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Engage, Engage, Engage! Love what you do and give love to receive love.
Love only grows by sharing. You can only have more for yourself by giving it away to others. For it is in giving that we receive. You can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving.
Why build an inauthentic account with bots or pay someone, when you could be having all the fun? Sitting and waiting for your connections to form won't help your page, we all know that.
I thought I would give you a story to illustrate my point of giving in the form of comments of other peoples pages. Leave genuine thoughtful and thoroughgoing comments or even DM's.
A pond once started a quarrel with a river. "Oh, river, you are so foolish! Day-in day-out you pour yourself into the ocean, who gives nothing in return." The river was not bothered at all. "See I keep my riches heaped and plenty, if you keep giving like that you will be dry sooner than later. " The river responded, "I give, not to receive again, but for the pure joy of giving!"
So the seasons came and a drought hit the land. The pond waters were getting muddy and murky while the river was overflowing and Chrystal clear. The pond lost all the water he had, while the giving river who kept giving was gifted by the first rain loving back into its veins.
Now I want to ask you; are you a river or a pond? For if you are a pond, then your heart isn't in poetry and what help would it be to grow an account that you are not whole heatedly in love with it?
30% of Internet users are on Instagram. A platform with the highest level of engagement for brands, with 2-7% percent of users interacting with each post. All the people are longing for your authenticity! Speak to them, show them your scars, but how will they see you? How do you get someone to care for your poetry? (Well first you should obviously write some quality lines, but assuming you have that?) First you need to care about them.
1. Complete your BIO There are two parts what you can take advantage of when you create your profile:
Your Username.
Your Name.
They both can appear in the Instagram search result. In this case, if you create a brand around your name, then your Username should be your name.
REMEMBER: biggest mistake I made was not entering it head on with my own name. If you intend on eventually publishing your book, and many of you are, then forget the pen name! Embrace your name. People can't pronounce it? They still get "Rupi Kuar's" name wrong. If you make your readers care enough, they will take the time to get to know you. Don't hide, flaunt your vulnerabilities like an armless man in a darting competition. People worth attracting will view your confidence as a strength anyways.
For your business pages – it’s the name of your business or if you create the thematic account, include the keyword there so it will be searchable.
For the Name field, include your keyword there too: something, which briefly describes your business or your target audience.
There is no need to double-write your name in the Name field, but you can do it if you like and still add 1-2 keywords for your business.
The rest of your BIO isn’t searchable. However, give the introduction to who you are and what you do, so people will get to know you more through it.
2. Connect to your friends Follow people who you know. Search through your Facebook and Contact list. They will get the notification about your follow and may follow you back. They are your first followers.
Make new friends with your friends, friends, friends. Not all of them like poetry? Make your content shareable. Nobody knows what they want. Everyone loves it believe me, they just don't know it yet.
3. Look for your audience From the beginning, describe your potential audience for yourself (create an avatar). Surrealistic art connoisseurs who like slam poetry / maybe haiku's are your thing - so maybe Buddhist philosophy could be on the side?
Then, look for other accounts, which serves your audience. Not your competitors. But those who focused in their posts on people who you want to attract.
Search for your favorite author's / poets. If you don't have any. I will have a blog post on some good big accounts coming up.
Find the accounts, which post on a regular basis and have a good engagement with their content. Create a list of such accounts for your brand and then start engaging. Go to their profile. Comment on their posts. Follow their followers and interact with those new people. You need to get their attention and get connected before they will be willing to buy your book.
4. Communication is the key Do you know that you see only 30% of the content of people who you follow?
The same for your followers, they also see only some content of people who they follow. The key point here is to start communicating with people, so they will check your feed, follow you and keep engaging.
The more people engage with your post, the higher it appears in their feed. Your posts are also competing with each other. This way, the post, which got more engagement, shows first than the one with the less engagement. Make others care, by caring first.
5. Post interesting content, but that you are still passionate about
Keep your audience in mind. Please, please, please don't just fart your words on the page like every other insta-poet. Poems are not one-liners that you got after getting out of the shower with a high resolution background. (Well, come to think of it... *inserts thinking emoji) Don't be that poet! Or at least don't call yourself a poet.
Sorry, back to my point. You can supplement your poetry account with other content that draws eyes in. I added educational videos, stories, interviews and other famous poets poems. Share you other interests, that could benefit others. Do it with the intention of serving them. What are your current intentions with Instagram? Now that you have eyes on you, make them care about you.
Use your damn stories! Ask questions! Show them things. Spam them in stories and please don't post 5 posts in 30 minutes? Like really, I unfollow people like that, don't you?
The optimal, acceptable amount of posts are; 2-3 posts a day separated by at least 3 or 4 hours.
Quotes from your favorite authors or poets could also be a cool thing that fits in with Poetry accounts. Oh, and of course!!! Art. People. Art! They go together so well.
Really you can probably mix poetry with anything else, but try and stick to theme. It takes the strain off your brain of idea-generating and also it show that you are decisive and confident. That is sexy, I want to follow that, don't you?
Treat your social media as the high-standard online edition. Every time before you tap the ‘Post’ button ask yourself if it fits your social media ‘magazine’ and would you engage with this post? Is this worth to share? If the answer is ‘No’ or you doubt if you would engage with the post, then the post is weak. Be proud of your work.
(By the way, I am already proud of you for reading this far! Give an email if you have anything else you would like to ask me.)
6. Be consistent Be consistent in your posting even if it will be just a few times per week. Pick the comfortable schedule for yourself. Don’t try to run a marathon from the first day or you will get burned out fast.
Once you got used to your optimal schedule, you can post more. When you post regularly, you consistently get to your follower’s radar, so they always remember about you.
When you don’t post for a while, you stop showing up on the people’s feed and even if you will start posting again you may lose the connection with some followers, as you won’t get to that 30 % of people’s posts they see.
7. Start a conversation If you engage with your followers, start writing a simple open-ended question in the post. Ask them about something. The captions are great for calls to action, use them.
From the beginning most likely they won’t write anything. However, keep doing that even if it looks like you are talking to yourself for now.
The important part is if you want people to start the communication on your feed, go to them first and comment on their feed for a period of time with the proper comments.
Yes, it’s time-consuming. But when you do that, you will see that people start replying your questions too and the interaction with your other posts will grow.
Till you involve people to the conversation with you, posts with the open-ended question, ‘tag the person,’ ‘fill in the blank’ will get the minimum to zero effect with the low level of engagement.
8. Use the right hashtags Hashtags help you to be discovered by other people. On Instagram, you can add up to 30 hashtags. Use many or all of them.
Search for relevant hashtags for the topic(s) you post. Then, create the lists of them for each subject you post about. Pick those, which has a number of images about 500,000 or less. Those search results update is slower. You can also add 1-3 top hashtags to get the ‘quick’ engagement for the post for the first few minutes. Save them in the phone app. When you publish the picture, just copy and paste them to the capture or the first comment.
Here is my secret formula for every post and also for YouTube: (Psht, it is our little secret)
_________________________________________________________________________
Follow me on Instagram
@jacques_writes for more
@jacques_writes
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Good day my little lemon drop.
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May you be
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Buy my book, 'in light' @ this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B087GCSRLP
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Check out my blog for more: https://poetry8work.wixsite.com/website/blog/
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Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacques_writes/
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Here is a hashtags prose poem. Feel free to skip it and enjoy the post.
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The #soul goal of my #poetry is to express a higher #awareness and this page aims to create a safe space where #writers and #poets can find their voice by expressing themselves. #philosophical poetry is what I #love. #philosophy is in every one of my poems, questions waiting to be answered. #mystical experiences are what I am looking for. #spiritual life is enlightening #selfdevelopment is what I do in my spare time #selfactualization being the goal #enlightenment as the ultimate goal of my life #creative works of art are written in this #instapoets #writingcommunity making #creativewriting pieces that are #insightful increasing world #consciousness so I give you a #poemaday yes a #poem, a piece of #art, there are so many #poems in this #poetrycommunity and all have their place - Mine are promoting #openmindedness. Thanks for supporting this #poet #mylittlelemondrops you are my favourite thing on this beautiful planet. I also do some #poetrynetworking with other poets, check out #behindthewords. _________________________________________________________________________
Note your tags will be different, feel free to copy paste this one though. Why use a hashtag prose poem?
Well, Instagram promotes pages that don't spam their captions with tags. Putting in any words in-between shows the Instagram algorithm Gods that you care and to your offerings are noted and less likely to be demoted.
9. Get to the Instagram Search Top Results You can get more exposure and followers when you get to the Instagram top posts for the certain hashtags. This is the area at the top of the Instagram search result with only 9 specially selected pictures.
While Instagram doesn’t tell you the algorithm of choosing pictures for the top, there is something you can do.
The point is to get more engagement with your post within 1-2 hours after it got published and better from the accounts with the big followings.
Here are more tips:
– Post at the time when more of your followers online. If you have a business account, then check your statistic.
If no, then look at your posts, at what time people engaged more with your account. – Prepare the high-quality image, which will fit your niche. Well, that’s actually what you should always do on your account. Perhaps you can put the title of your poem on a high quality pic and then a white background and black text for the actual poem? Grab their eyes and then steal their hearts. Be a good thief my little lemon drops.
– Pick the hashtags relevant to your niche. They shouldn’t be too popular. The more popular it is, the harder to get to the top if your account isn’t big yet.
– If your picture has other people or brands on it, tag them. They get the notification about your post, and there is a possibility that they will engage with it too.
– It’s good to have the relationship with the bigger accounts. If you don’t have any, start interacting with them. The perfect result is when they follow you and begin like and comment on your posts. When the accounts with a large number of followers engage with your picture, then you get more chances to get to the top. Also from my experience it is possible to get your post in their stories or on their page, but get ready for a battle that can last between 2 and 8 months. That was my luck, let me know if you struck gold in a day.
– Then post your image and track the results. Check the search feed of the hashtags you use.
The post usually disappears from the top within 24 hours.
Also, it’s possible that two of your posts get to the top, but then they will compete with each other.
It seems complicated, and you won’t get to the top every time, but if you do it right, there is a big chance to get there quite often.
10. Post videos and use Instagram Stories There are two ways of using videos on Instagram: on the main feed or Instagram Stories. Video content can get 34% more interactions than the regular photo pictures.
Depending on the complexity of your product or services, tutorials can go a long way in making sure people know exactly how to use it.
The main feed lets you host longer video, and they stay there till you want.
With the 10 seconds Instagram Stories you can show a quick tutorial or the step-by-step process with each video. For example, if your doing a cool art piece to mach your poem, it could be a time lapse of each layer. Maybe you share your writing desk and how papers are empty and suddenly filled with poems? Do something unique, the world is yours.
Share an update about a new blog post or the limited sales. Use Instagram Stories Live feature to connect with your followers from everywhere. Meeting your favorite author? bought and read your favorite books? Poetry reading? Stream it right from there.
If you aren’t selling a book yet, host a tutorial covering why your service is essential, maybe teach people how to draw bunnies? Give your readers some value in return. And when ever you follow someone or love one of Rupi Kaur's poems, ask yourself why? Why did I connect? Be mindful and master the human behavioral psychology will enable you to press the right buttons to tap your way to 1000 followers.
Show how your page, book or service is different from the rest. Set yourself apart from others with a little creativity.
Also, if you go to the search feed, at the top you will see the most interesting stories from all over Instagram. They are personalized to the user’s interests, so your story can be shown to entirely new people. Note you can only reach this feed if your account has more than 1000 followers, or well, at least the chances increase significantly.
Conclusion
Be a river and not a pond. Open up and be yourself. Start story-ing and give your readers some value! Yeah, I said a lot of things. Some; you may know, others not. Use what you can. Step by step. One day you could be writing you own blog post on how to gain your first 1000 followers on Instagram and probably teach me a thing or to.
Go share your passion with the world! I am rooting for you. Have a glorious day my little lemon drop.