, you increase the likelihood that someone's going to get distracted, or that they're just not going to pay attention to the right thing, and thus you run the risk of losing their interest and causing them to scroll away.
As a baseline, I suggest having your visual relate to whatever you're talking about. So in that example that I was just giving, if you're making a cooking video, then you want to be cooking in the video. You don't just want to be talking to the camera.
If you're making a fitness video, you don't just want to be walking around and holding your phone. You want to be doing the exercises or working out or at least wearing workout clothes and at least being in a gym when you are making the fitness content. But that's just the baseline.
The pro creators don't only ensure that their visual relates to the topic of the video, but they ensure that one of those three elements in the first few frames is unexpected. It's out of the norm. So they're doing the cooking video, they're cracking an egg into the bowl, but in the background there's a pot of water that's clearly about to boil over.
Or they're saying the hook and introducing the topic for their fitness reel and they're walking through a gym, but in the background there's someone doing some sort of crazy exercise that they're going to talk about later. This piques the viewer's curiosity and ensures that they not only understand what the reel is about, but they're curious to figure out what that thing was that grabbed their attention and that was out of the norm.
The next piece of what makes a good post on Instagram is a post that gets people sticking around. A post that has great retention, like we've talked about. And here are some ways that you can achieve that.
Number one is a rule that was named by one of our Instaclub Hub members. So don't shoot the messenger. I've been called misogynist for sharing the name of this rule, but I did not name it.
A woman named this rule, and it is the miniskirt rule. If you would like a male version of this rule, call it the short shorts rule. I don't care what you call it, but whatever you call it, it is as follows.
Your post, like a mini skirt or a good pair of short shorts, should be long enough to cover what you need to cover, but still short enough to hold attention. So if you're picking up what I'm putting down, just like a mini skirt or a pair of short shorts, there is no one size fits all. This is not Brandy Melville.
Instead, each reel, each carousel, each caption, any content that you create, the length is going to vary. And it's going to vary because sometimes you're going to need more time, more seconds, more slides, more characters to cover what you need to cover, to teach the important material, to tell the full story, to give all the tips, whatever it may be.
But regardless of however long it needs to be, you don't want it to be any longer than that. You want to be as concise, as succinct as possible. I often encourage people to eliminate redundancy, eliminate synonyms.
Stop saying the same sentence four different ways. Stop saying the same word multiple times. Once people get it, they got it.
Kind of the opposite of what I was just doing, right? The last few seconds, I've said the exact same sentence multiple different ways. If this was a reel, I would only include one version, one sentence, one phrase, or one word to make it as concise as possible.
and eliminate redundancy. The next piece of advice that I have for you about retention is to focus on entertainment more than education. And I know that this is crazy, especially if you've been trying to grow on social media for the last few years, you've heard.
value make your posts valuable and every social media coach in the world has said make your post valuable but that's something that has been misinterpreted misunderstood and i believe that most people have misunderstood make your post valuable to mean make your posts educational don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with education education is great but Education is only valuable if people are actually paying attention.
Think about a textbook sitting in a library collecting dust that hasn't been checked out in like 20 years. There is still plenty of education to be had. That's still a very educational textbook, but I would argue that it's not a very valuable textbook because it's not able to hold people's attention.
People are not interested. People are not checking that book out and reading it. You could even make the argument that that education isn't valuable because no one wants to hear it.
But that's more of a philosophical debate that I'm not going to get into today. The point I'm trying to make is simply stop worrying about, oh my gosh, how smart is this post? Am I teaching a new lesson?
Is it super educational? Is it super valuable? Is there like a great tutorial or some really juicy tips that like no one's ever thought of before?
Or is it entertaining? Like, is it actually going to be captivating? Is there a story that's being told?
Are there open loops? Are there reasons for people to stick around? Is there a great hook?
Is there a payoff at the end that people are going to be looking forward to? Or are you just another teacher droning on about what, what, what, what, boring? In fact, just a few months ago, I got to interview the head of Instagram for business, Thomas Finetto, and he said that the number one mistake that brands and small business owners make is that they focus too much on education and not enough on entertainment.
Entertainment is what they should be focused on first and foremost. He said that for every post, whether the goal is width, depth, or conversion, you should be asking yourself, is this entertaining? Fortunately, Instagram literally gives us the stats.
They tell us the answers. They give us a graph on every single post about how entertaining was this post. We have a retention graph on literally every single reel we make.
And so right now I'm going to break down for you the five most common retention graphs and what they mean, or more importantly, how you can adjust your content because the ultimate goal is a retention rate greater than 50%. Of course, there are nuances to this. Some industries have higher retention than others.
Some creators have higher retention. Some video formats and styles are more likely to have lower or higher retention rates. But generally speaking, as kind of a goal that you can set for yourself, you want a retention rate above 50 % at the end of your video.
Or to say it another way, you want half or more of your initial viewers to still be watching at the end of your video. If you see a retention graph that looks like this and it immediately drops off a cliff, aka people aren't even watching your video for one to two seconds before they're scrolling, that usually means that they're judging a book by its cover.
And this is a style of retention graph that is much more common in the normal Instagram feed because your followers are used to seeing your reels. And unfortunately, this kind of graph means not only are they used to seeing your reels, but they're used to your reels being not very engaging, not very captivating. And so they're seeing it's one of your reels.
recognize you they recognize your face and they're immediately like oh this is not going to be good this is not going to be interesting there's going to be a sale or promotion this is just not going to be something that I want and they're instantly scrolling if your retention graphs consistently look like this it's a problem but don't worry not all hope is lost we can fix it Here are seven questions that you can ask yourself to essentially make the cover of your book look more appealing.
Number one, is this pretty much the same visually to every other reel that I post? I'll give you an example of this. Back in 2024, I got a little complacent.
I got a little bit lazy. And I started making way too many reels that were just here in my home office. I thought I was doing something smart by batching literally hundreds of reels in the exact same setting with the exact same mic, exact same camera, and the only thing that really changed was my t -shirt.
But what unfortunately happened... was that all of my reels started to kind of look and sound the same so that if you had seen one, it felt like you had seen them all. And thus people were judging my reels very quickly and immediately determining either they had already seen this and they didn't need to watch it, or they were just going to be taught another lesson and it wasn't going to be visually interesting.
So something that I did to change this is that I just got out of the habit of filming every single one of my reels in my office. I'd film some in the kitchen, some in our living room. I'd go outside, I'd go in our bedroom, I'd go on walks, and I'd try to film the exact same content saying the exact same script, but in different locations so that visually it was unique from the rest.
The second question to ask yourself is, does this visual relate to the topic of your reel? I know we talked a little bit about that earlier, but of course you want the visual, whatever is on the screen in that first one to two seconds to directly relate to the reel. Like if you took the text off the screen, would the viewer still have a pretty good idea about what this reel was about to be about?
Question number three, is the visual in those first few frames plain and obvious? Or is there a lot of clutter, a lot of distraction, a lot of things going on that could potentially confuse the viewer? Question number four, did you follow the rule of three?
Which again, like I mentioned earlier, is that there is a maximum of three visual elements on the screen. And remember, less is more. Question number five, is it HD?
You don't need like an 8K resolution professional camera to achieve this. And actually, Instagram currently is recommending uploading at 2K, which is kind of crazy because it's not the full 4K HD that a lot of us are used to now. And it's not the basic 1080p HD that many people shoot in.
Instead, Instagram recommends uploading in 2K. But even if you upload in just plain old HD, it should be good enough. Question number six, is it bright and well lit?
Of course, you don't want it to be over. exposed. You don't want to be too bright where it's going to visually blind someone the second they open up your reel and they're scrolling and all their reels are dim and then yours is like bright white.
But just generally speaking, brighter is better. And then again, like we talked about earlier, is there an unexpected element that is plain to see and yet piques curiosity in those first few seconds? If there is, it's more likely to get someone to stop their scroll, grab their attention, and it's going to be a more engaging book cover to make someone want to crack it open and read the rest.
The second common retention graph that you'll see is one that looks like this. And this one basically means that someone stuck around with your reel for the first few seconds, they gave you a shot, they listened to the hook, but then they were uninterested. And this one is a very easy solution and it's a good sign because it means that people are giving you a chance.
It just means that the words in your hook or the way it's being presented or the way that you are introducing the topic of your reel is just not very engaging. So if you can play around with different hooks, if you can swap out the hook that you did use for a more engaging one, whether it's the words that you're actually saying or the visual on the screen, you are likely to solve this problem and get people to keep watching after the hook.
The third common retention graph that you'll see is one that looks like this, where there is a relatively steady decline for the first X number of seconds of your reel. And then at a certain point, there's a steep drop off, usually followed by another relative plateau. What's going on here is what I like to call the I got it effect.
There are times where there is a specific thing that you did that caused people to scroll away. Like maybe there's a sound effect that was just like way louder than the rest of the video, like an alarm bell going off and people were like, oh God, and they scrolled. Or maybe there was something on the screen that was really unexpected and was maybe like not suitable for work, for example, and that made people scroll.
Maybe you cursed in your reel and that was unexpected and so people scrolled away. But more times than not, the real reason that there's this kind of sudden... drop off or the sudden cliff that appears in your retention graph is that people just kind of are like, yeah, I got it.
I'm bored. There's some redundancy. I get the picture, so I'm going to scroll.
Basically, this is caused by nothing pulling them forward. Either the payoff, the answer to their question or the cure to their curiosity was given too quickly, or the buildup and the pacing was too slow. It was like, okay, get to the point already.
I got it. So here's a few different ways that you can fix that and thus improve the retention of your reel. Number one is to open a loop, which basically means that you're going to tell people that something's coming, but you're not going to give it to them just yet.
For example, you could say, if you're a beginner rock climber, here are the three things that you need to avoid. And the third one is the biggest mistake of all. Or every entrepreneur is losing at least 20 hours of productivity per week because they don't have this AI automation setup.
Let me show you exactly what it is and stick around to the end for the exact prompt that I used. Or I was able to get jacked in less than 20 minutes a day, but the biggest difference maker completely shocked me. There's also a psychological effect called the Zygarnik effect, which basically means that when you give a list of things like the top seven tips, people naturally want to stick around to the end because they want to complete the list.
Basically, because we know that there are seven, it creates curiosity in our mind to hear what they all are. But pro tip here, don't always include the best for last, or if you are going to include the best for last, mention that, because if instead your list just keeps building and thus the first one is the least important, the least controversial, the most obvious, people are not likely to stick around until the end because they don't know to stick around to the end and because the first one was boring in and of itself.
The second way that you can improve your retention graph and avoid these sort of cliffs or drop -offs in retention is by including a re -hook or a second hook. Just like we put so much time, energy, and effort into the hooks at the very beginning of our reels, we should incorporate re -hooks throughout the reel. These are moments to grab the audience's attention and re -engage them.
Examples of how to do this include things like a pattern interrupt. Around the four to seven second mark of your video includes some sort of new angle, text pop -up, gif, overlay, b -roll, something that changes and is even a little bit unexpected. including some sort of plot twist, oftentimes by directly saying, but here's the problem or except I was wrong.
Example number three would be raising the stakes. And you can do this by directly calling out the action that you want to avoid. So if in this case, the action that you want to avoid is your viewers scrolling, then you can say, but if you scroll right now, none of this matters.
Or if you scroll right now, you're going to totally do this wrong. Besides those examples, some other ways that you can improve your retention overall is number one, cut the setup. One of my favorite examples of this is a reel that I posted numerous times that began with like a three to four sentence setup of how much should you post on Instagram?
According to a new study that analyzed 3 million posts and I get into all this background. Instead, I eventually just cut out that intro and I started with the juice. I started with the most important part, which is if you're posting one time a week, on average, you're going to be losing followers.
If you're posting a few times a week, on average, you're going to be plateaued in your growth. So I cut the intro, I cut the setup. and the overall reel performed much better.
Another way that you can keep people engaged is by sticking to what's called the two -second rule, which is a rule that comes from TV and cinema, which basically states that there should be something changing or happening, some sort of new scene, new angle, new B -roll, new character, someone else speaking, something happening.
every two seconds, which sounds crazy. But the next time you're watching a TV show, the next time you're watching something on Netflix, I want you to try to count out loud how long each clip is. And I bet you're going to struggle to get to three seconds.
And finally, here are some questions that you can ask yourself if you really struggle with getting people to stick on your videos and retain their viewership. Number one, did the hook already give away everything that the viewer needs to know? Number two, what exactly is being said or being shown on the screen right before the retention drops?
Number three, is there a clear and obvious reason to keep watching past that moment where retention drops or not? Number four, is there a part of the setup or backstory that isn't 100 % necessary? Number five, does the video actually relate to and deliver on the promise of the hook or is it a little bit of a bait and switch?
And finally, does this reel look and sound like every other reel that we see in the feed or is there actually something unique and dynamic that is obviously apparent in it? The fourth example of a common retention graph that we see is this slow and steady decline from start to finish. No one clear moment where viewers dropped off, but also people weren't really sticking around to the end.
The reel usually finishes with below a 20 % retention rate. And the way that you solve this is quite similar to the way that you solve the one we were just talking about, but there's not a one singular clear moment or scene that needs to be addressed. Instead, the entire video needs to be looked at with the questions and the examples that I gave just a moment ago.
And then the fifth and final retention graph that I want to show you that is pretty common is this one right here, where retention seems to be pretty good throughout the entire reel, but then it steeply drops off a cliff at the very end. And this is usually the result of some sort of summary, recap, or call to action at the end of your video.
Now, calls to action are usually effective. Usually, if you tell people to share the reel, they're more likely to share it. If you ask them to comment, they're more likely to comment, save, like, etc.
However, it can sometimes work against you. you if people are scrolling away because they've already engaged in that way. The specific instance where I see this most common is where people ask their viewers to like and or follow.
If you're posting it to your feed, you never want to ask people to follow because they already follow you. Not to get too advanced here, but the one time when you would want to ask people to follow is if you were doing an alternative call to action that you were going to use as a trial reel. Totally different topic.
We're going to talk about trial reels a little bit later. The other one, like I just mentioned, is likes. And I know I included that in my list like eight seconds ago, but actually studies have shown that when you ask people to like your reel, on average, you get less likes.
So at the end of your reel, if you ever find yourself wanting to say, don't forget to like this reel, just edit that out. And what we see is that when you remove that kind of a call to action or even your call to action in general from the end of your reel, the overall retention improves, which thus increases the viewership and the overall engagement increases as well, which then increases the viewership even higher.
So if you're ever studying your Reels insights and you see that in the final seconds of the retention, it just drops off a cliff, consider ending the video right there at the top of the cliff, because that's when most people are scrolling anyways. So obviously, whatever happens after that is not very important, or at least it's deemed not very important by your viewers.
So focusing on everything I just said will help you improve your retention. And like I mentioned, the difference between a average video and a great performing video is the retention rate. The difference between a great video and a viral video is the number of shares or the share rate that your video receives.
In short, shares are the best form of engagement on Instagram. Whether you're trying to grow a business, build a community, become an influencer, make more sales, or any other reason that you can think of, shares are what you want. And in order to make shares easier, I have two different acronyms for you.
The first one is going to be what shareworthy content is. Like, what are the elements of a shareworthy post? And then the second acronym are going to be the five different kinds of shareworthy content.
The first acronym for the elements of share -worthy content is SHARE. Pretty easy to remember. S -H -A -R -E.
S standing for simple. We've talked about this already, but is the post easy to understand? Could a drunk grandma understand not just the hook, but the entire post?
Is it something that is digestible and consumable without having to have a bunch of background and knowledge and expertise? Or could the general population pretty much understand it? H as in hook.
Does the post have a strong hook? Obviously, if the post doesn't stop someone's scroll, they're not going to watch it and they're definitely not going to share it. A in this acronym stands for authentic.
Authenticity is one of these buzzwords. And the advice for how do you be authentic is oftentimes the same advice for what do you do on a first date? And it is just be yourself.
But I think that's horrible advice. So instead, my strategic way that you can actually be authentic on Instagram is to reduce the time between idea and execution. In other words, the moment inspiration strikes, the moment you're like, oh, I should tell that story.
Oh, I should give that tip. Oh, I should talk about that thing. Make the post.
post it, or at least we'll talk about this later, make the post and then schedule it so that it's ready to be posted at the next available time slot. But conversely, the more time that you spend editing, refining, script writing, AI, chat GPT, Poppy, any of these things, the more time that you spend on that, the less authentic the post will become.
Many of these tools are great for research. Many of these tools are great for script writing. But the more that you can get in the habit of idea immediately leading to execution, the more authentic your content will be.
R in this acronym stands for relatable. And relatability comes from specificity. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Let's use ice cream as an analogy. Vanilla ice cream is not hated by very many people, but there's also not very many people who are madly in love with plain old vanilla ice cream. The vast majority of the population is just kind of lukewarm towards vanilla ice cream.
Maybe lukewarm isn't the best word to use there, but you get what I'm saying, right? There's a reason that vanilla has become an adjective to describe things that are just kind of, meh, kind of middle of the road. Usually not that bad, usually not that amazing, kind of just liked by everyone.
But the problem is when your posts are just kind of meh, liked by everyone, they don't have a strong emotional impact and thus they're a lot less likely to be shared. And so instead, like I mentioned, relatability comes from specificity. In the ice cream world, specificity means more inclusions, the more specific niche, nuance kind of ice cream.
The rocky road with caramel swirl, right? It's that ice cream flavor that there's definitely some people who hate it, but there's also going to be some people who absolutely love it. I'll give you another more practical example.
Let's say that I took that meme of the guy who represents anger from the movie Inside Out, right? And he's really angry. He's on fire.
He's like this little ball of frustration. If I took a photo of him and I posted it with text above it that said, me when my post flops. That is a little bit share worthy.
It's a little bit relatable. Pretty much everyone on Instagram can relate to being frustrated about a post flopping, but it lacks specificity and so it's not going to get very many shares. If instead I take that exact same image and I instead make the text more specific to say something like, me when I spend three hours editing a reel and I post it only to get seven likes, one comment, and negative three followers.
Now it's a lot more specific. I didn't just say the word flops. I specifically painted a visual picture as to what that looks like.
Thus, the reel is going to be more relatable and more share worthy. And a big part of that is painting the visual picture, allowing the mirror neurons in your viewers' minds to fire. When you say flopped, yes, anyone can come up with their own definition of what flopped looks like, but then it's not going to resonate that strongly.
Instead, if you can paint the visual picture, if you can really spell out word for word with details what the experience is what the circumstances are then people are going to vividly picture that in their mind and this is a classic psychological thing that happens when we're reading books and watching movies they're not going to picture you with your post flopping they're going to picture themselves in that specific circumstance so again relatability comes from specificity and the more relatable your post is the more likely it is to be shared And then the final post of what a shareworthy post is, is it is entertaining.
Sure, it can have educational value. Sure, it can be teaching a tip. But if nothing else, it needs to keep people watching.
Each frame, each second, each clip, each sentence needs to move the plot forward. It needs to keep people engaged. It needs to keep them watching, curious, and waiting for more.
So those are the elements of a shareworthy post. Let's talk about what shareworthy posts actually look like in practice. and for this the acronym is tribe t -r -i -b -e which is the name of this podcast build your tribe which i can't believe we're this far into the episode and i don't think maybe i have already asked you to subscribe i'm not sure anyways just if you haven't already and if i haven't asked make sure to hit that subscribe button because obviously if you've made it this far into the episode this is what you're looking for and so every single week i put out some sort of short helpful tips strategy ideas video they're rarely hours long like this one is but if you've made it this far clearly you're into that sort thing so just double check right now and make sure that you're subscribed but let's get back into the acronym tribe t -r -i -b -e -t being timely Timely, meaning posts that are about breaking news, that cover trending topics, that reference whatever pop culture is paying attention to right now.
It might be something like the Super Bowl, which there are always plenty of memes and posts and drama that come out of. Any sort of like award show, like the Met Gala or the Oscars. Those are things that are often timely.
Whatever show everyone is watching and talking about right now, whether it's Dancing with the Stars or Stranger Things or whatever it may be. And then, of course, actual breaking news that relates to your niche. Timely content is very share worthy because it makes the person who is sharing it feel like they are also being timely.
They are also someone who's on the cutting edge and in the know and part of the in crowd. So let's say that you were a hairstylist and Stranger Things was all the news right now and everyone was talking about and watching Stranger Things. Well, then maybe you could talk about the different hairstyles in Stranger Things or how those were achieved or how you think that they would look today if these characters were in modern day.
What would their hairstyles be right now? Maybe there's breaking news about a recall on a specific hairspray brand that's really popular and then you could make a post that is helping break that news. Or let's say that you're not on the cutting edge and you find out about that news a few days later and it feels like kind of everyone already knows that this recall has taken place and you're not going to be the one to break the news.
Instead, you could give your two cents. Maybe you could share why we shouldn't be using that hairspray anyways. Or maybe you're going to share why even though it's recalled, you still think people should use it.
So even though you're not the one breaking the news, you're adding your own commentary, your own two cents to the news. Ultimately, the most important thing that you need to keep in mind with timely posts, as with any other shareworthy post, as with pretty much any other post that you're posting to your feed on Instagram, like I mentioned like an hour ago, it needs to be related to your niche.
So if you're a hairstylist, are you going to post about the recall on lettuce? No, probably not. The R in the tribe acronym is relatable.
Now, I know we talked about relatability a moment ago and how relatability comes from specificity, but relatable posts in general, I gave you some examples a moment ago. Oftentimes, they're very funny. Oftentimes, they're memes, they're trends, they're lighthearted.
Oftentimes, they are self -deprecating, right? You're kind of making fun of yourself. Those sorts of relatable posts, very shareworthy.
The I in the tribe acronym stands for inspiring, motivational quotes, Bible verse. verses, scripture, poems, things that are actually going to make an impact on people and inspire them or motivate them can be very, very share worthy. The biggest mistake that I see people making when it comes to inspirational content is number one, they're just picking any random quote and it doesn't really relate to their niche in any way.
It doesn't actually tie into what they do. It's just like a random motivational quote from Kobe Bryant. And the other mistake that I see people making with inspirational content is there again being vanilla.
They're being lukewarm. Their motivational quote is never give up on your dreams or live, laugh, love. Like it's not actually making an impact on anyone.
It's not actually motivating them. It's not a quote that is like never before heard. It's a quote that everyone's heard a million times since they were seven years old.
So instead, my recommendation is to pick stronger quotes, more niche quotes, quotes that are less common, quotes that might have a little bit of controversy in them, quotes from a person who might be a little bit controversial. Those sorts of things are more likely to grab attention and get shared and stop someone's scroll than the kind of lukewarm quotes that we've all heard 50 million times.
Basically, avoid the cliches. The B in the tribe acronym stands for beckoning. And this is the one that's probably the most confusing.
It's also the one that you're going to probably do the least often. And it's the kinds of posts that are like the ALS ice bucket challenge. It's calling on the bigger community and asking for their help, asking for them to pitch in.
Maybe you're raising awareness. Maybe you're raising funds. Maybe you're trying to draw attention to a certain cause or concern.
If you try to do one of these posts every single week, eventually it's going to lose its power. Because if every single week we're being asked to help spread the word about a new thing, raise money for a new fund, share a new message, it's eventually going to be like, okay, I just can't do this anymore.
I got it. I'm burnt out. I'm tired.
But if instead it's maybe once a quarter, once every six months, or even just once a year, it's going to be much more impactful. For example, if I was to make a post that was like, let's make Instagram great again. Let's support small businesses by sharing their posts.
Shares are the best way to support small businesses on Instagram and it's free to do so. So share this post and let's spread the message. If I post that once a quarter, it's going to do great.
But if I post that once a week, it's not going to perform as well because people aren't going to want to share it every single time. Moreover, if I were to post that or something like that every single day, people eventually would be like, okay, yeah, I get it. I shared this yesterday.
I'm not going to keep sharing it again every single day. I got the message. My followers got the message.
Let's move on. The E in the tribe acronym stands for edgy. And by edgy, I mean content that is a little bit controversial.
I would never encourage you to be intentionally rude, crass, defamatory, or to get yourself canceled or anything like that. But... it is true that enragement equals engagement.
Again, I'm not telling you to rage bait people or to try to enrage people, but if you have a strongly held opinion that relates to your niche that is maybe counterculture or it's different than what the norms would say, then I want you to post about that. If you have an unpopular opinion, I want you to post about that.
If you disagree with the norms, I want you to post about that. If there is a popular influencer or thought leader in your industry who's teaching one thing and you think there's actually a different or better way to do it, then I want you to post about that. When you post content that is a little bit edgy, your viewers share it because they're too scared to say it themselves, but they can amplify you saying it.
And thus, it kind of makes them feel like they've said it themselves. It's like a way that they can say like, yeah, I second this. I agree with this.
Retweet this. I want to amplify this message without having to fully commit to articulating it themselves. The final piece of what you post and what makes a good post is the format of the post.
Format is kind of like the presentation or the style. I think an easier way to think about formats on Instagram is the same way we think about formats on YouTube. So on YouTube, one example of a format is a vlog.
It's a video blog, a day in the lifestyle where a content creator or an influencer is kind of documenting their day and taking you along for the ride. That's one format. Another format on YouTube is educational talking head videos like the one you're watching right now.
Sometimes called explainer videos or lecture videos. It's a different format than a vlog, right? The camera stationary.
I'm stationary. I'm talking into a professional microphone. You're not getting to see my behind the scenes or the day in my life.
There are also music videos on YouTube. That's an entirely different format. But even though formats are different, they can be used for the same purpose.
For example, in this explainer lecture style direct -to -camera format, I've told you some stories. A music video could also tell you a story just through music. A day -in -the -life vlog is a story in and of itself, but you could also be a content creator who's telling stories in that vlog.
So formats are kind of like the way that things are presented. And on Instagram, formats beat topics. What I mean by that is you could take a really boring topic like taxes, but with an engaging format, it could do really well or even go viral.
However, on the flip side, if you take a really exciting topic like skydiving, but you put it with a really boring format like a unscripted talking directly to camera video where it's just filmed on your phone and you're kind of rambling on without a good script, it's not very concise, and you're just kind of wah -wah -wah about skydiving, that format is boring and thus the video probably won't perform well.
And so that's why regardless of what industry you're in, what niche you're a part of, what you want to be, a content creator, an influencer, a brand, a business owner, whatever, studying viral formats and being able to adopt trending popular formats into your niche is a reliable way to get great views and grow your audience.
Now, generally speaking, there's three steps that I recommend following when you're approaching this idea of formats. The first is studying what other people have done. Whether it's to find what formats are currently working, what formats have been working for years, or what formats are just dead and ineffective.
And in just a moment, I'm going to take you into Poppy AI, which is by far my favorite tool for discovering these viral formats and applying them to your own niche. So I'll take you right into my computer and show you how that's done. But the second step in this whole format thing is finding repeatable formats.
When you're first getting started, you're going to have to do a lot of experimentation. You're going to have to do a lot of getting inspired by other creators. and using Poppy, like I just mentioned, to pick out what formats are trending or popular or going viral and then putting your own spin on them.
But eventually, the second step is to find some repeatable formats that you can use over and over again. That way, it's not just like, oh, I made one reel that was in this style. To use the YouTube example, I made one vlog, but every month I'm going to make a vlog or every other Tuesday I'm going to make a vlog.
Because when you find a repeatable format, of course, you're able to do it over and over again and plug different topics into that format, which requires a lot less energy and effort for yourself because you don't have to reinvent the wheel. And I think the best way to find one of these repeatable formats is, of course, like I already mentioned, step one, experiment with different formats, but then pay attention to two things.
Number one, pay attention to its performance on your page. Just because a format or style worked for someone else doesn't mean it's guaranteed to work for you. It's a good indicator, but it's not always a guarantee.
And so you're going to want to experiment to see what does your audience resonate with. And part of that is going to be your own way of interpreting or your own style or the way that you put your unique space. on said format and that's like I said the second thing is not only how is your audience responding but are you actually enjoying this format can you crank out this format is it a format where you can have lots of different ideas and you already have you know your mind going of different ways that topics your topics could fit into this format or is it something where this format is so time -consuming it takes so much work it takes so much energy and effort that's just not really worth the squeeze I'll give you examples for me One format that I'm not sure if I saw someone else do it because I've been doing it for so long now, but it's become a repeatable format is what I like to call my trophy or my award reel.
It's a very simple B -roll video of myself holding up my hands and in real life, there's nothing in my hands, but then I digitally edit in a trophy and I have that video saved and every few weeks or months, I can reuse that exact same format and just change the text, thus changing the topic at the top of the screen to give the award or the trophy to someone else.
Nine times out of ten, this format of reel works really well for my audience. It's very share -worthy. The text I'm adding on the screen oftentimes makes it very relatable or edgy.
And personally, it's something that is easy for me to create, easy for me to come up with, and takes little to no effort. On the other hand, a format that I've done a few times that has performed really well is what I call my generations reel. It's a relatively long reel where I put examples of how different generations post on their Instagram stories or post on Christmas morning.
And while this format usually does perform pretty well, for me it takes a lot of time energy and effort and so it's not a format that I do all too often it is repeatable but because it takes a lot of effort it's not something that I'm going to repeat every single week it's really something that I repeat maybe once a quarter or once every six months And then the third and final level, I guess you could call it when we're talking about formats is creating your own formats, creating your own unique styles.
And this is going to come as the result of digesting a lot of different viral formats from other creators, experimenting on your own page and putting your own spin, taste and personality into them until you eventually tweak them and change them enough that they are your own unique style or format. But with all that said, let's hop into my computer and I will show you how you can use Poppy AI to find, discover, and even reuse some of these viral formats for yourself.
All right, so this is what it's going to look like once you are set up on Poppy. What I like to do first and foremost is go up here to new board. When you click on that, it will automatically create a new board there in the first position and then open said board.
like i said earlier these boards in poppy are kind of like the boards that investigative detectives use in those crime shows where they have this big cork board that's filled with different like newspaper clippings and articles and photos and maps and whatnot with little strings tying it all together so this is the first board and the first thing i like to do is give it a name up in the upper left for yours let's call it something like format inspo board one Then as you can see here in the middle, it gives you a few recommendations of ways to get started.
You can create viral YouTube shorts, create viral TikToks or scripts for your reels, all this stuff down here. But what I'm actually going to have you do is go to some of your favorite content creators, regardless of what niche they are in. And I want you to think specifically about who has really creative content that you enjoy to watch.
This does take a little bit of conscious consumption, so yeah, you can't just mindlessly scroll through Reels and TikToks, but I want you to instead thoughtfully consume and think about who are my favorite content creators, regardless of if they're in your niche or industry or not, but people who make creative, original content.
So I'm going to grab a couple different examples here of people who I follow on Instagram who I think do really creative, great stuff. So I'm going to grab this one here. And all I'm going to do is copy the link to their page, go back to Poppy, and I don't have to click anywhere.
I can literally just press Command V and paste in the link to that creator. Then from there, it will take a second. We'll load over here on the right hand side.
And then I have a few different options of what I can select. It will automatically take her latest content and it will give you a little outlier score in the upper left. Basically, this one is performing 3 .3 times better than her average.
This one is performing at 60%. So below her average, you can add her entire profile to the board. But what I like to do is actually do this quick add button and then click.
top 10 outliers because this will pull out her top 10 best performing posts out of her most recent 50 and it will automatically add them in this little collection, this little curated box here to the board. Then I'm going to repeat that process with a handful of other content creators. I recommend at least five, but the more that you can bring in the better.
I'm going to bring in my good friend, June, who is an absolutely amazing human being. Again, just copying the link to his profile, going back to Poppy, pressing Command V and pulling that in. Then same process again, quick add, top 10 outliers.
Now we have 20 total outlier posts. And then I'm just going to repeat this process for the remainder of the unique, creative content creators who I follow and who I look up to and who I'm often inspired by. All right, now I've got all these added to my Poppy board.
But before we get into what to do next, I actually think there's a few really interesting things that I do want to show you. Number one, we'll take Blake here as an example. You can see that these top two of his most recent posts are at 0 % of his average.
That doesn't mean that these were total flops. What this actually shows me is that these are trial reels. So normally, if you were to just follow someone on Instagram, you wouldn't see all of their trial reels because trial reels are only shown to non -followers.
But when Poppy analyzes this content, Poppy isn't a follower of Blake here. And so it pulls up his trial reels, which tells me, number one, he's using trial reels, which is awesome.
Again, we'll talk more about trial reels later. But number two, it shows me actually how he is split testing different content and different things. And that in and of itself gives me clues as to what he as a content creator is paying attention to and optimizing for within his posts.
But as you can see I've added all these different content creators to my page and as you can also see They have a wide variety of niches. So we have cooking we have this one that's fitness related We have June who is a content creator for content creators kind of like I am we have this one, which is more about psychology This one I believe is also psychology then we have yet another psychology account and then we have another fitness slash nutrition account so a wide variety of different topics or niches involved here and the final thing that I wanted to show you is that even if this was all you did and this in and of itself gives you a clue as to, first of all, what are their best performing content?
What's their best reels? What are their most viral pieces of content? And you could watch these reels and yourself just like visually take notes and learn from these and get inspired.
But just from like a bird's eye view without clicking on any of these individually, I start to see some reoccurring patterns. Like on this example right here, you can see that of her top 10 outliers, I believe it is seven of these have a laptop in front of her and six of the, seven have text in red on a white background on the laptop.
So that's kind of like the visual format without knowing what the rest of the reel is about without knowing and clicking and actually watching to see how the rest of it is presented. That in and of itself is something that I could recreate in my own niche. But here's where things are going to get fun.
The next step is I'm going to go to my own Instagram profile, copy the link to my profile, paste it in here. And then I'm not going to add my outliers. I'm going to add my profile as a whole, because in just a minute, we're going to have Poppy analyze where there are gaps in my own content compared to what all these other people are doing.
And we're going to have Poppy take a look at all of the things that I'm posting so that it gets a sense as to the things that I regularly post about. So instead of adding quick ad or 50 posts or outliers, I'm just going to. do quick add profile to board and it will add my entire profile to the board just like that And again, this is very much an interactive board.
So you can zoom in, zoom out, you can drag, move stuff around. And the next step that I'm going to recommend, and this is something that might be a little bit advanced. So this is something that you might have to pause this episode right now and create, or when you start using poppy, you might have to create something like this for yourself, but it's what I like to call a brand voice document.
Here is my actual living brand voice document. I call it a living brand voice document because it's updated for me automatically every single week by clot. That's a little bit.
I'm not gonna get into that right now. This is my brand voice document So it's a document that outlines who I am my my core attributes my tone my vocab words I say don't say all that sort of stuff I could just copy this text and paste this text directly onto the poppy board But instead what I'm actually going to do is go to this upload button over here and then click on Google Drive I could just drag in a file from my downloads, but Since I have Google Drive connected, I can just pop right into Google Drive.
I can search for my brand voice doc. Pull that up. Click on that.
Select. Done. And now we'll automatically add that document and all of the contents of it to this board so that it's basically knowledge that this poppy board now has about me.
Now pro tip for the future, something that you can do as you continue to create more boards is as you add things that you know you're going to want to reuse board after board after board, like the link to my Instagram profile or like my living brand voice document, I can actually add it to my brand. That way it's just something that is included on each of these boards.
It's not something that I have to manually add each time, but because this is my first board or theoretically this would be your first board, you don't have a brand set up yet. Now is where the fun part starts happening. So I'm going to click on this first button up here in the top left that says AI chat, and it adds this little AI chat window right here onto the screen.
Now I get to take out the red yarn and connect each of these pizzas to the actual chat so that the chat is being informed by all of these outlier posts and my profile that we have previously added to the board.
And to do this, I'm basically just tapping on this little tiny circle that is on the center right -hand side of any media or any piece of content that has been added to this board. I click on the first node on the thing that I want connected, and then I click on the node on the left -hand side of the chat, and you can see it is kind of drawing these lines for me, showing that they're all being connected one by one to the actual chat.
There we go. Now, as I zoom out, you can faintly see that all of these individual lines, all of these individual nodes and outlier content and inspirational profiles have all been connected to this chat. I can zoom in on this chat now and I can interact with it just like I would with basically any other LLM chat like Claude or ChatGPT.
And in fact, if down here in the bottom right, I click on this little button that says Poppy, I can actually select if I want Claude or ChatGPT or NanoBanano or Gemini or Grok or any of these other models to be the exact LLM that I am interfacing with. But for our purposes, I'm just going to stick with Poppy for today. And here's the first prompt that I'm going to give it.
And I recommend that you use the exact same prompt. It is pull out the best performing formats from these pages that are not currently being used on my own. When I say format, I'm referring to more than just the words being said in the reel, but the overall visual, the style, the presentation, the pacing, the props, and any other unique elements.
Give me a list of unique formats and include links to at least one of each of these sources of the different formats. Then I just hit enter. And then after some generating, look at all of this amazing content and amazing ideas that it has come up with.
From here, there's a few different things that you can do. You could just scroll straight down to the bottom and click on any one of these ideas that Poppy has given you. And as you can see over here, it will create a script for you just based off clicking on these.
Idea number two, which is something that I recommend regardless of what you're going to be doing, is actually read through each of these so that you can get an understanding of what the unique formats are. And because we asked it to, it included a link to each of these formats so you can watch them for yourselves. And or the third thing that you can do, which is the one I'm going to recommend that you do, is put in this prompt down the bottom.
Now come up with an exact shot for shot storyboard outline of how I could apply, you could say, each of these 15, you could say ideas number three and four, you could say every idea except for number 12 to my own content. Tell me every necessary piece, the visual on the screen, the text, the script, the audio, etc. For ours, let's just say I'm going to do number two, number three, and number seven.
And look at this, it's getting to work, coming up with the full script outline in the actual visual of what it should look like on the screen. And as you can see, Poppy is again recommending some next steps if you're stuck and don't know where to go from here. But because we didn't actually read through number three originally, let's go back up to the original explanation as number three, read through what it is, and then read what Poppy came up with for us.
So number three is the I Made Nothing Premiere. Episode one of a new series where there's no audience input yet. So the creator mimes cooking on an empty pan.
Sauteing nothingness with shaved emptiness. With Epic Orchestra Music, it's a launch format. It turns zero comments into the joke that drives the first wave of participation.
So I'm going to click on this and get a little bit of an idea. Oh yeah, I remember this. So this guy was doing cooking the comments, but it was day one.
So he obviously didn't have comments from the day before. So it's funny. It's lighthearted, as you can see.
Exactly as Poppy described, it is. mimicking or miming what it would be like to cook and to eat food. This is also an important point where I want to pause and note something I probably should have paused and noted earlier, which is that something that is unique that Poppy is doing is it's able to actually watch this reel.
If I were to just like take the link to this reel and give it to Claude or download this reel somehow and give the file to ChatGPT, it couldn't watch it in the same way that Poppy just did. It would really just read the caption, read the transcript, and then kind of infer the rest. while Poppy is basically essentially watching this reel just like a human would.
Now, this is, I think, going to be a relatively tough one to apply to my niche, but let's see what Poppy came up with. I kind of threw it a curveball and asked it to come up with one without actually checking it first. That's why I recommend that you would check it first.
And here's what it came up with. The I Made Nothing premiere. Your version launched the episode of any new series.
This is the same skeleton as... Number two is episode one, but stripped into its purest form. The format is the joke, and the joke is that the format has no input yet.
Use this anytime you launch something new, like a series, a challenge, a newsletter segment, or a podcast bit. Shot by shot. Start with an extreme close -up of your hands doing something precise and pointless, aligning a pen perfectly on a blank notebook, or straightening a single sheet of paper.
And it gave me the idea, episode one of the insert series name. Shot two, visually cut to a top -down shot of a blank notebook. You write the series name and then underlined it, then underline it again.
Shot three, a fast montage of you working with nothing. Four cuts, one second each, typing on a keyboard with no screen, stirring an empty mug, scrolling on a blank phone, nodding thoughtfully at a wall. Okay, I like this idea, but one thing that I'm noticing is that it's still leaving room for me to come up with what the series is.
So I'm going to challenge Poppy right now to see if it can come up with a series for me that I could then apply this format to. Come up with a series that I could start using idea number three. We'll see what it comes up with.
And here's what it came up with. Your series would be testing the comments. His is cooking the comments.
Yours is testing the comments. The premise is your audience comments a specific Instagram tactic, a hook, a claim, or a piece of advice that they've heard, and then you test it on your account. I think it's actually a really creative series and I like it.
I think it'd be a great way to dispel myths, a great way to experiment, and a great way to find out if there are any hacks or tricks or rumors that people have heard that are actually valid and have some truth to them. Kind of like that old show Mythbusters, but Instagram edition. I like it.
I think this is actually a super creative idea from Poppy. And as you can see it also gives me a shot for shot of how this could look and all of this is based off of someone else's format that I was inspired by. I'm not stealing his posts.
I'm not word -for -word copying his videos. I'm taking the inspiration from him and applying it to my own niche. And I said I but it's really Poppy who's doing all that work for me.
It's just up to me to actually create the video. So again, I firmly believe that Poppy is an excellent tool to have in your toolkit as a content creator. I'm not someone who's a big proponent of having like 17 different subscriptions and using every other different AI tool.
I think that oftentimes we can get bogged down and lost in the weeds. I think that oftentimes we can lose our own sense of taste, creativity, personality, and we can actually slow down our process by trying to add too many tools to the system. But Poppy is one that I definitely think can help you work more efficiently and help you amplify your own taste.
rather than losing your taste to AI. And Poppy has hooked up my audience with a $1 trial of Poppy. So you can check out everything that I just showed you for just $1.
Click that link down in the description below and you can check it out for yourself today. It's an absolutely amazing deal and I don't think they've ever done a special that is quite this heavily discounted. So definitely click that link before it goes away.
B -roll content is one of the best ways to level up your reels on Instagram and get more views and engagement without having to do very much extra work. B -roll content is kind of like behind -the -scenes footage. It's footage that visually shows whatever it is that you're talking about so that the viewer isn't just watching you talking to the camera the whole time.
And thanks to one of today's sponsors, Storyblock, it's easier than ever to get 100 % human -made video content that you can use for B -roll or any other supplemental footage in your reels. On Storyblocks, they... have millions of videos that you can use and plug right into any of your reels and none of them are AI generated.
So you keep that human touch. It's genuine. It's authentic.
And people aren't going to be turned off because of some AI slop. You get unlimited downloads under your one subscription. So you can test and experiment with the different content that they offer.
And their average member saves three and a half hours per week of work. I love easily adding video content from Storyblocks into my reels. Head to Storyblocks.
My next recommendation for how do you make a good post on Instagram is that you remember that done is better than perfect. And really this entire section is how do you make a good post because I believe that good should be the goal.
Not A +, not perfect viral posts, but just making good posts. Stop editing your posts, stop refining them, stop writing your scripts, stop trying to improve them once you think they're good. And sometimes you're even going to post some things even if you think it might not be great.
Even if you think it might not be as good as it could, you're still going to press post and you're ultimately going to let your audience be the judge. I can't tell you how many times myself personally or every content creator and business owner that I work with says, I spent hours and hours working on this post. I thought it was hilarious or I thought it was super valuable.
Posted it and it absolutely flopped. And then at the exact same time, maybe that same exact week, I had a post that I just kind of whipped up. I didn't think very much.
I posted it and it went viral. So at the end of the day, you can follow every rule. You can check off every box on the checklist.
You can do everything air quotes, right? But ultimately you're going to press post and it's just not going to perform the way you would expect positively or negatively. So ultimately done is better than perfect.
A practical way this into practice is to set a timer for yourself when you're creating content. If it normally takes you 45 minutes to make a reel, set a timer that is less than that. Set a timer that is maybe 30 minutes long and whatever you get done in those 30 minutes, you are going to hold yourself accountable to press post at the end.
Or if you know that you're going to cheat yourself and you're going to go 34 minutes, then get an accountability partner, like a spouse, a colleague, a business partner, a friend, or someone who can actually hold you accountable. So when that timer hits zero, you are actually going to press post with whatever you have. But ultimately I say this because you're going to learn so much more after the post has already been posted than you are by continuing to watch more YouTube videos and subscribe to more podcasts and edit your reels for longer, find them and make them a little bit better before pressing.
Instead, when you actually press post, you're going to get the real data of how it performed. What were the moments that were boring? What were the moments that got people excited?
What was the moment in the video that everyone liked it? And what was the moment in the video that everyone scrolled away? Instead of guessing at that or trying to figure out based off of theories and psychology as to what it might be, when you actually press post, you get the real data.
And that brings me to my final tip about how do you make a good quality post, and it is through quantity. Quantity. breeds quality practice is what leads to progress and so oftentimes there's this debate on social media of which one should you focus on which one matters more quality or quantity and i hope i've already begun to illustrate for you that you need both you are most likely not going to have success on instagram without both quality and quantity if it was just about quantity and all you had to do was upload 300 times a day and it didn't matter what you uploaded well then you wouldn't need to listen to this entire episode you could just post any random photos and videos from your camera and you would be fine, but that's not how it works.
And at the same time, it's not just all about quality. You can't just post a few times a month and expect to grow because first of all, if you're only posting a few times a month, you're not probably going to have a good idea of what a good quality post is. It's really, really hard to have that sense of what is going to go viral, what is really going to work well if you don't have the data and the data comes from posting.
But let's say magically you did know what makes a viral post. You did go to the Steven, Steven Spielberg school of film and you did go to the Emma Chamberlain school of virality and you just knew what made a viral piece of content.
Like you just had this innate gift that you were born with. Even if that was true and you posted a few times a month, you're going to get beat by someone who's posting a few times a week or even a few times a day who has a lesser skill set because they simply have more at bats, more opportunities and more chances to reach the same audience.
So with all that being said, let's transition from the topic of quality into the topic of quantity and answer the question, how much should you post? And unfortunately, I know you might have been hoping for a numerical answer, but I'm not going to give you one. Instead, I'm going to give you an eight word phrase that I.
want you to remember, the more you post, the more you grow. T -M -Y -P, T -M -Y -G. On Instagram, it is statistically correct, proven by numerous studies, that there is a direct correlation between the number of posts that any given account is making to the feed and their growth rate.
Part of that is because, like I already said, each post is an opportunity to practice and improve the quality of your content. Part of that is just because you have more at -bats. If we're thinking of yourself as a baseball player, if you get to step into the batter's box more often, you are more likely to get a hit, get on base, and maybe even hit a home run than if you're someone who only ever steps in the batter's box once a week or a couple times a month.
And in the words of one of my favorite Pokemon creators, Alex Ketchum, count uploads, not followers.
Track the number of times that you're posting and try to improve and optimize that, not counting the number of followers. The number of followers you have is the byproduct or the result of the number of uploads that you're making. So this all sounds great on paper, and I truly do think that it's great because you can control the number of times you upload.
Quality is something that's harder to control because quality is often... deemed by the mind and the perception of the viewer, right? You can think something is really high quality, but your viewers might not get the joke.
They might not see the value that you are providing in the content. And so quality is a lot more subjective, but quantity is something that is just a number. How many times did you post today?
And that is something that you can control because you can control your effort. You can control your output. And so again, I think that's great news, but it's only great news on paper because as I'm saying all this, there's also probably that voice in your head that is filled with anxiety that's like, how the heck am I supposed to post every single day or multiple times a day?
How is that possible? Brock, I'm not a full -time content creator. I can't just sit in my house and create reels all day.
I have a life that I want to live. Well, don't worry. I'm going to answer that for you because as someone who posts over 163 times per week, every single week with little to no external help outside of myself on my content, I have systems in place.
I have strategies that I've been using and refining for years to get to this point. When I first got started on Instagram, I wasn't posting five to 10 times a day. I was posting maybe once a day if I was lucky, but realistically it was more like three or four times a week.
So like every other day. But now I've gotten to the point where I'm kind of known for my consistency. And I believe that one of my superpowers is my hyper consistency.
So I'm going to break down for you how you can achieve that for yourself. Because no, I wasn't bitten by a radioactive Instagram spider. Instead, I just have systems and strategies that I consistently rely on outside of just discipline.
And that's actually the first thing that I want to talk about, which is that systems are always going to be discipline. And discipline is always going to be motivation. A lot of people, when they're first getting started on Instagram, rely on motivation, inspired.
Maybe they finish a great super long YouTube slash podcast episode, like the one you're watching right now, and they're feeling fired up. And so they post a bunch of times today, they post a bunch of times tomorrow, but then before they know it, the motivation is gone and they're burnt out and overwhelmed. Instead, the next step in the right direction is relying on discipline.
So that even on the days where you don't feel like showing up, even on the days where you don't feel like posting, even the days where you don't feel motivated, you are still going to stick with what you committed to. you're still going to press post on that day. But sometimes things just get chaotic and you literally can't post no matter how disciplined you are.
It's basically impossible for you to post on any given day. And so that's where systems and strategies like the ones I'm about to explain to you come in. So strategy number one, how do we actually post more?
The first thing I'm going to recommend is focusing on sustainability, which sounds crazy because I was just talking to you about 163 posts a week, five to 10 posts a day, which is crazy. But I want you to instead focus on sustainability. What can you realistically sustain?
And I don't want this to be like a random number that you pull out of thin air. I want you to look at your own time, your own resources, your own goals. Be really candid and honest with yourself about how much time, energy, and effort are you willing to commit to this whole Instagram thing.
Also, if you've already been... trying to do them for maybe the last few months or years, look at your own track record. Over the last 90 days, how many times have you posted?
If you've posted 45 times in 90 days, well, then you know that your baseline of what you can sustain, at least currently, is one post every other day. Now, through these other tips and strategies that I'm about to share with you, I'm hopefully going to teach you how you can dial up that sustainability and you can sustain a more frequent schedule without having to burn the midnight oil or work harder.
Because I do want to say, I'm anti -hustle culture. Like, sure, I guess like that could be one of the strategies is just like hustle harder and sacrifice your boundaries and like neglect your friends and family and make more posts for Instagram.
But that's not me. That's not something that I teach. That's not something that I believe in.
That's not how I want to live my life. And that's not how I want you to live your life if I can be so bold as to proclaim what I think you should be doing and how you should be living your life. I think it's much more sustainable and much more enjoyable to instead still be able to live your life, instead be able to use systems and strategies to keep up the consistency that you want.
But with all that being said, I am definitely a fan of working hard. And I do think that there's a distinction between toxic hustle culture and working hard. I work hard on Instagram.
And if you want to grow a successful business on Instagram, you're going to have to work hard too. It's not going to be easy. So work hard.
Yes. Stay up until 3am making a reel because Brock said you had to post today. No.
The second strategy that I want you to employ that will allow you to post more is to feck perfection. And I hope you can read between the lines and pick up what I'm putting down here, but stop trying to make perfect posts. I believe that a significant cause, if not the number one cause of burnout on social media, is not posting too much, but it is instead trying to make perfect posts.
Overanalyzing, overthinking, overediting, overdoing every single post that you make so that each post feels like an art project. Each post feels like this ma - and then by the time you post it, it's not really authentic anymore, it's hours or days or weeks after the original idea struck, you post it, it flops, it doesn't perform well, that's a negative feedback loop, and it doesn't take long for that to lead to burnout.
So instead, I want you to embrace your humanity and stop trying to be perfect. For me, what that looks like is sometimes my posts have typos, they have mistakes. Not because I'm trying to trick people into commenting and calling out my misspelled word, but simply because I'm so focused on getting the post posted that sometimes I fail to spell check it.
My third tip for how you can post more and thus grow more on Instagram is that you need to be batching your content. I think it is an excuse whenever I hear people say, I don't like batching content because I'll just post whenever I feel inspired. That's not a sustainable strategy.
And in just a minute, I'll explain to you how I still allow room for daily inspiration while also batching to maintain uploads. If at the time that you are watching or listening to this episode, you do not currently have 14 days of posts that are already done, created, edited, scheduled, and ready to be uploaded, then I want you to take the next 14.
days off of posting. Yes, you heard that right. I want you to take the next two weeks without any posts.
The algorithm will not punish you. No one's going to get mad at you. Adam Lozeri, the head of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, they're not going to come knocking on your door to get mad at you for not posting for the next two weeks.
And also, your followers probably aren't going to notice. This isn't an airport. You don't need to announce your departure.
Just for the next two weeks, press pause on uploading any new posts. And again, I know that sounds contradictory to everything that I was just saying, but I believe that this is not a setback. This is actually a setup for your...
future success. So spend the next two weeks, not uploading, but instead creating, also known as batching, as many posts as possible.
Use all the strategies that we were talking about earlier about what makes a good post, how do you use Poppy to find a high -quality, repeatable format, and create as many posts as possible over the next two weeks. Then, once you have those posts created, you're going to schedule them so that they can be automatically uploaded for you, and you don't have to think about it each day.
And no, you will not be punished for doing that. Adam Lozeri, the head of Instagram, basically every single week answers the question, on his Instagram stories where someone asks, if I use a scheduling tool, will I get less views?
And he says, no, I schedule my posts. So no, you will not get less views just because you scheduled your posts. Also, quick sidebar, it doesn't matter where you edit your reels.
That's another longstanding myth on Instagram is that if you edit in CapCut or iMovie or InShot or whatever, if you edit anywhere besides the Instagram edits app, you're going to get less views. That's not true. Adam Ozeri has said that that's not true.
We've tested it in the Insta Club Hub and proven that that's not true. So edit. wherever you like.
But before we talk more about the actual scheduling process, I want to walk you through what works for me in terms of the content creation process during this batching phase. Number one, daily I'm getting inspired because daily I scroll social media. I don't know about you, but pretty much every day I'm watching Instagram Reels.
Maybe I'm scrolling TikTok. I'm watching YouTube videos. Pretty much every single day in one way or another, I am consuming content.
Even on the days where I am not on my phone or I'm not scrolling on social media, I might still be watching Netflix or reading a book. or reading the newspaper, and there is always inspiration. There are bajillions of pieces of media in the world, and almost all of them can be used in one way or another for inspiration, especially when you're using a tool like Poppy that I described earlier.
So as I'm scrolling, I'm saving ideas in a variety of ways. Sometimes I will send a post back to myself via text or via direct message, and I like to do that when I want to include an additional note about what was inspiring or what caught my eye about the post. Because I don't know about you, but there's no nothing worse than when you save a post and then you go back and look at it like two weeks later and you're like, why did I save this?
Was there something that I wanted to note like personally? Or was that like the hook was really good? Was there a visual?
Was there something at the end? Was there something in the caption? What was it about this post that made me save it?
That's really frustrating. So my way to avoid that is instead I just press the share button instead of the save button. And then I send the post to myself either via direct message right on Instagram or via text message like through iMessage.
And that allows me to add a little bit of an extra. note as to why I am saving this post. But sometimes if the post is more obvious and it doesn't need an explanation attached to it, then I will just save it into a saved collection on Instagram.
And I do have numerous saved collections. I have a saved collection for great hook ideas. I have a saved collection for interesting formats.
I have a saved collection for cool visual storytelling. I have a saved folder on Instagram that's just for viral trends. And this categorization allows me to be more efficient in the future.
I've even played around with setting up some automation so that when I save specific posts into specific folders or in specific ways on Instagram, it automatically gets logged into like a Google sheet and then Claude and or Poppy is able to access that Google sheet and automatically turn the saved content into ideas or inspiration that I can reuse.
That's a little bit more advanced. That's something that I've covered in other episodes of this podcast. It's something that I don't think is necessary to cover in this one, but just know that if you want to get more technical with this and you want to build full comp, complex automation so that all of your saved posts are automatically turned into scripts that you can use.
That's possible. But again, daily, I'm getting inspired. And that's just a matter of reframing the way you use social media from being a passive scroller into an active consumer.
Step two in my batch creation process is that semi -weekly, so a few days a week, I will collect my ideas. I will organize them. I will make sure that they are tagged.
I'll make sure that they are put in a Google Sheet if that's what I'm using. I'll make sure that I'm ranking them based off of what is urgent because it's a trend and it needs to be done right now versus what is something that can be done a few weeks from now. What's the easiest post?
of all the ones that I've saved that I could recreate. What's the most difficult one that's going to take a few hours for me to recreate? Basically, a few times a week, I'm just collecting my thoughts, if you will.
Oftentimes, I also have thoughts in a wide variety of areas. My Instagram DMs, my notes app, Google Sheets, all these different locations. And so a few times, maybe two or three times a week, I'm collecting all of these ideas.
Or a few times a week, I'm having AI collect all these ideas and put them in one central, easy -to -access location. Then the third step in my batching process process is weekly and that's weekly content creation.
So you can create every single day if that's something that you really enjoy. But for me, not every single day do I feel like going on camera, not a, do I feel inspired and motivated and funny and charismatic and enthusiastic, whatever. I only feel that way maybe a couple of times a week, sometimes only just once a week.
So what works for me is not necessarily scheduling in a specific time block, but instead just making sure that there is at least one session per week, whether that's an hour long, three hours long. whatever, that I am creating content for Instagram. And when I say creating, I mean filming reels, basically.
Carousels can be edited at 3 a .m. in your PJs. Again, not recommending that you stay up until 3 a .m., but you get what I'm saying, right?
You can edit a carousel any time of day. You're not going to film a reel probably at 3 a .m. in your pajamas.
Instead, you're going to want to be feeling good, looking good, and in the zone, so to speak, to be recording those reels. And so that's not necessarily recommend or suggest doing every... single day.
Like I mentioned, if you can do it every day, great. But what I recommend is once a week, you're recording content. And a tip within a tip within a tip is when you are doing this weekly batching session and you're recording this content.
Number one, start with the low hanging fruit. If you have an hour to record reels, I would much rather that you get to the end of that hour and you have six easy reels filmed rather than three quarters of one really tough reel filmed. So start with the low hanging fruit.
Additionally, during that recording session, however long it is, whether it's 20 minutes and hour three hours i only want you to record i don't want you to stop and edit your script that should have been done ahead of time during the semi -weekly organization of all of your ideas and scripts and all the inspiration that you already had i just want you to record record record and create as much as you possibly can then the next step once you're done with that session the time is over the kids wake up from their naps whatever they get home from school and that recording time is done then it comes to the editing phase and editing has a wide diversity in terms of who's going to edit, how long it's going to take, how much editing you're going to do, whether you edit yourself, whether you have a human being, an editor who's going to edit on your behalf, whether AI like Claude with a plugin that's going to edit for you.
And I do want you to remember, ask the question, who not how? So instead of how can I edit better? I want you to ask.
who can edit this for me and who could be a human or it could be an AI tool or a software. Who is going to help me be more efficient with my editing? Because what I find for a lot of small business owners and content creators is that editing becomes a significant bottleneck when it really shouldn't be.
There are tons of people and AI tools and softwares out there that are very proficient editors and are going to be able to do just as good, if not a better job than you. And they're going to be able to do it in less time. Sure, it might cost you some money, but in my opinion, that money is an investment.
because you are now buying back your time and you're able to spend more time creating, more time working on other areas of the business, or simply more time living your life being a human being and less time slaving away on CapCut or edits or whatever editing app you use. The other piece of this batch creation process that I do weekly is the actual planning of the post.
And when I say that, I mean like planning what day each post is going to go live, planning what time each post is going to be scheduled for. And so that actually brings me into the second piece of this whole batching and scheduling thing, which is scheduling.
Like I already mentioned, yes, you should be scheduling your content on Instagram. And there's a wide variety of ways that you could do that. You could set a manual reminder in your phone's calendar that sends you a push notification and says, Hey, it's time to post on Instagram.
And then you could log in and manually post and upload every single post. That's not very efficient. That's not what I recommend.
You could schedule your posts directly in Instagram because as you're about to upload a post, there is a button that allows you to schedule it for the future, but it's pretty limited. Oftentimes, it will only allow you to schedule like 15 posts at a time or won't allow you to schedule outside of 30 or 90 days. It doesn't allow you to see a preview of your grid.
Basically, it's really, really limited. You could use the in -app Instagram scheduler if you're in a pinch or if you really have to, but it's not what I recommend for most people most of the time. There are a wide variety of scheduling tools out there, and a lot of them do a pretty similar thing.
They allow you to upload your completed posts to them, write your captions, sometimes add audio or hashtags or things like that, and then schedule your post to be uploaded at a later date automatically. The tool that I've been using for years, the tool that I recommend, it's the tool that I love, is called Metricool. And if you use code Brock, B -R -O -C -K, which is my name, of course, then you'll get a month of their pro features for free, but even on just their free basic plan without...
pro features you can schedule a certain number of posts to be automatically posted each month But again, there are a wide variety of tools out there that pretty much provide the same thing. And so I just want you to experiment with a few of them.
See if there's one that works for you. Maybe you like the visual design. You like its app.
You like the interface. Maybe there's one that fits your budget better than others. So just play around and find the scheduling app that's right for you.
But once you're done with this 14 days of batching or you're at any point just done with batching posts and you have a collection of reels and carousels and photos that are ready to be scheduled, you're going to schedule them using your scheduling tool. But then this is how we're going to multiply. your content with tip number four of how you can post more, which is what I like to call upcycling.
There are two components of upcycling. The first piece is recreating your existing posts or even just your existing ideas in new formats and new styles and new ways. So for example, if I did a talking head reel where I'm speaking directly to the camera and I'm giving some tips about how to become a rock climber, I could also post those exact same tips in the format of a carousel where the viewer is going to be swiping through.
the exact same tips. I've already shared them in a reel. Now it's just being posted again in a new format.
I could also take that carousel and turn it into a B -roll reel where there's a video of me rock climbing, there's text on the screen that says how to become a better rock climber, giving the tips that I said in the spoken reel or the tips that were written on the screen in the carousel. I believe that every single idea that you have can be posted in at least three different formats or versions.
And I would argue that most ideas can be posted in way more than just three versions, but I'm going to set that as your new minimum for every idea that you have for every story you want to tell for every tip you want to give for every lesson you want to teach. create at least three different formats or three different versions of that teaching or that story.
And for these slightly modified versions, you don't want to post them all back to back. You don't want to have the exact same idea shared on the same day. So instead, we'll space them out by at least a few days, if not a few weeks, so that your audience is a lot less likely.
They're not very likely to begin with, but they're a lot less likely to notice that, hey, this reel that you just posted this morning is the exact same tips that you shared in the carousel this afternoon. Space them out by a few days or a few weeks and probably... no one's going to notice.
The very, very small fraction of a percent of people who might notice are the people who were heavily impacted positively by your first post, right? They were like, oh my God, the tips were so good in that reel you shared. Now that you're sharing it as a carousel, I remember, but the tips were that good.
They were that impactful. They were that valuable. The story, the lesson, whatever it is, was that good that they don't mind seeing it again.
The second piece of upcycling your content is that every single post can be posted more than one time. Here's where using a scheduling tool can really unlock more frequent posting. Whenever you create and schedule a new post, I want you to immediately go in, duplicate that post, whatever that looks like in your scheduling app.
In Metricool, I literally just press a button on a post that says duplicate, and then I select a date, approximately 90 days in the future. Sometimes it's a little bit more, a little bit less, but basically I fast forward three months and I just pick a random day three months into the future. And I don't just do that once.
I do that twice with every post. So if you do the math, every single post is being posted once. It's being duplicated and posted 90 days later and then duplicated and posted again 90 days after that or 180 days after the original post.
And so every single individual post is exactly the same. same caption same everything i've changed absolutely nothing and it's being posted three times and that's just a minimum i have posts that i'm still posting in 2027 that were originally posted in 2022 because i post them every six months and every six months they do really well people engage with them they go viral most people have not seen it before the few people who have seen it before do not remember and again that fraction of a fraction of a percent who did see it and does remember they don't mind seeing it again because it's been so long and they only remember it in the first place because it was that valuable the first time they saw it So not to get too mathematical on you, but if you want to post every single day, one time per day for 365 days, you only need about 40 unique ideas, 40 different lists of tips or pieces of advice or jokes or whatever it may be, 40 in total to post every single day for the entire year.
Because every single idea or story or list of tips or recommendation or public service announcement or statistic, basically any single thing that you want to share can posted nine different times because every single idea is going to have three formats multiplied by three uploads for each of those formats, AKA nine total posts per idea.
You do the math and that means that you only need about 40 unique ideas to post every single day of the year. Now, the way that this fits into my actual schedule is that, like I said, once a week I am going in and planning my content for the next week, but truly most of the time, all of my posts for the upcoming week have already been scheduled.
because they are just re uploads of things that I have posted in the past. So what I do for myself is that once a week I log into my scheduling tool and I just look at my next week. I take a glance at what is already scheduled for the next week.
And again, it's a kind of random assortment of things that were posted 90 or 180 or even more days ago. And then I just do a spot check and I make sure that there's no duplicates. There's not the same exact tips or the same exact ideas being posted back to back.
I make sure that no two posts that are too close to each other, look too similar. I just make sure that there's some good diversity and there's some good spacing.
Sometimes I'll find that I just happen to randomly select that every single post was going to be posted on Tuesday the 14th for whatever. And so I'll just take the posts, the 17 posts that were supposed to be scheduled on Tuesday the 14th, and I'll move some to Monday, some to Wednesday, some to Thursday. But that way I'm never forced to create content on any specific day because I constantly have a backlog of content from the past that I am reusing and that has already been scheduled to be reposted.
And this is how I mentioned earlier, I still leave room for daily inspiration. Sometimes there's a viral pop culture moment that I just have to make a post about because it would be so funny. Sometimes there's Instagram breaking news that I need to report on.
Sometimes I'm feeling inspired because everyone is talking about this thing and I need to make my own post addressing that thing. And so I still have space for that. All I have to do when that inspiration strikes or when that moment appears is take the post that would have been scheduled on that day or that would have been scheduled later that afternoon.
And I push them to the next day or the next week, or I just delay their uploading so that I can right now in this moment, make this post. Basically, I'm allowed to, I can make a post whenever I want. I could make a post every day if I wanted to, but I'm never, ever forced to.
I'm never in a position where I have to make content. And thus, I've broken the chains. I've gotten myself off of the hamster wheel of daily content creation.
I've stuck with daily content uploading, but I no longer have to. I'm no longer tied to. I no longer have the job.
of daily content creation. Alrighty, really quickly, I just wanted to pause and say thank you so much for making it this far. Like, I'm kind of shocked that there are still people watching or listening.
I... I know that I myself personally like really long YouTube videos. And yeah, there's been a handful of other people in adjacent or similar niches to me who have done their own versions of these really long masterclass style videos.
But this is a huge risk. And this is something that has taken a really long time and a lot of effort to put together. So I just want to say thank you truly from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you for engaging. Thank you for watching. If you've been watching this far and you have learned a few things, I would appreciate it if you hit that like button.
I think I said earlier, I've lost track of all the things. I've said, but if I haven't already, please definitely double check that you are subscribed. The vast majority of my viewers, watchers, listeners, whatever, are not subscribed.
You tune in every single week, so you think you're subscribed. YouTube or whatever podcast app you're using recommends my episodes, so you assume you're subscribed, but just real quick, do a double check, and truly from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for spending so much time with me. I appreciate you.
Now that we know about quality and what makes a good post, and we know about quantity of how much you should post, let's talk about the strategies that you should use in general. for your posts and for your Instagram that are going to be hurtful, the strategies that don't matter, and the strategies that are actually going to be helpful.
I'm going to share with you five of each, and I think this is important because there's so many myths on Instagram, and there's so many things that maybe they used to work and they don't work anymore, or maybe they used to work and now they're actively working against you. Maybe they were just myths from the start, but they've been so widespread and they've been around for so many years that people think they're fact.
Let's talk about it. Number one on the list of strategies that's going to hurt you is buying any sort of followers or engagement. It sounds silly and you might be like, well, Brock, duh, of course, but it needs to be said because there are people who follow me and message me every single day who ask where they can buy followers.
Hey, if I just buy some views or buy some likes on my posts, will that just provide me with a little boost that I need to get kicks on Instagram? No, it will not. And even if it did, it will hurt your account in the long run because followers or engagement that you buy will never buy from you.
You're not buying actual followers or views or engagement. You're buying. robots to spam your account and artificially inflate your numbers don't do it enough with that one let's move on to number two follow unfollow follow unfollow is the practice where you go through every single day and you follow hundreds or maybe even thousands of people and then you wait a few days those people are like hey joey smith followed me and they follow you back And then a few days later, you unfollow all of them.
So again, you're artificially inflating your number of followers and you're keeping your number of people who you follow low. This is a strategy that has been around since 2012. And unfortunately, it should have been left in 2012.
Strategy number three is what's called rewatch bait. rewatch bait are the reels that are essentially trying to trick people into rewatching the reel over and over again. And I'm not talking about the creative loops where it seamlessly transitions from the end back to the beginning and you don't even realize that it restarted.
That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about instead is the reels that usually are like four or five seconds long, so they're super short, and they have like three paragraphs of text on the screen. So a ton of text.
So much text that you could never read it before the reel ends. The creator is doing this intentionally because back in... 2024, this worked.
If you put a bunch of text on the screen, someone would have to watch the real quote unquote, watch the real four or five, six times on loop over and over again, just so that they could read the text. Well, Instagram wised up to this. They figured out what was going on and people just began to be annoyed with this.
It was like, I don't want to read all that text on the screen. You're not giving me enough time to read it. So I'm trying to like pause it or rewind.
And it's just frustrating for the viewers. And so Instagram began cracking down on this. And if you do this thing where you flash the text or the text isn't on the screen for long enough to be read, get less views because of it.
So the general rule of thumb or recommendation that I like to give here is read the text out loud. If you can verbally read the text out loud in the time that it's on the screen, you're good to go. If it disappears, if the scene changes, if the reel ends before you can finish reading it, then the clip needs to be longer or the text needs to be shorter.
Another version of this rewatch bait is the kinds of reels that are again, super short. And they're what I like to call the read the caption reels where people would put some sort of hook, oftentimes a very clickbaity claim or something that's usually about like money.
Oftentimes like I made $34 ,000 in one weekend in less than 30 minutes while I was at the pool, find out how, read the caption. And then the caption is like, it's so long, it's obnoxious. And it's oftentimes aided by ChatGPT where it's like super long and unnecessarily long and ChatGPT made it even longer.
And again, it's with this basic premise that you're trying to trick people into watching. or making the algorithm think that people are rewatching your reel over and over and over again, when in reality, they're just reading the caption. But this is another example of something that the algorithm has wised up to, they've figured out what is going on, and the audience is annoyed by.
And I want you to understand what I'm saying here. There's nothing wrong with a long caption. Remember the miniskirt rule from earlier, also known as the short short rule from earlier.
As long as it needs to be to cover the important, necessary information, but still as short and concise as it has to be to hold people's attention. This is not that. These are the obnoxiously long captions.
This is not the kind of caption where it's like, hey, it's a recipe reel, so I put the full recipe in the caption. That's fine. This is not, hey, there's some necessary backstory that I needed to write in the caption.
That's fine. Or, hey, there's some extra tips that I wanted to give in the caption. That is fine.
All of these things are fine. There's nothing wrong with... long caption where it becomes wrong not just in my opinion but algorithmically speaking and with the average audience which we pull people all the time what we see is that when there's this super long caption that does not need to be super long paired with a reel that is super short that didn't need to be super short like it's obnoxiously short it's cut short intentionally that is what the algorithm picks up on that is what the audience is annoyed by and thus that will actively work against you and hurt your growth the fourth thing that is actively working against you is what's called an engagement pod.
Now these are far less common nowadays. They were super common from like 2014 to 2017. And an engagement pod is basically where a group of people, oftentimes people who are a part of the same organization or a part of a network marketing company, or they're in a similar niche, they'll get together with like 20 to 30 of these people and they'll all get in a group chat and they'll all make an agreement that, Hey, when one of us posts, when any of us posts, we're going to share it, the link to the post in this chat.
And then we're all going to go hype it up. We're all going to go like it, save. share, comment.
We're all going to go hype up this post. And at first, when you join one of these groups, it's exciting and it works great. And then people are like, well, yeah, on paper, this makes sense.
It's going to work great. But over time, two bad things happen. Number one, people just stop following through.
They stop engaging in the same way. They stop interacting. They stop hyping you up the same way they did when the group first started.
And so Instagram is like, wait, you used to get 30 to 40 likes and comments the second you posted, but now you get like 12 or seven. And so it sees that as a dip and it thus assumes that your post isn't as high quality. It's not as good of a post.
It's not as engaging of a piece of content. And so it shows it to less people. And over time, the algorithm learns that, wait, you're getting the same seven likes every time.
You're getting the same comments from the exact same people every single time. And so you're not really engaging a new audience. You're just engaging this small group of people.
And so it stops deeming that to be as valuable. And so over time, over the course of months or even years, your engagement continues to go down. And eventually you leave the group or the group just dissolves and ends.
And you're worse off than where you started. So don't do engagement groups or engagement pods. The final air quotes strategy that is not going to help your account and it's actually going to hurt your account is AI slop.
AI video production is getting easier and easier every single day. Nowadays, you can write a few sentences into one of these AI tools and it can generate for you literally hundreds of reels in minutes. And that was completely unthinkable just years ago.
And while that is a ton of quantity, it's often very, very low quality. And like we talked about earlier, that will not be effective and that will not work. Now, of course, society's preferences are always changing, but at the time of recording this, a lot of people, I would actually venture to say that the majority of people are against AI slop.
However you define AI slop is up to you, and wherever you draw the line in terms of what is an okay, acceptable use of generative AI versus what is not is totally up to you, and that's your prerogative. For me, I draw the line at video generation. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I will never use my face or my likeness to create a digital clone of myself just to pump out more content. I value my humanity. I value my imperfections.
And so no, I will not be outsourcing myself and who I am to some sort of AI clone. I also think way too many people are getting lazy with AI. They're creating AI flyers and they're using ChatGPT to create images and they use whatever the first images that ChatGPT made and they're just throwing that up on their Instagram.
obvious. People know it's AI. And even when people don't know it's AI, it just comes across lifeless oftentimes.
And so it's actively going to be working against you in many cases. Now that we've covered these strategies that actively hurt your account, let's talk about the strategies that just don't really matter. And these five strategies that I'm about to share with you are the ones that you probably have been thinking about throughout this video, wondering, when am I going to talk about these?
Because many of these are strategies that you've likely heard taught over and over again, and that you probably even believe are essential for growing a Instagram. The first one is posting time or the best time to post and there's no such thing.
Pretty much every single year, every single social media tool puts out their newest report on the best time to post. Metricool, Later, Planoly, Hootsuite, they all put out a best time to post guide and all of them say something different. So that's our first clue that there is no universal best time to post.
But maybe you're thinking, okay, Brock, I hear you. There's not a universal best time to post, but don't we all have our own unique best time to post? I mean, kind of, but not always and not necessarily.
For many accounts, it can be true that your post will perform better if they're posted during a certain timeframe or on a certain day of the week. But the bigger piece of advice that I need you to understand is that it's still better to post at the wrong time than to not post at all. Oftentimes what ends up happening is that people determine that their best time to post is between 7 and 8 a .m., but then they miss that time for whatever reason, and so they skip that day entirely, and that is ineffective.
I like to use exercising as an analogy here. Let's say that based off a wide variety of factors like your age, your disposition, your amount of sleep, your eating, and all that, there's a specific way of time that is your optimal time to exercise maybe if you're a man it's the time of day where your testosterone is the highest or it's the time of day where your energy levels peak and so theoretically that is your best time to exercise it is still in your best interest in terms of your long -term health to exercise that day even if you miss that perfect time frame there is no universal best time to post and a post made at the wrong time is still better than no post at all Now, when you're first trying to determine what your best time to post is, you might be tempted to look at Instagram's insights.
And Instagram gives you a statistic that shows you when most of your followers are online. But just because most of your followers are online during a specific time period doesn't mean that that is the time period where they are most likely to engage with your content. Because maybe the majority of your followers are online in the evening, but the evening time is when they just want quick dopamine videos, and that's not what you post.
You post longer, more. educational more thoughtful videos and so even though more of your followers are online they're not looking for your kind of content at that time in their day so instead the way that you can find your best time to post is post at a wide variety of different times as early as 1 a .m. and as late as midnight I literally have posted that every single hour every single minute of the day and over the course of a few weeks or months you'll start to notice trends you'll start to notice that when you post an educational video early in the morning it doesn't do as well but when you post educational videos in the evening, they do better.
When you post memes on the weekends, they do great, but when you post memes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, they don't do as well. So this takes a lot more time and analysis to figure out, and it's something that definitely requires experimentation, but even when you do ultimately find your best time or your best days to post, I still want you to post outside of those times as well.
The second strategy that doesn't matter is hashtags. And this is coming from someone who used to have an entire course called Help With Hashtags, where I just taught people how to discover their best hashtags to help them grow. Take it from me, hashtags are no longer effective as a way to grow on Instagram.
Basically, hashtags are almost dead. They're not absolutely obsolete, but they're not something that you should worry about. But if you don't want to just take my word for it, you can take Adam Moseri, the head of Instagram, who has said on the record, and I quote, Hashtags are not a reliable way to increase your reach on Instagram.
But let's say you don't want to listen to me or the head of Instagram. What has Instagram actually been doing? Well, over the last few years, they've made some significant changes to the way we interact with hashtags, which indicates their lack of relevancy or their reduced importance on Instagram.
One of these changes was removing the recents section of hashtags. So it used to be that when I used hashtag pizza lover on one of my posts, if I clicked on that hashtag or someone searched that hashtag, they would see two different categories of posts.
They would see the top posts made using that hashtag, and they would see in reverse chronological order all of the most recent posts made using that hashtag. Well, a few years ago now, Instagram removed the recent section, which indicates that the ability to be discovered via using a hashtag is less effective now, and the only real way that you can be discovered is if you truly become one of those top posts.
But beyond that, another massive change that Instagram made is that you can no longer add up to 30 hashtags on your post, which was the previous limit, and they now limit you to only five hashtags that you can add into your caption. You can get sneaky and add extra hashtags into your comment section, and they do count and apply to the post, but you can no longer add more than five hashtags.
And that's a significant reduction in terms of the number of hashtags that we can use, which signals their reduced importance and relevancy on Instagram. But then beyond all of that, what does the data actually say? Well, according to a recent study that was done by Social Pilot, the more hashtags you use, the less views your post received, and they actually found that posts that had zero hashtags bags on average perform the best.
So for 95 % of content creators and small business owners on Instagram, forget about hashtags. What has replaced hashtags is simply the algorithm. The original purpose of hashtags was simply to categorize your content.
The algorithm used to be far less advanced and it used to rely on us, the user, the creator, to add hashtags to help inform it about what this post is, what it's about, and who would like to engage with this post. Who is this post meant to be viewed by? That's why if you added hashtag pizza lover, you were more more likely to reach other people who were searching for pizza lover and who were interested in pizza loving content.
But now the algorithm is so advanced it can literally read the text that's on your t -shirt in your post and that helps inform what the post is about. Literally one time I made a post and I was wearing a silly meme on my t -shirt and Instagram and the algorithm was able to scan my entire post, read the meme that was on my t -shirt and show the post to people who are interested in said meme.
Now that's a little bit of an extreme example but it's just meant to illustrate the point that hashtags are no longer necessary and the categorization of your post is done Automatically by the algorithm and it's able to look at everything It's listening to your audio if you have any sort of like spoken audio or words in your reel It's reading any text that you add on the screen It's even able to read native text in the actual video like right there on my monitor.
It says find joy Theoretically the Instagram algorithm could read that text even though it wasn't added digitally to the screen It's natively in my space. It also reads your caption. It reads the comments and it's looking at hundreds of other data points to figure out what your post is about.
And so hashtags are far less necessary. There are about 5 % of people who I do still recommend to use hashtags. And those are people who have a very specific local business like a nail salon or a laundromat or a restaurant.
If you have a very geographically tied business and you can only operate at your one physical location and you need people within your vicinity to find you, then you can use local based hashtags, hashtags that include your city and whatever term or topic describes your business. Thus to just aid your chances. of searchability and discoverability, and that can help you a little bit.
But if that's not you, then don't worry about hashtags. The third strategy that does not matter is cold outreach or engaging with other accounts. Let's talk about cold outreach first.
By cold outreach, I mean DMing hundreds or maybe even thousands of people every single day with generic copy and paste sales pitches. Hey girl, are you on a fitness and weight loss journey? I'd love to tell you more about insert product name.
This is so 2016 and it's the equivalent of door -to -door salesman. There's a reason why when you walk down any neighborhood street, you're going to see hundreds of signs that say no soliciting. And if you try to knock on doors, 90 % of the time, the doors ain't even going to be open.
And the 10 % of the time that they are opened, they're probably just going to be slammed in your face because no one likes cold outreach. No one likes a door -to -door salesman. Instead, that's what your content is supposed to do.
How do you reach new people? It's not by searching for and mass sending messages to hundreds or thousands of people every single day. It's instead about creating great content.
And then the algorithm organically serves your content up to the people who it deems would be most interested in said content. And that's a much more enjoyable, pleasurable way to discover people. I mean, that's how we all discover people on Instagram and on social media every single day.
And so that's how you grow. I hope I've illustrated that by now. The way you grow on Instagram is by posting a lot of good content, not by messaging a lot of people with a really well -crafted DM.
The other piece of this strategy that I mentioned is engaging with other people. Should you engage with other people on Instagram? Yeah, absolutely.
It's part of being a good person. And yes, there is something to be said about the energy you put out and the way you get it back. And yes, I think we should all support small creators and small business owners on Instagram.
And yes, I think that we should all be a part of the community. And yes, I know that everyone wants a village, but no one wants to be a villager, so you should be a villager. Yes, all of those things are true, but algorithmically speaking, the algorithm will not reward you for engaging with other people.
That's a myth. It's not like if you spend more time on Instagram, then Instagram's like, ooh, Susie was a good little girl, and then it shows your post to more people because of that. That's not true.
The inverse of that is also not true. It's not like if you... post and ghost or like you post and then you don't show up or you like close your phone, then Instagram will push out your post to more people.
I know this sounds crazy, but this is a real myth. The myth was that if you posted and then you immediately like close the Instagram app, Instagram would push your post out to more people because they were desperate to get you back. And so they were hoping that if they pushed your post to more people and you got more engagement, those notifications would bring you back into Instagram.
That's absolutely not true. Conversely, like I said, engaging with other people is not going to algorithmically benefit. you the final note that i will say about this is that it does not matter the kinds of content you engage with that has no impact on who discovers your posts for example if i was a pokemon content creator but i only ever engaged with formula one content it's not like my content would then be pushed out to people who are interested in formula one if i make content about pokemon it will reach people who are interested in pokemon content not people who are interested in what i'm interested in if that makes sense so in other words you are free to interact with as many cat videos as you want your free to engage with any posts you want.
You're free to like every single one of Brock 11 Johnson's reels, and it will not impact or change how your reels are distributed or whom your reels are distributed to. The fourth strategy that does not matter is using trending audios. When Instagram first released Reels in 2020, trending audios were very important.
And for the majority of 2021 and 2022, using a trending song or audio on your Reels was very, very helpful. And that's because Reels were brand new. The algorithm was still in its infancy, at least in terms of Reels and short form content.
And so it needed trending popular audios to figure out what people were into. It wasn't as advanced as we've been talking about it. figuring out the nuances and the details of what people's interests are.
And it was instead like, well, there's this one song that everyone seems to like right now. So if you use that song on your reel, we're going to make sure your reel gets more views. It eventually figured out that it's actually the content that people are interested in, not the background audio or the soundbite that people are lip syncing.
With that being said, sure, it can still be true that using a good audio can definitely enhance your reel, right? There's a reason why when you go to the movies and you watch a film, there's basically a song playing in the background at all times. It's because that's the mood, it helps amplify the emotions, and that's exactly how I recommend using audio and songs and music in your own reels.
Use it to amplify the emotion. Use it to help illustrate a point. Don't use it to be the point.
And moreover, adding a trending audio onto a boring reel is . It can't save bad content. It can amplify good content, taking it from good to great, but it's not going to save a bad, disengaging, boring video.
So forget about the trending audios and focus on everything that we talked about earlier when we were talking about what makes a good post. And then the fifth and final strategy that doesn't really work is really any sort of trick. If there's anything on Instagram that sounds like it's like a gimmick or you have to spin around on your right foot three times and then jump upside down and then you have to add keywords at a certain point, those things are tricks.
Those things are gimmicks. And sure, they might work for a day or a couple of days or maybe a couple of weeks. but you're going to drive yourself insane trying to keep up with them.
And that's because these tricks are usually very quick to be figured out by people who work at Instagram or by the Instagram algorithm itself automatically. And then they optimize, they change the algorithms, they change the way the platform works so that those tricks don't work anymore. And so if you're constantly chasing the latest hack or gimmick or trick, you're going to end up driving yourself crazy and you're not going to build an actual loyal engaged audience.
You're just going to gimmick your way and trick your way to a couple viral. videos maybe. Now that we've talked about the strategies that hurt and the strategies that are neutral, let's talk about the strategies that are actually the most helpful on Instagram.
Number one is focusing on the audience rather than the algorithm. There's such a constant craze about the algorithm updates and part of my job is helping you stay up to date with the algorithm. But also admittedly, part of the reason I update you on the algorithm so often is because it's what people want.
It's what people think they need when in reality, what I would say they actually need is a focus on the audience. can understand the psychology of your audience, of your community, of your viewers, that is going to have so much bigger of an impact on you than understanding the technology. So audience over algorithm, psychology over technology, and humans over hacks.
The more that you can empathize with your ideal audience and understand their struggles and their pain points and their shortcomings and their dreams and their goals, the better content you can make. Four ways that you can actually do that is number one, use Google Trends. Google Trends is a free tool from Google that shows you actual keyword search terms and allows you to reverse search and see how popular are different search terms at different times.
So you can see which term are people actually looking up, what words are people actually using and searching for. And then in turn, you can use those words in your content. Similarly, another great tool that I recommend using is Answer the Public.
Answer the Public is kind of like if Google Trends was put into one really, really helpful database. So the way that Answer the Public works is you type in a term that is related to your niche or your category on Instagram, and then it tells you all of the most common related search terms, phrases, comparisons, and things like that that people are actually looking up on Google.
So again, Google Trends is for when you already know a word or keyword or phrase that you want to use, and you're going to look that up on Google Trends to see are other people using it, or you're going to compare it to a similar word or phrase to see which one is being used more frequently. Whereas Answer the Public is kind of just like, I don't know what words to use.
I don't know what people are looking for. I don't know what questions people actually have. And you're going to put in a keyword or topic, and then it's going to give you so much information to prove what people are actually using and looking for.
The third tool that I'll recommend is the one that we talked about earlier, which is Poppy. Poppy is a great tool for doing audience research into competitors' audiences. So you can find people who maybe have the audience that you aspire to have, or you can find people who are in your niche, and you can put their posts or their entire profiles into Poppy to analyze what terms keep coming up, what phrases are used over and over again, and then you can use that to inform the terms and phrases that you use, or even to look for blind spots.
Like, what words are they not using? that you actually see show up more common on Google Trends. What words would you use and would you look up that these other people are not using that then you can use in your content to make yourself stand out?
Number four, just read through the comment section. Whether it's your own comment section or if you don't have a very engaged comment section or any comment section to speak of just yet, you can look at popular influencers and creators in your niche and read through their comments. What are people talking about?
What jokes do people find funny? What questions keep coming up over and over again? And that will give you...
a great sense for where people are at what they're thinking about and what they're struggling with and then number five track your past performance i believe a mistake that a lot of content creators and small business owners can fall into is overweighting a specific comment and not looking at the overall data for example students of mine will say things like i started doing a lot more fashion content because one of my friends messaged me and said that they loved my fashion and styling tips or i recently got a message from one of my followers and they said that they loved my cooking content.
So I've been trying to include more food related content into my posts. But then when we look at the actual data, food related content doesn't ever perform that well. Or in the first example, get ready with me fashion content never performs well.
It never gets very many views, comments, or likes. So look at the actual past performance. Look at the actual engagement that each kind of post, each topic, each style is receiving, and don't pay too much attention to what any one positive or negative comment says.
Like I said, listen to what people are saying in the comments, but don't put too much stock into any one individual comment. The second overall effective strategy is to detach from the results.
Now, this is something that I think is helpful in all areas of your life. This is one of my like founding life models. Like if there was a constitution of Brock, this would definitely be one of the first amendments, but detach from the result basically means that if you're always tying your worth, your happiness, your motivation, your sense of success or failure to the result, then you're constantly going to be riding the roller coaster.
On Instagram, views are always going to be going up and down. You're always going to have days where you get some followers and days where you lose some followers. And so being aware of the results is helpful.
Optimizing for better results is great. Striving to achieve big goals and shooting for the moon is awesome. But you have to detach yourself from those results.
And when you do that, you're actually able to analyze the results much better because you're not analyzing them through the sense of ego. You're actually analyzing them for what they are and what they truly mean. Detaching from the results is similar to the idea of getting the goalposts to stop moving.
Constantly in so many areas of life, so many of us are allowing the goalposts to keep moving. And what I mean by that is when you achieve a goal, you're not really satisfied. You're looking for the next goal.
The goalposts have actually moved. And then when you miss the goal, when you don't quite... hit your mark, then you're down in the dumps, you're dejected and you're letting it affect your sense of worth.
And so this is definitely something that's easier said than done, but detaching from the result is necessary for your long -term success, not just on Instagram, but in online business as well. These things are always going to ebb and flow up and down, back and forth. And so the more that you can detach yourself from these ever -changing results, the more consistent you're going to be able to be.
Now, the way that each of us is going to actually detach from the result is going to vary. I do think it's something that you're never just going to check off the box of like, yep, check, I'm done. I have detached from the result and I never have to worry about that again.
I do think it's a constant practice, but whatever your practice is going to look like is probably going to be different from person to person. Some of us are going to have to rely on an accountability partner. Some of us are going to have to rely on affirmations.
Some of us might rely on going to therapy or our faith or maybe our family, friends, and loved ones. There's different strategies that you can use, whatever allows you to Keep whatever is important, important.
Keep the main thing, the main thing, as they say. I also think it's important to recognize that Pobity is nerfect when it comes to detaching from the result. Even someone like myself who's literally preaching to you about detaching from the result right now, I have moments when I get down in the dumps because a post didn't do well or I get in my own head because a post flopped or on the opposite, I allow myself to get too high and too overly excited because a post went viral and I feel like I'm sweet and I'm a badass because I had a post hit 10 million views.
We have to remind ourselves that we can't let our highs get too high nor our lows get too low. We have to stay even and we have to detach from the result. And I know that these strategies are more like overarching principles or mindsets.
They're really high level. They're less nuanced and detailed and Instagram specific than what we were talking about earlier. But I really do believe that these five strategies are essential.
At our two -day Instaclub Hub live in -person conference earlier this year, I had a panel about mindset with multiple creators who have over a million followers and who have been doing this for multiple decades. And I asked each of them what role they thought mindset played versus strategy played in the success of their online businesses.
And every single one of them said that mindset was 100%. It wasn't like, oh, 80 % of my success was mindset, but then 20 % was I had the right strategies, I had the right tools. No, every single one of them said that mindset was everything.
And so that's why I know it's the things that we overlook. I know they often sound cliche. I know it's like, Brock, just tell me how many reels I need to post.
Tell me more about trial reels. Tell me about hashtags. But if we can remember that mindset is everything.
Mindset matters mindset is key then we're going to have much more sustainable long -term success on Instagram and so this next piece of mindset of this next strategy if you will that I want to talk to you about is one that I kind of mentioned earlier and that's that motivation will always lose to discipline motivation is great sometimes you're gonna watch a great podcast you're gonna you know hear a great song or music video or motivational speech or whatever you're gonna feel really fired up and that's great use that to your advantage but if that's what you're relying on to stay consistent a year in never going to stay consistent.
You're constantly going to burn out. You're constantly going to miss days because you're just not always going to feel motivated. Motivation is like food.
You have to consume it every single day or else you're going to burn out. But it's not sustainable to listen to a motivational podcast every single day just to maintain your online business and your consistency on Instagram. So instead, that's where discipline comes in.
Discipline is doing what you said you were going to do even when you don't feel like doing it, even when it's hard, even when it sucks. It's going to take months if not years to grow on Instagram.
And so discipline is what will sustain you through that long run. What's even better than discipline though is systems. Because sometimes even the most disciplined person on the planet is going to have life happen.
And let's be real. Instagram should not be, and it will not be hopefully, your number one priority. Maybe your family, your friends, your pets, your loved ones, maybe your other hobbies, maybe your real job or your real business.
And I don't say real in that like this is a fake job or fake business. I just mean like your primary, maybe your... your first initial job before this side hustle came along and this is going to eventually be your main thing.
But for right now, your original nine to five is still your main thing. You get what I'm saying, right? that is going to come up.
That is going to take priority. You're going to have to take your dog to the emergency vet at three in the morning, and you're going to be up all night with them. It's going to be really serious and really scary.
And you're just, no matter how disciplined you are, you're not going to be making a reel in that moment. You're going to making sure that you've kept the main thing, the main thing, as they say. And so when discipline can't take action, when discipline can't work, that's where you can fall back on your systems.
I believe that you do not rise to the level of your motivation, but you fall to the level of your discipline and even more so you fall to the level of your system. So if you have no systems in place, you're not going to stay consistent.
You're not going to grow. Or if you do grow, it's not going to be sustainable long -term growth. It's going to be a quick viral pop with a bunch of followers, but nothing ever comes of it.
And we've talked about a lot of those systems already today. We've talked about using Poppy as part of your ideation system. We've talked about scheduling your posts and how you can upcycle them to stay consistent.
We've talked about the system that I use and recommend for batching content. But the more that you can automate, systematized, the more that is formulaic, that is routine, those systems are what will keep you going.
Strategy number four is stick to it. It is going to take a long time to grow. It's going to take many months, if not years, to grow on Instagram.
I firmly believe that the reason I have 1 million followers on Instagram is not because I'm ridiculously good looking. I don't think I am. I don't think I'm super funny.
I don't think I'm super creative. I don't think I have like an amazing ability to edit. I don't think I have like an amazingly seductive voice that just draws people in.
I don't think I have any outlier God -given ability or skill or talent or characteristic or anything like that. Instead, I simply believe that the reason that I have consistently gained about a thousand followers a day for the last few years is because i've stuck to it i will stick around i will keep working i will keep showing up i will keep improving and everything i just said about myself you can say about yourself too Even if that's not who you have traditionally been in the past, those are affirmations that I want you to start telling yourself.
You are going to keep showing up. You are going to stick with it. You are going to keep working even when things get tough.
You're going to keep optimizing and improving and tweaking and keep posting until this thing works. The reason that 99 % of people fail to grow on Instagram is because 99 % of people give up. They get burnt out.
They get overwhelmed. They get frustrated by the algorithm. They tell themselves that they're shadow banned or that Instagram hates them or that they're never going to grow or that they just don't insert whatever it is.
They don't look the right way. They don't sound the right way. They don't have a fancy enough house.
They don't have good enough gear. They don't have good enough ideas. Their topic's too boring.
Whatever excuses they make, they ultimately give up. They quit. Or they pseudo -quit.
They keep pivoting, they keep changing lanes, they keep rebranding, they keep starting over, over, and over again, and they never stick with anything long enough to have the success that they're actually looking for. And so I know it's an oversimplification. I know it sounds cliche.
I know it sounds simple and dumb and like, really? We're over two hours into this video and I'm telling you to stick with it and that's it? Yeah.
Stick with it. And then strategy number five is the one that we were talking about earlier, which is ultimately how do you grow? You post a lot of good posts.
It is always one of those two levers. Quality. quantity I have yet to find a single Instagram account that has high quality posts and a lot of them and has not grown quantity of course is the one that's more objective it's easier to judge are you posting every day are you posting multiple times per day if not well then let's dial up that quantity quality is the one it's of course a little bit more subjective it's a little bit more person -to -person of is your post truly high quality but Take a harsh look in the mirror and be honest with yourself.
Are your posts up to the standard? Are they good or above average or great compared to everything else that you're seeing in your feed? Or are they not?
Because again, I highly doubt that you have great A plus amazing quality posts and you're posting at least one of them every day, if not multiple times a day, and you're not growing. I've yet to see that. So if that's you, go ahead and DM me on Instagram and I'd love for you to be the first, but I doubt it.
All right, we have three more sections to cover in this video. Right now, we're going to talk about trial reels, which are a unique tool that Instagram has given us and a real powerhouse, a goldmine for growing on Instagram, for testing our content, for figuring out what is high quality content. It's also a great tool for distribution and getting views.
Then we're going to talk about Instagram stories because that's a huge component of Instagram, making sales, growing, interacting with your followers, building community. So we're going to talk more about Instagram stories. And then we're going to land this plane by talking about something that every single business owner every single content creator every single person on Instagram who wants to grow should be using but let's start like I said with trial reels trial reels were first launched in December of 2024 and they have now reached pretty much everyone on Instagram trial reels are a kind of reel that you can post that are only shown to non followers the original premise or idea behind trial reels from Instagram was that trial reels would be a way for us to experiment to trial our content in front of an audience that felt like less pressure.
Basically, Instagram's hypothesis was that less people were posting reels because they were scared of being cringe, or they were scared of posting something that their friends and family and followers would see, and it wasn't really up to par. It wasn't great. And so trial reels became this place where you could reach new people and test out your content in front of them before sharing it to your primary audience.
Now, how do you get access to trial reels? Like I said, it has been rolled out worldwide, so your account should have access to it as long as you meet the two - criteria number one you have a public Instagram account and number two you have at least 1 ,000 followers people get really mad about that second one because it's like wait if I only have a couple hundred followers if I have a brand new account I need trial reels more than anyone because I need this really cool growth tool I hear you but unfortunately what would happen if they allowed anyone with any number of followers to get trial reels is that spammers would just create like a hundred accounts a day with zero followers and they would just spam trial reels on those new accounts so you do need about a thousand followers But I know so many people have gotten access to it prior to 1 ,000 followers.
It seems like the real number is more like 200 or 250 followers. And once you pass that threshold, you unlock trial reels. But why do they matter?
I explained to you what they are and like, yeah, it's a cool way to experiment. But here's what us marketers and us social media people very quickly figured out. Trial reels are your golden ticket to reaching a new audience.
I mean, think about it. It's a kind of post that is guaranteed to reach new people. It's guaranteed to reach eyeballs who do not already follow you.
So even if you got 50 views on a trial reel, that's 50 brand new people who you could bring to your account. And so when trial reels first launched and we first figured this out, people were posting dozens of trial reels a day. I mean, why would you not?
If you have zero concern of spamming or overwhelming your existing followers and the only people who can see these trial reels are brand new people, you might as well post dozens, if not hundreds. You might as well post every single reel that you've ever taken and just keep posting it over and over day after day on trial reels and keep reaching new people because of it.
Well, Instagram very quickly figured out, oh, maybe we should put some rules in place. And so they did, and here's what those rules are. Number one, there's a daily limit.
Unfortunately, that daily limit is not universal, but for most people, it seems to be around 20 to 25 trial reels per 24 -hour period. If you pass that number, if you post more than 20 to 25 trial reels in a 24 -hour period, then they will lower your limit to 10 or even just five trial reels. And then if you pass it again, then you're going to be blocked from posting.
trial reels for 24 hours or up to seven days. So generally speaking, what I recommend is don't post more than five in a day. It's okay if maybe every once in a while you post six or seven, but try to keep that number below five.
Rule number two, no duplicates. And let me explain this one because this one can be a little bit confusing. On your main Instagram feed, you can duplicate the exact same video over and over again.
Remember earlier, we talked about upcycling your content. You can take a reel and post it literally every hour on the hour, same caption, same audio. same everything over and over again on your main feed and instagram doesn't care because their point of view is well this is your feed and your followers so do we recommend this no but the algorithm won't punish you for doing so it's your content you have the right to do so and if you're going to spam your followers they're going to unfollow you and that's your fault on trial reels however because it's reaching new people and because thus it cannot spam people you could really abuse the system and like i said earlier a lot of people were abusing the system so if a real exists anywhere else on Instagram.
If you've posted on your feed, or if you've posted as a trial reel, or if someone else has posted it on their feed, or if someone else has posted it on a trial reel, if that file, if that video has been posted, if it exists anywhere on Instagram, it cannot be posted a second time as a trial reel onto your page. Basically, every trial reel that you post has to be unique and different from any other video that has ever been posted on Instagram.
The good news is if you do accidentally post a duplicate or Instagram says that you post a duplicate because that's been going on quite a bit recently where Instagram's like, hey, we think this is a duplicate of what someone else has posted or hey, we think this is a copy or too similar to something you have posted in the past, that happens accidentally all the time.
the time, there's not really anything bad that happens. It's just that that particular dupe, that particular video will not get very many views. And in fact, it usually gets stuck below 50 views or even just at like one, two or three views.
It's very obvious. Most of your trial reels will get 200, 300, 4000 views and we'll get at least a couple hundred. But then suddenly this one trial reel will get like four views.
Well, then that's a sign before you even get the notice from Instagram that they deemed it to be. a duplicate. Right or wrong, it's not that big of a deal because only that one trial reel is effective.
Any other trial reels that you post that day, totally fine. Anything else that you post in the future to your feed, to trial reels, anything else, totally fine. So now that we understand the rules, we understand the premise of what trial reels are, there's two different ways that you can use trial reels.
You don't have to necessarily pick one or the other. You can absolutely do both. The first approach to trial reels is for, as they were intended, experimentation and trialing and refinement.
your posts before you post them to your feed. And we'll talk more about that in just a second. But first, the second way that you can use trial reels is for distribution, for maximizing the potential reach from any given post, basically getting more juice from each squeeze.
But let's go back to talking about how you can use them for experimentation and refinement. The way that you're going to do that is number one, when you create any reel, post it as a trial reel. Then wait at least 12 hours, if not a full 24 hours.
Give it time to breathe. Then step three, study the insights. And specifically, you want to look at the insights in the order that we talked about earlier.
First, refine for skip rate. So if a lot of people are skipping the reel, then immediately go back to the drawing board and improve your hook. If you have a good skip rate, which is low, people are not skipping your reel, but after a few seconds of the reel, then they're scrolling away, so your retention rate isn't good, great.
Then we can go back to the drawing board and we can improve our retention rate. Finally, once you have a low skip rate, which is good, you have a great high retention rate, people are sticking with your video, then we can optimize for the final metric, which is oftentimes going to be the share rate. So step three, analyze your insights.
Step four is to actually optimize, improve the reel, re -record it, re -edit it, change it up. And then step number five is to repeat steps one through four. So you're going to optimize it, you're going to change it, you're going to re -record the hook, you're going to re -edit the video, and then post it again as a trial reel and start the whole process over.
Give it time to breathe, check the insights, improve it, refine it. If it needs to be posted again, post it a third time as a trial reel and just continue repeating this process until you get the skip rate as low as you want it, the retention rate as high as you want it, and the share rate where you want it as well. Now, while that use case is exactly how Instagram intended trial reels to be used, I actually find that that use case is a little bit more advanced and it requires a little bit more of a technical understanding and an understanding of just what makes good content.
Using trial reels in that way is definitely something that you can do even in your early days of Instagram, but it's also a skill that you're going to get better at over time. The other much easier way to use trial reels is purely for distribution. And even if you're on day one of growing on Instagram, this is something that you can employ to relatively easily with little to no work, get extra views and get the maximum possible juice from each squeeze of your reel.
So in order to maximize your reels distribution through using trial reels from now on, whenever you create a reel before you do anything else, before you post it to the feed, before you post it on Facebook or do anything else with it, I want you to first post it as a trial reel. Then you can post it to the feed.
And when I say then, it could be five seconds, five minutes, five days, five years later, I don't really care. All that matters is that it's posted first and foremost as a trial reel. Because again, like I talked about earlier, if you posted it to the feed first and then you tried to post as a trial reel, well then that trial reel would be considered a duplicate of the feed post.
However, if you post as a trial reel first and then post it to the feed, the trial reel is the original and the feed post, even though it's a duplicate, Instagram doesn't care. So already by doing that, you've doubled your output. You've doubled your potential distribution because you've posted the reel two times.
Exact same reel, no extra work. You haven't changed anything. All that you've made sure to do was post it in the right order.
Then step number three, you're going to post it again a second time as a trial reel. Now hopefully you've been paying attention and immediately your red alarms are going off because you're like, Brock, I thought you literally just said that we can't post dupes, and now you're telling us to post it a second time as a trial reel.
Yes, I am, but we can't just post it as is as a trial reel. We have to make some minor changes, some slight modifications, in order to bypass Instagram's duplicate detection system. Basically the goal here is to make the minimum amount of necessary changes to bypass the system so that you can get extra views and extra distribution for the work that you put into this reel with just maybe like five to 10 % extra work.
So here's some ways that you can do that. Number one is definitely a little bit more advanced, but it's the most reliable and that's recording different hook varieties or different options that you can use as the hook for your video. The primary part of your reel that the Instagram duplicate detection software is checking for is the first seven ish.
seconds. So if you can swap out the hook and maybe the second clip right after the hook and replace it with just a similar video, but with different synonyms, or maybe you're wearing a different t -shirt, or maybe you're saying the exact same thing, wearing the exact same shirt, but you're just standing in a new location that would technically count as a unique reel, not a duplicate.
And it would thus bypass the duplicate detection system. And that way, when you're editing your reel, the rest of the reel can be the exact same. You've already done the work, you've already recorded it, you've already edited it, you've already created it, you've already done all of that.
All you're doing is just swapping out a few seconds at the very beginning, and thus you're able to get more views and reach from it. One of my personal favorite ways to bypass the duplicate detection system with very minimal work is simply by mirroring the video. And when I say mirroring the video, I simply mean flipping it from left to right.
And you only want to mirror the video, of course. If you mirror the entire reel, then any text or closed captions or titles that you have placed on the reel will be backwards. So you leave the text as is so that it's actually legible, but then you make the video mirror.
So to use the video that you're looking at on the screen right now as an example, currently my monitor is on this side, but if I were to mirror it, all of a sudden it flips and it is kind of like reversed on your screen. And at a minimum, I would recommend mirroring the first clip or two, but if possible, mirror the entire video.
And that has been shown to pretty re - reliably bypass the duplicate detection system now I will say that just like any other trick the algorithm is constantly getting smarter and I wouldn't be surprised if within the next few months or even weeks the Instagram duplicate detection system wisens up and it starts to catch people who have used the mirrored trick and it's counting those as dupes so just be mindful and keep checking like I said earlier it's not the end of the world nothing really happens all that bad if you do get caught duplicating your content the worst thing that will happen is that that dupe won't get viewed use, but then that just gives you a clue that, okay, Hey, Instagram is cracking down and mirroring my videos no longer works.
So I'm going to have to make some additional changes beyond just mirroring the video. So some of those additional changes that you could consider making in addition to or in lieu of mirroring the video include slightly speeding it up. So not to the point where it's going to be like you're talking on fast forward, but just, you know, like maybe a 10 % or even a 5 % increase in speed is enough to change the pacing and the pixels and what is in each frame.
And that is usually enough to bypass the system. You can also try adding or changing the filter if you had already used a filter because that changes, of course, the colors of whatever is on the screen and thus it can make the pixels look different and it can increase the likelihood that Instagram doesn't catch it.
You could change or add B roll. That's a really reliable way to bypass the duplicate detection system is add in some new clips or, you know, if it's like a talking head reel, add some visuals or some different B roll into those first few frames, those first few clips of the video and Instagram will usually not catch it as a duplicate then.
And then the final thing that you can try is putting it into a different editing app. So let's say that you edit all of your reels in CapCut. You could pull them into the edits app and then export.
them and then share them onto Instagram. Because every time you export from a new editing app, there's new metadata that's applied. There's new tags that are added to the files and it ever so slightly changes the pixels, which again, all this is to increase the likelihood that you can bypass the duplicate detection system and thus get more bang for your buck and more reach and distribution for each reel that you're creating.
But I truly love trial reels. I think it's one of the best features that Instagram has ever come out with, even though they didn't intend for it to be a way that us business owners and content creators could leverage it to get more views and read. and distribution.
It has been a significant help and I'm glad that they haven't gotten rid of it. I use it all the time, whether it's for distribution, for testing different hooks, for refining my content, as we talked about earlier. The one thing that I do want to tell you about trial reels is that they're not like a holy grail.
It's not like if you can't grow and your content sucks and you just, no matter what you're doing, you cannot figure out Instagram. If all of a sudden you start posting trial reels, you're just going to blow up and go viral. That's not the case.
And anyone who's telling you that every one of their trial reels goes viral, they're lying to you. So they can be very, very helpful and they are an awesome way to increase your views reach distribution and just improve the overall quality of your reels before posting them to the main feed but they're not going to be your saving grace on Instagram if we're thinking about content on Instagram trial reels are on one far end of the spectrum because they're only reaching non followers I do want to add a quick disclaimer that like maybe 1 % of your viewers on trial reels can be followers but it's not very easy for a follower to find your trial reel and it's very very rare but again thinking about this as like a spectrum on one end of the spectrum try Reels exist, and they are pretty much only reaching new people.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Instagram stories, which are almost exclusively seen by your current followers. Again, just like trial Reels, non -followers can find your stories. And if someone, let's say, sees your viral Reel, they could click on your profile and watch your Instagram stories.
Thus, they're not a follower, but they're viewing your stories. But the way that stories are designed, they only reach your existing followers. They only are shown to.
your existing followers. So then how do stories fit into this entire equation? Let's talk about it.
First of all, let's quickly cover what are Instagram stories. Instagram stories are photos or videos that are up to 60 seconds long. They're viewable for only 24 hours after you post them.
So any of your followers who open up Instagram during that 24 -hour period can view your story. Once that period ends, your stories expire and your followers can no longer see them unless you add those stories to a highlight, which is kind of like a curated collection of past stories. and that lives on your profile forever.
Also, as I mentioned already, they have zero disconnected reach, which is Instagram's way of saying that they only reach your existing followers. Because of all this, stories usually have significantly lower views and engagement than a feed post. We typically find that even the best performing Instagram accounts are getting one third of the views on their stories that they are on their reels.
So easy math here. If you're averaging 100 ,000 views on your reels, your best stories are going to be getting 33 ,000 views. But of course, that number can vary because of a wide variety of factors.
Because of everything that we've said, the audience's expectations of what they're going to see on stories and what people want from Instagram stories is definitely different than what they expect on, say, like an Instagram reel or a normal feed post. The biggest two things that I hear from people that they want more of on Instagram stories and the reason that they continue to tune in is, number one, they're looking for more personal content, more behind the scenes, more day in the life, more vulnerability and authenticity, a little bit more raw and less curated.
The second thing that people expect on Instagram stories is less niche or business focus. So like we talked about like three hours ago at this point, if you're scared of the whole idea of niching down and pigeonholing yourself and, oh, I want to talk about all these different things. Like I said, again, about three hours ago, you can let your freak flag fly on your Instagram stories.
In fact, at the time that we're recording this right now, I have a story up about my workout this morning. I have a story up about my love of breakfast burritos. And I have a story up about goodie bags that we give to our delivery drivers.
our neighborhood. None of those things really have anything to do with business or growing on Instagram, but rather they allow people to get to know me a little bit deeper. And so that leads me to the entire point of stories.
I oftentimes hear from business owners and content creators, you know, I don't really want to be that personal. I don't want to share about my personal life. I'm really just on Instagram to build an audience and then convert that audience into customers.
So what's the point of Instagram stories? Well, number one, Instagram stories are the best place to deepen your connection with your audience. And multiple studies have shown that since the year 2020, the number one fastest rising indicator of whether someone is going to become a customer or not is how much they trust the business.
And so Instagram stories allow you to develop that trust. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it takes some vulnerability and some authenticity, but people are so much more likely in the world of AI and in the world of misinformation and fake news to do business with the businesses that they trust, with the businesses that they genuinely feel they have a connection with.
And moreover, the second point of Instagram stories is that Instagram stories are the best place, the easiest place to transition someone from a follower, even an engaged follower into an actual customer. And that's because Instagram stories are also the easiest place to get someone from your content. into the direct messages and it goes down in the dms in the words of yogati it goes down in the dms it goes down that is where business happens that is where sales are made that is where connections form and that is where transactions are actually happening on instagram And in just a few minutes, we'll talk about how to facilitate that and how to make that easier.
And it doesn't necessarily have to require hiring setters who are like people who work in your DMs and they set appointments on your behalf or closers, people who work in your DMs and they close deals on your behalf. Doesn't require any of that. I'll talk you through that in just a moment.
And that's, again, where we'll land this plane. But first, I have three general Instagram stories tips for you. Number one, less is more.
If you don't have something exciting or interesting to share, don't feel forced to share. It's better to have your Instagram stories blank with nothing on them than to have boring, uninteresting, mundane things on your Instagram stories. My second general recommendation for your Instagram stories is that you have to train your audience, not just to view your Instagram stories, but to engage with your Instagram stories.
And that's something that takes time. It's something that takes repetition. It's something that takes rewarding your audience for doing so.
It also takes normalizing that engagement. And one of my favorite practical ways to normalize your audience engaging with your Instagram stories is that if you ever receive a direct message and your response to said message would be helpful for more than just that person to see. For example, if someone sends you like a super intimate personal question and you respond to it, that's not something that everyone else would benefit from seeing.
But if someone asks you what is ultimately a frequently asked question and you answer it, you help them out, you solve their problem. take a screenshot of that. And it's okay if you need to blur out their name or blur out their profile picture, but take a screenshot of that direct message and post it on your Instagram stories.
It's kind of the equivalent of that classic phrase that influencers always say of, a lot of you have been asking me, which is kind of cheesy and overdone. And it oftentimes makes people feel like, have they really been asking you? It's kind of like that, but instead it's real, it's genuine.
And you are not just telling people that a lot of people have been asking you, you are showing them. It's normalizing that form of interaction. And when your 163 story viewers see that you are having conversations in the DMs, when they see that it is normal to DM you, and when they see that you are providing value via direct message, it increases the likelihood that they DM you in the future.
It kind of creates a little bit of FOMO and makes them feel like, oh, hey, I want to jump in on this conversation. And then my third general recommendation for your Instagram stories is to use your feed or your other areas of Instagram to direct people to your Instagram stories. For example, you could make a reel where you are giving five tips for being a better rock climber and the post actually only has tips one through three and you tell people that tips number four and five are on your Instagram stories.
At the bottom of your bio, which again is something we talked about about three hours ago, you could make the fourth line of your bio to watch your stories and you could even give it a specific reason. Watch my stories for a daily tip for rock climbing. Another way that you could direct people from your feed to your Instagram stories is just by making little casual offhand references.
your stories. For example, maybe you're giving some tips in one of your reels and you're like, yesterday I was posting on my Instagram stories and a lot of people were talking about this one thing. And it kind of just instills this little nugget in the back of people's minds that, hey, this was actually talked about on her stories first.
So maybe I should tune into her stories more regularly. And then the final way that you can use your feed and the other areas of your Instagram to promote your Instagram stories is to incentivize story viewership. For example, the easiest way to think about this is if you were to do like a giveaway on your Instagram, you could make one of the steps to enter that giveaway to view your stories and find the secret keyword, which then incentivizes people to click on your story, reply with the keyword, et cetera, et cetera.
It just kind of gamifies or increases the likelihood that they go and watch your stories because there's something in it for them. By this point, you might be thinking, okay, that sounds good. Personal, authentic, raw, focus on documentation, not curation.
Okay, I got it. But what do I actually post on Instagram stories? I think there's kind of two different paths you can go down or two different ways you can approach posting on Instagram stories.
And you don't have to just choose one path and stick with it. You can change day to day because again, stories reset every 24 hours. And the two different ways that you can approach Instagram stories is one, just about deepening connection with your audience.
And the other, is for converting the audience. Let's talk about deepening the connection first.
This is what I recommend doing on your Instagram stories most days. Let's say approximately three days per week. This is the approach, this is the thought that you're going to have going into your Instagram stories.
When you're focused on deepening the connection, number one, I want you to focus on documentation rather than creation. What that looks like in practice is that if there's something going on in my life, I'm taking a quick picture of it, I'm snapping a selfie, I'm taking a video, I'm taking a screenshot. I'm not opening up Canva.
I'm not reaching out to my graphic designer to whip me up a new design. I'm not opening ChatGPT to have it make me a flyer. None of that.
The less you can edit, the less you can plan, the less you can create for Instagram stories, the better. They're truly meant to be documentary and in the moment. Oftentimes, I will talk to people about posting stories regularly, even posting multiple stories every day, and they're like, oh my God, that's so much work.
I have to come up with what I'm going to post and plan and create and edit. No, no, no. That's right.
Reels. That's feed posts that you have to think through and plan and edit and design and all that. Instagram stories are just about documenting your life.
Instagram stories have their roots in Snapchat. Instagram stories were a copy of Snapchat in the early days of Snapchat. I know some of y 'all weren't around back then.
You weren't on social media. Maybe you weren't on Snap back then. In the early days of Snapchat, you couldn't upload from your camera roll.
You couldn't curate and edit. If you didn't take the photo or video on your phone in that moment, you couldn't send it. You couldn't post it on your Snap story.
Like I said, Instagram stories can be up to 60 seconds long. So at most, maybe it would take you a minute and a half to make an Instagram story. Because let's say you record a full 60 second story and then you spend a few seconds like adding some text or some titles or adding a sticker or closed captions or whatever, maybe a minute and a half.
But that's like the maximum possible time that any given story should take you to create. Most stories are going to be less than 10 seconds to make. Take a picture, post it.
And I say all of that to hopefully calm you down before I say the next thing, which is that when you are focused on deepening the connection with your audience, I recommend posting about three to 10 stories per day. Now, again, I don't want you to just post a post. I don't want you to just post any random thing that you're doing.
Hey, here's my lunch today. But anything that would be interesting, anything that might grab people's attention, anything that might pique curiosity, anything that might generate conversation or questions, anything that is unique or interesting that's going on in your day, that's what you're going to be sharing in those three to 10.
Can you do less than three? Sure. Can you do more than 10?
Sure. But three to 10 is just a general sweet spot recommendation. There's two different ways that you can achieve this three to 10 stories per day thing that I've been outlining.
There's the beginner way and the more advanced way. The beginner way is just focus on posting throughout the day. Literally, as I described a moment ago, snap a picture, take a selfie, take a video, and just post it on your story.
And this is the strategy that I would recommend if you're brand new to Instagram, if you're struggling with the idea of Instagram stories, struggling with the idea of consistency, if you don't have a lot of time, then just document. Just take photos and videos throughout your day and post them. If even that sounds hard to remember, if even that feels overwhelming, set a reminder in your phone at random times.
Pick random times, random hours of the day, and just have it send you a little reminder, a little notification in your calendar app to take a story, post a video, something like that. And then whatever it is you're doing in that moment, see if there's something that you could find insightful or interesting or intriguing, some story, lowercase s, that you could tell about whatever is going on for you right then and there.
And that'll help train you to get in the habit of posting stories, and then eventually stories will become second nature. Whenever you're doing something interesting or noteworthy, you'll naturally just take out your phone and take a quick photo or video. The more advanced strategy is to do what I just described.
Take photos and videos throughout your day, but don't post them in the moment. Save them for the following day. But you're not going to post all of them the next day.
Instead, the next day, you're going to curate what from the previous day is the most interesting. What from the previous day is the most captivating? Which story, which moment is going to be most intriguing in order to generate conversation and questions and interaction?
And then you're going to post that on your story. So this more advanced strategy definitely takes more thought and more planning. It definitely takes time to...
document throughout the day and then curate the next day, but it is better for engagement. And it's also better for your safety. If you're someone who's concerned about people knowing where you're at, when you're there, a good recommendation, a good general rule of thumb is never post where you're at when you're there.
Only post when you've left or in this advanced strategy, post the next day after you've curated and decided what from the previous day's documentary is actually worth including. For example, yesterday in my real life, I woke up early and got a good workout in. And then I had a freak out because I deleted a bunch of files that were supposed to be for this episode.
I deleted probably about 45 minutes of this episode. That was big drama. I had to like recover the files, download them, go through all these different softwares to try to recover the footage.
And then I had a bunch of one -on -one calls. I think I had like eight one -on -one calls all back to back to back. And then me and my wife took our dogs for a walk.
And then I had some more meetings and work. in the afternoon. And then last night I got to go to a banquet for a youth football team that I'm helping coach.
So that was super fun. I got a little gift bag and one of the kids on the team brought me a thank you note, which made me cry and was super sweet. And throughout the entire process yesterday, I was taking little pictures and videos and documenting my day.
And then at the end of the day, I was able to look back, and it's probably obvious for you based off the way I described everything, but in looking back, I was like, oh my god, the most interesting, dramatic moment of my day was when I lost all of those files and then I had to go through this entire journey to retrieve them.
And so did I post about my walk with my dogs on my Instagram story? No. Sorry, guys.
And I say sorry, guys, because they're literally sleeping down here right now. For about 80 % of this recording, they've been sleeping right next to me. Did I post about my workout?
No. Did I post about the youth football banquet? Not on my public story.
I posted on my close friend's story, which is something we're not going to talk about today because it doesn't really have any purpose in marketing. It doesn't really help you grow. It's just something that you can create so that you can still share stories with your close friends and family.
So I posted on my close friend's story about my football banquet, but the general public didn't get to see that. And instead, the only thing that I posted about was the drama of retrieving the files. Thus, it got a lot of interaction.
It got a lot of people going like, oh no, I can't believe you deleted them. asking me like, wait, how did you get them back? Explain what happened.
And so from that, I got a lot of DMs. I got a lot of comments, questions, and interactions. It boosted my story views and it deepened people's connection with me at the same time because they got to see I'm not perfect.
I'm genuinely struggling with something. I was frustrated by something. It was an authentic, real moment.
Not everything is just rainbows, lollipops, and sunshine. And all of this ultimately helps build trust, which leads to better conversions and sales down the line. Speaking of, that's the other path that I said that we can go down with our Instagram stories.
That's the other way that we can strategically approach Instagram stories, converting our viewers and our audience into customers. So let's talk about how to do that.
And the strategy that I'm about to share with you will not only help you convert more of your followers into customers, it will also be the strategy that you can use to get your most viewed story ever. Now, as a business owner or content creator, you're usually going to want your most viewed story ever to be a promotional story so that you can really get the most bang for your buck.
I don't really care if my most viewed story ever is me deleting. a bunch of files and having to recover them. It's cool.
Yeah, that'll help more people build a connection with me. But what I really want strategically, of course, is that the most possible people are getting sold to. And so that's basically exactly what we're going to discuss right now.
And this strategy, I only recommend using one or maybe two days per week. I do know some content creators who literally use this strategy seven days a week, and they're constantly just resetting their stories once every 24 hours and reusing this strategy. But what happens is your stories stop getting clicked on.
People stop coming back to your stories because they know that they're just going to get sold to. They know it's just going to be a promotion. They know it's just going to be another buy this, download this, sign up for this.
And so they stop tuning in. And so again, you can do this one to two times a week, but don't go overboard with this strategy or else you risk burning out your audience in the long run. And this strategy is what I like to call my STD formula.
And yes, it's named STD because it's silly, it's funny, and thus it's memorable and you will not forget it. Before you understand the strategy, first and foremost, you need to understand that the most important form of engagement on Instagram stories is a direct message. By far, it's not even close.
The best way to boost your views and get more eyeballs on your Instagram stories, reaching more of your existing followers on any given day, is to get more DMs. There's a direct correlation and it heavily impacts your views. So let's get into the STD formula.
The S stands for single, as in you are only going to post one story in that 24 -hour period. And in fact, you want all of your previous stories that were posted before this moment, you want them to expire or delete. So if there's a story that still has three hours left, delete it or wait three hours before starting the STD formula.
But again, basically you want your stories to be blank. That allows the algorithm to reset. And then we are going to create one singular story.
That's all you're going to post in this whole formula, just one singular. frame on your stories. That single frame should be either a photo or a solid color, like a background.
You don't want it to be a video. You don't want it to be a boomerang or anything like that. Just a photo, an image.
That brings us then to the T in the STD, which stands for text heavy. This single story that you're about to post is going to have multiple lines of text, not just a few words, but probably a few sentences, if not even a few paragraphs of text. Part of the goal here is to increase the watch time or the retention of your Instagram stories.
Let me explain. When you post a photo or a still image or a solid background, basically anything that isn't a video on your Instagram stories, it's usually only visible for about five seconds. There's a five second timer and then it moves on to the next story.
Well, people understand that stories have been around for about a decade now. And so when there's a lot of text on a story, what people do instinctually most of the time is they hold their finger down on the screen. to pause your story.
When they are pausing your story to read the text, that is also increasing the overall watch time or retention of said story. Now, you have to know your audience a little bit here. Again, most people most of the time are going to know to put their finger down to pause and hold and read.
But if you have maybe a little bit of an older audience, if you have an audience that is maybe less tech savvy, if you just know that about your audience, then you can even include a little blurb, a little piece of text that's like, hold your finger here to pause and read. that little reminder, that little call to action.
But again, most people at this stage know that they can hold their finger down to pause and read. But we're not just writing multiple sentences of text about our day. We're not just dear diarying it.
Instead, this is where we are writing our marketing copy. Think of it as like, what text would I write on a sales page? That's what goes here.
Typically, you're going to start with the hook, then you're going to introduce the problem, the problem that your product solves, and then you're going to end by telling people that in order to solve that problem, in order to get your solution, they're going to DM you a specific keyword. Maybe they're going to DM you the word guide, and they're going to get your free guide to beginner rock climbing.
And that brings us to the D in the STD formula, which is the most important part. I'm on the record of saying that you can't have an STD without the D. And the D in this case is the DM.
You need people to DM you. You need people to reply to your story. And part of this goes back to what we were talking about earlier about training your audience and normalizing that direct message.
Part of it is also giving them a specific word to DM you. If you tell people, DM me if you're interested, then you're giving them more. because now they have to think of what they should say.
They have to think of what question to ask. But instead, if you say, DM me the word hi, if you're interested, it makes it so much easier because now all they have to do is type two letters and then you'll take care of the rest. And then as long as you're getting DM replies to that story, the story will get more views.
Thus, you'll get even more DMs and it's a positive feedback loop. It's a snowball that can boost your story views to their maximum possible potential. Exactly as I recommended for you, I use the STD formula twice per week on my Instagram stories, but there is an advanced strategy that I use about once a month when I really want to squeeze every ounce of potential out of my Instagram stories and get the most viral story that I possibly can, reaching as many followers as I possibly can.
And it's a little bit advanced. So if everything I just described with the whole STD formula, if that felt like I was speaking a different language to you, that's okay. You can fast forward over the next few minutes.
But if you're ready for the next step, if you're like, okay, I get it. I'm posting a single still image with a lot of text and I'm telling people to reply with a specific word. I get it.
That makes sense. Then I have the next step for you, the more advanced strategy, which is called the STD hidden E formula. And it is as follows.
S now stands for still image. Before it stood for singular. So I guess I should have said this a moment ago, but after you post the STD story, don't post anything else.
For the next 24 hours, no other stories. You can post on your feed, you can post reels, you can do whatever you want, but do not post any other stories or else it would no longer be an STD. It wouldn't be singular.
The STD hidden E formula, however, slightly changes the S from the word singular to the word still, which is part of what we talked about before, right? You want a still image, a photo. You don't want a video or a boomerang on your story, just a still image, an engaging photo.
For this, I typically recommend a selfie because then your face is somewhere on the screen and people are just more likely to pay attention to other people. So that's the S. The T still stands for text heavy.
This is still where you're doing the marketing. This is still where you're including the sales pitch. This is still where you're including all that lingo and all the human psychology to try to convince people that they need whatever it is that you're selling or promoting.
The D still stands for the DM reply. You need to tell people to reply with a specific word to DM you, direct message you that specific keyword in order to boost the story. But the D here is also DM automation, which is something I told you a few times we're going to talk about in just a moment.
But DM automation really takes this up a notch because then people are not just saying, hi, as in, hi, I'm interested. And then you're going to manually respond to them and have that conversation with DM automation. When they say hi, they're instantly going to get a response from you automatically.
Again, I know it's a little bit advanced. We'll talk about that in just a second. But the STD still starts pretty much the same.
It looks pretty much the same whether you're doing STD hidden E or just the plain old STD formula. But now let's get to the hidden E. Before you post that STD story, once you're done creating it, it's a still image, there's lots of text, you told people to reply with a word, hide a small emoji somewhere on the screen.
And when I say hide, I mean add the emoji to the screen, but then pinch it down, make it really small, and pick an emoji that somehow blends in with the background. You don't want it so hidden that no one can find it, but you also don't want it so obvious. Like I wouldn't put like a Christmas tree the size of my hand right here, but maybe I'd put like a little tiny Christmas tree up here that kind of blends in with my green background, and it's not obvious or overt to see it the first time you look at the story, but if you're looking for it, you'll find it.
So this is now the reason that this is no longer a single text -heavy DM automation. story. It's instead a still image, text heavy DM automation story.
It's no longer single because we're posting a second story. Okay. So that second story should basically be alerting people that there's a hidden emoji on the previous story.
You let people know, Hey, I hid an emoji somewhere on the previous story. If you can find it, I will dot, dot, dot. And then finish that sentence with something that is a great incentive.
I will send you a $5 Amazon gift card. I will buy you a cup of coffee. I will enter you to win a free pass for Disneyland.
Just something that your audience truly wants. Something that is like very widely applicable. And it's not something that's like, oh, if you get randomly selected, you'll get 5 % off.
No, no, no. It's something that's actually valuable and something that if they find it, they really feel like they're going to win something good. Then you post that second story.
Don't post any other stories for the rest of the day. No third story, nothing else on your stories. What will happen is that first story is already going to be doing great because it's everything that we talked about in the STD formula.
It's already has great retention. It has a great DM rate, a really high interaction rate. All of that is awesome.
But now anyone who skipped that story or anyone who wasn't super interested, they're seeing your second story. And that's a huge incentive. They really want the thing that you're talking about in the second story.
So now they're tapping back to the first story, which is another great form of engagement. Another thing that is boosting your retention rate and helping you get even more views on that first story. And there are even more people replying because they're looking for that hidden emoji.
It feels like a game. It's fun. It's interactive.
And so all of this comes together to create a goldmine, a powder keg that will get you your most viewed story ever. And in the process, it's also selling. With all that being said, here are four things that kill your Instagram story views.
Number one, video stories, especially long video stories, especially, especially really long talking head video stories where you're just yapping to the camera for 60 seconds straight. And the biggest reason for this isn't necessarily the algorithm. It's the audience.
When someone's watching your 60 second talking head story, they rarely know where you're going with things, but they know that they can't really fast forward. They can't rewind. There's no way for them to skip ahead or skip backwards.
The only thing that they can do is pause your story or skip the entire story altogether. But after years of watching yapping Instagram stories, most of us have figured out that most people are pretty boring when they're yapping. And moreover, if during that yap session, we miss a word or we mishear something or something comes up in the real world and we have to look away from our phone, then we're forced to make a decision between two really bad options.
Either skip the rest of the story because it's like, well, I missed it, so I might as well just skip it. Who cares? Move on, which is what most people do.
Or rewind all... way to the beginning watch the 37 seconds that you already watched just get to second number 38 which is where you missed a word which is what most people will not do so most people instinctually when they see a long talking head story they just skip it instantly instinctually and that over time leads to diminished story views the second thing that kills your instagram story views is any sort of re -shared content this can come in a wide variety of forms it can come as any feed post that you're sharing to your stories so if you post a reel and you share it to your stories your stories will get less views if you take someone else's photo that they post on their feed and you're in it and you want to share it to your stories to give them a shout out that will get less views if someone tags you on their story and you repost it to your own story that story will get less views Now there are reasons for doing all of these things, sure, and if you take a feed post and you share it to your stories, that feed post will get more views, absolutely.
However, it will also hurt your story views during that day. So you can share your Reels to your stories, but do it with the understanding that this is going to give you a little bit of extra views on the Reel, but it's going to hurt your story views that day. The third thing that kills your Instagram story views is just too many stories.
And even when I said three to 10 earlier, some audiences say that if you post more than seven or eight, that's too many in a day. I've heard some people say that if you post more than three in a day, that's too many. I think that's a little bit extreme.
Every audience is different. And also every creator is different. There are some people who I don't care if they post 20 stories in a day, they're that engaging, they're that captivating.
I'm going to watch all of them. But then there are some people who it's like, I don't want more than four or five stories from you today. So know yourself, know your audience.
And also, So just be intentional when you are going to post a lot of stories in a particular day. And the final thing that kills your Instagram story views is the link sticker.
This is why we use DM automation. This is why we tell people to reply with a keyword because let's say you made your great marketing pitch. You included all this text that converted someone and made them ready to become a customer.
And then you put the link sticker. Well, now your viewers have two options. The people who are uninterested, the people who you did not do a good job of converting, they're just going to skip your story.
That's always going to exist. No matter how great of a marketer you are, it's never going to be 100 % of viewers. Becoming customers so there's always gonna be some people who skip forget about them Let's focus on the people who are about to become customers the people who are interested those people are going to be clicking the link Thus, they will not be interacting with the story.
They will not be engaging with the story. So your story will not get any more views. Basically, 100 % of your viewers will not be engaging, aka you have a 0 % engagement rate, so your story views will be super low.
It's not that the algorithm automatically punishes you for putting the link sticker. It instead punishes you for the result of what happens after you put the link sticker, which is that nobody engages because either they're not interested in their scrolling or they are interested in their tapping. So that brings us to the final section of this video, which is DM automation.
It is the non -negotiable tool that I believe every single content creator and small business owner needs to have in their tool belt. The less followers, the less engagement you have, the more you need DM automation. DM automation is something that I know you've seen by now, especially if you follow me on Instagram, you've seen it.
It's the thing on feed posts where someone says, comment the word blank and I will send you the link. Comment the word guide and I will send you my free guide. Similarly, on Instagram stories, it's reply with the word blank, and I will send you blank.
You get the picture. It is by far the most effective tool for making sales on Instagram. And that's because instead of relying on the traditional link in bio or link sticker system where no one is interacting, even when they're interested in becoming a customer, you are now turning the interested audience, the people who want to become a customer into an engaged audience as well, which helps boost the post, helps it reach more people.
And then like we talked about earlier, it's a positive feedback loop. There are a wide variety of tools that offer DM automation. Some of them have more bells and whistles than others.
Some of them are more trusted than others. The one that I use is the one that is the most trusted, the one that's been around since day one. It's kind of the OG in this space, and it is ManyChat.
I've been a partner with them since 2021, and I have sent hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of messages at this point via ManyChat. Direct message automation is shockingly easy to set up and my encouragement for you is to get in there and just play around with it regardless of what tool you are using. It likely has capabilities and features that are way over your head when you first get started so my recommendation instead is to just start with a very simple reply with the word blank to this story and I will send you blank sort of automation.
One keyword, one specific freemium or guide or product or resource that you're sending them in exchange and then you can learn and build from there. Typically, whenever I speak on stage or give some sort of presentation, I am asked to do some sort of Q &A at the end. And so I right now have for you my 30 most frequently asked questions that I'm going to go through rapid fire to close out this episode.
And before I do, again, I wanted to say thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for sticking with me. If anyone is still watching at this point, my gosh, you are my favorite person on the planet.
You're awesome. You're a rock star. Thank you for being here.
Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to press that thumbs up button. And let's get into the rapid fire Q &A.
Am I shadow banned? No, there's no such thing as shadow ban. Make better content or post more content.
You're not shadow banned. Okay, well then why did my reach suddenly drop? Did the algorithm change?
No, probably not. The algorithm rarely has a drastic change overnight. The reason that your reach suddenly dropped is either because you had an account violation, you did something that broke Instagram's rules, or you just posted not very good content, which led to a lot of people not engaging.
So post better content. What's the best day and time to post? It doesn't matter.
How often should I post? There's no set number, but the more you post, the more you growl. Do hashtags still work?
What hashtag should I use? How many hashtags? It doesn't matter.
Don't worry about it. Do I have to show my face on Instagram? Should I show my face on Instagram?
You don't have to, but generally speaking, you should because humans are more likely to trust and connect with other humans. Is it okay to repost content from TikTok or other apps? Yes, absolutely.
Just make sure that there isn't a logo from those other apps because Instagram has explicitly said that if you have a TikTok watermark or a watermark from any other app, they will downrank your content because of it. What changed in the Instagram algorithm this month? Probably nothing major.
It changes a little bit every single day, but it's way more important to pay attention to the audience rather than the algorithm. And also, of course, you can stay subscribed to this podcast to stay up to date if there are any big changes. Does deleting or archiving posts hurt my account?
No. Should I start a new account or fix the one that I currently have? Well, it depends on a couple of different factors.
And the three most important ones are how old is your account? The older your account, the more likely I am to recommend that you start over. Number two, how low is your engagement rate?
The lower your engagement rate is and the longer that it's been that low, the more likely I am to tell you to start over. And then number three, miscellaneous. Have you bought followers?
Have you drastically rebranded and changed your niche from baking to rock climbing? If any of that is true, then you might want to start your account over, but it depends. How do I convert followers into customers?
Well, it takes time first and foremost to build trust, and then ultimately DM automation is the tool that will facilitate that conversion. How many followers do I need to make money on Instagram? Zero.
You can start making money by posting content on Instagram as a UGC content creator, even with zero followers. We have members of our Instaclubbub who with less than a thousand followers have been able to make over six figures every single year. It's much more about the quality of your follower and what you're selling than the quantity of followers that you need.
But something that I want to make sure that we're on the same page about is that Instagram does not pay. So if you're thinking, oh, well, once I reach 10K or 100K or a million followers, then Instagram will just pay me enough every single month to pay my bills. That's not the case.
How do I get brand deals, aka having brands or companies sponsor my posts on Instagram? Number one, start with affiliate marketing for proof of concept so that you have a track record of making sales on your Instagram in the past. Then follow and regularly interact with and engage with the brands who you want to partner with in the future.
And then step three. reach out to those brands with a specific pitch or way that you could help them. Is it worth paying for ads or boosting posts?
Paying for ads is much better than boosting posts. You have much more control. Either way, though, it's something that I don't recommend unless you already have organic content figured out, because if you're paying for more people to see bad content, that's not going to work out.
And if you already are making money, if your business has generated $1 in profit, and if you understand what makes good quality content, then you can run ads. Will running ads or boosting posts hurt my organic content? No.
How do you stay consistent without burning out? Remember your why and also remember that discipline beats motivation and systems beat both. I feel cringe about posting.
How do I get over that? Remember that nothing is cringe. It's all made up.
And you'd much rather get to the end of your life and look back and be proud of the moments that you bet on yourself, put yourself out there and you were willing to be cringe, then look back on your life and think about all the times that you played it safe. Should I have a personal, private, professional, business creator account?
Which one is best? creators usually best. Where do I find trending audios?
Trending audios don't matter too much. Instagram does give you a collection of recommended and trending audios whenever you are picking a song for your reels or your carousels. So it's fine to just pick one of those.
Can I edit a post after I've posted or will that hurt the views? You're free to edit. It won't impact anything negatively.
What are highlights? How do I make them? Do they matter?
Highlights are curated collections of previously posted Instagram stories that lives indefinitely on your Instagram profile for anyone to be able to view. To create them, go to the archive area of your Instagram settings and access your archived Instagram stories. But ultimately, do they matter?
Not very much. Should I reply to every comment? Yes, if you have the time and energy to do so.
And I recommend not just replying, but replying with a follow -up question to generate more conversation. Should I follow people back? Only if you're actually interested in what they have to post.
It's not part of Instagram etiquette to follow everyone back. So instead, only follow the people who you genuinely want to support and see their content. Is it bad to unfollow people?
No, I unfollow people all the time. If someone comes up on my feed and I'm no longer interested in what they're posting, I'm actually doing them a service by unfollowing them rather than sticking around as a disengaged follower. What does engagement rate mean?
Engagement rate is a simple mathematical equation that tells you the percentage of your viewers or followers who have engaged with the post. So if my post got 100 views and three people liked it, that's a 3 % engagement rate. Different services and tools online will calculate it differently.
It's kind of a metric that can be swayed depending on what you determine is incorporated in terms of engagement and what the denominator is. Is it the number of views on the post? The reach?
Is it the total reach per month? Is it the number of followers you have? There's not one universal equation used for engagement rate.
How do I get rid of spam or bot followers? Don't. Leave them alone.
Forget about them. Let them weed themselves out. If you go through and try to remove them all, it's going to take a bunch of time and it's going to hurt your account worse than if you just left them there.
Does the blue checkmark matter? Should I get verified? Should I do meta verified?
There's definitely some social currency to having the blue checkmark. If I see someone's business has that blue checkmark, I instinctually know that, oh, they take Instagram seriously and this is their real legitimate profile, but it's not necessary for growth. So if it's something that you want, if that's something that you value, go for it.
What is a collab post and how do I do one? Collabs are one of the most underrated ways to grow on Instagram. Collaborating with other people is a great way to reach new audiences.
In order to collaborate with someone, right before you press post, just press the button that says tagged and you're going to be able to then invite people to collaborate with you on the post. But that usually takes forming a relationship with someone beforehand, communicating about what the collab post is going to be, planning out what each of your roles is going to be in said collab post, and then ultimately posting it.
Should I go live? You can, but in all honesty, going live on Instagram is not really worth it. It's like the least important thing that you can do on any given day on Instagram.
Should I hide my likes? No, I don't recommend it. If everyone on Instagram collectively decided to hide their likes, then that would be fine.
But in reality, the only people who currently hide their likes are the people who are not proud of their likes or they have relatively low likes or they struggle with the mental health side of Instagram and so they hide their likes for their own sake so that they're not looking at the number of likes they have. But it's just not something that I recommend.
Even if you get low likes, be proud of the content that you posted and don't hide your likes. And with that, we have landed the plane. That's the end of this episode.
Again, thank you so much for watching today. If there's any topics that I covered in this episode that you want a deeper dive on, I guarantee you I've already covered it on this podcast. So make sure that you're subscribed, click on the channel, and you can search through and find other videos that are deeper dives into every single topic that we talked about today, whether it's DM automation or share -worthy content or hyper -consistency or using AI or Poppy or anything like that.
You can find more about it on the channel. But again, thank you so much for watching. And as always, happy.
networking.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The pitch is blunt: four hours, everything you need to grow on Instagram, and permission to take it in pieces. What follows is less a list of hacks than one method, Niche, Attention-grabbing profile, Post, with the algorithm explained only far enough to show why skip rate, retention and shares decide what gets seen.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:18acronym
The NAP Method
- Niche
- Attention-grabbing profile
- Post
The spine of the whole course. Niche and profile are set once and adjusted occasionally; posting is the ongoing work where growth actually happens.
Steal forany account audit or onboarding checklist
08:14list
Six niche misconceptions
- Your industry, ICP or product is your niche
- You are the niche
- You're stuck with it forever
- You can only talk about one thing
- No one outside the niche will follow
- You must be crystal clear before posting
A niche is who plus what. Personality makes you stand out inside it, Stories and sub-topics give room to range, and pivoting is easier once you're moving.
Steal forpositioning workshops and client onboarding
39:45model
Four-line bio
- Line 1: plainly state the niche
- Lines 2-3: clarity and credibility
- Line 4: call to action (follow, Stories, or DM keyword)
An elevator pitch that fits above the fold, since Instagram truncates line five.
Steal forany social bio or landing page above-the-fold copy
51:15list
Engagement ladder
- Saves (weakest)
- Reposts
- Comments (quality varies)
- Likes
- Shares (strongest)
After skip rate and retention, active engagement is weighted unevenly, and shares win because they create conversation and bring better-matched viewers.
Steal fordeciding what single metric a post should optimize
54:51model
Width, Depth, Conversion with 60-20-20
- Width: reach new people, optimize for shares
- Depth: build trust, optimize for comments
- Conversion: move followers to a sale or long-form
- 60% to the current season's goal, 20% each to the other two
Shift the 60% by season: growth by default, depth in the month before a sale, conversion during launches.
Steal forcontent calendars around a launch
1:00:33concept
Inverse bell curve of production value
Views are highest at the two extremes, fully cinematic or fully raw phone footage. The middle, with light editing, scripted AI copy and gimmick transitions, underperforms. Go all in or stay out of the pool.
Steal fordeciding how much to edit a piece of content
1:04:30acronym
Negative 5-8-5 hook
- Negative word (no, don't, stop, avoid, lose, quit)
- 5 to 8 words
- 5th-grade reading level
Negativity bias plus brevity plus simplicity. Pair it with the drunk grandma rule: every word should be clear to a distracted viewer.
Steal forreel hooks, email subject lines, ad headlines
1:07:01concept
Rule of three (visual hook)
No more than three visual elements in the opening frames, the visual must match the topic, and pros make one of the three unexpected to spark curiosity.
Steal forthumbnail and first-frame design
1:12:41list
Five common retention graphs
- Instant cliff: the visual cover is being judged, fix the first frames
- Drop after the hook: swap the hook
- Plateau then cliff: the 'I got it' effect, open loops and re-hooks
- Slow steady decline: review the whole video
- Cliff at the end: cut the recap or like/follow ask
Read each reel's retention curve and target the fix to its shape. Goal: above 50% still watching at the end.
Steal forpost-mortems on any short-form video
1:25:12acronym
SHARE (elements of a shareworthy post)
- Simple
- Hook
- Authentic (short gap between idea and execution)
- Relatable (comes from specificity)
- Entertaining
The checklist for whether a post is likely to get sent to someone.
Steal forpre-publish checklist
1:29:51acronym
TRIBE (types of shareworthy posts)
- Timely
- Relatable
- Inspiring
- Beckoning
- Edgy
Five categories of posts people forward. Each must still tie back to the niche; beckoning (calls to rally) works best quarterly or less.
Steal forbrainstorming share-driven content
1:38:36list
Three levels of formats
- Study formats others use
- Find repeatable formats that perform and you can sustain
- Create your own format
Formats beat topics; a repeatable format lets you plug new topics into a proven structure without reinventing each post.
Steal forbuilding a recurring series
2:11:23list
Batch creation cadence
- Daily: capture inspiration (share to self with a note, or save to labeled collections)
- Semi-weekly: collect, tag and rank ideas
- Weekly: one filming session, easy reels first, no script edits mid-session
- Delegate editing: who, not how
- Schedule with a tool
Start by taking 14 days off posting to build a two-week backlog, then keep the cadence running.
Steal forany solo creator's weekly operating rhythm
2:20:00model
3x3 upcycling math
- 3 formats per idea
- Each posted 3 times, 90 days apart
- 9 posts per idea
- About 40 ideas fill 365 days
Duplicate every scheduled post 90 and 180 days out, unchanged. The weekly task becomes spot-checking spacing, and fresh posts slot in by pushing the backlog back.
Steal forkeeping a daily schedule from a small idea bank
2:27:26list
Five that hurt, five that don't matter, five that help
- Hurt: bought engagement, follow-unfollow, rewatch bait, engagement pods, AI slop
- Don't matter: posting time, hashtags, cold outreach and engaging others, trending audio, tricks
- Help: audience over algorithm, detach from results, systems over discipline over motivation, stick with it, lots of good posts
A myth-busting sort of common Instagram advice into harmful, neutral and useful.
Steal forFAQ or myth-busting content
3:08:16list
Trial reel refinement loop
- Post as a trial reel
- Wait 12-24 hours
- Read insights: skip rate, then retention, then shares
- Re-record or re-edit the weakest part
- Repeat
The intended use. The simpler distribution use: trial first, then feed, then a modified trial (new hook, mirrored video, 5-10% speed-up, new filter, new B-roll or a different export app).
Steal fortesting hooks before a main-feed post
3:32:29acronym
STD formula (and STD hidden E)
- Single (or Still) image story, all other stories cleared
- Text-heavy sales copy: hook, problem, solution
- DM a specific keyword, ideally automated
- Hidden E: a tiny hidden emoji plus a second story offering a prize to whoever finds it
A once- or twice-weekly Story built to maximize DM replies, which are the strongest Story signal, so the sales story becomes the most-viewed one.
Steal forlaunch-week Story sequences
3:41:18list
Four Story-view killers
- Long talking-head video stories
- Reshared feed posts or tags
- Too many frames in a day
- Link stickers
Each one drives skips or zero-engagement taps, which drags views down for the day.
Steal forStory audits
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
3:45:03product
“DM automation is the non-negotiable tool that I believe every single content creator and small business owner needs to have in their tool belt.”
The final section doubles as the ManyChat pitch, but it lands as the logical end of the Stories lesson (link stickers kill views, keyword replies boost them). Poppy is pitched three times with a $1 trial, and subscribe asks recur at roughly the 1.5h, 2.5h and 3.75h marks.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
