Good morning Reptile Entrepreneurs! Today we wrap up our study into social media strategy with strategies for retaining followers once they hit the follow button. As soon as our followers are no longer getting what they wanted, or surprise value, they will unfollow. We can throw as much click bait out there as we want to bring them in, but, if we can’t consistently provide what ever it is that caught their eye, they will unfollow us off their feed.

We have been diving into a four  part social media strategy that includes Purpose & Promise, that defines what you and your followers will get from this account, Outreach, the strategy of bringing people to your account, Conversion, which is letting your visitors know what they can expect if they decide to follow you, and, today, it is Retention, which is continuing to serve your followers for the long haul. The core of our social media strategy is to align these four so they work seamlessly together to lead the non-follower to be a visitor, then choose to be a follower, and to stay on long term.

Retention Strategy: Relationships

The core of retention strategy is the relationships we develop with our followers. On social media it is a strange blend between personal relationships that you would have with friends, and meta relationships like you would have with someone you see in the movies. You can certainly have a distance relationship where you just put out content and people who enjoy it can follow. But you will find greater success if you make yourself available to digitally meet and interact with your followers.

As one would expect of “Social Media” platforms, each one has a selection of tools to do that at varying levels.

Facebook is the highest level of social media where the basis of the groups and forums are constant interaction. Of all the social media platforms, Facebook is the one most likely to create deeply bonded friendships and life long enemies. YouTube is on the other end of the spectrum where it is essentially a performance. You produce a video and people watch it. The major interaction is in the comments section under the video and it is rare to see any sort of ongoing back and forth conversation there. To be sure, humans are very resourceful and will find ways of making friends and enemies. So it isn’t like any platform is free of bullying and there is a community tab, but the tools on YouTube are much more primitive as far as developing relationships. Instagram and TikTok are in the middle. They are both presentation based where the account holder creates a piece of content and then comments surround the content. But there are also private messaging and features that are mainly for followers.

We have been focusing on Instagram as the best combination of all the features that a start-up business needs to have a powerful social media presence. And we are watching TikTok closely because I think it is inevitable they will try and copy Instagram back to try and develop a higher level of social interaction. And what I mean by that is that there is a definite difference between entertainment and interaction. Just think about how much time is spent watching video scroll by and how much time is spent actually interacting with the content. You’ll find that the main appeal of TikTok is the constant scrolling. There is interaction to be sure, but the hours and hours are being spent being entertained. For our purposes, we value developing deep loyalty and relationships do that. So TikTok is becoming  a more and more interesting platform for us as it is developing deeper relationship building tools.

So enough of this high level relationship philosophy. Let’s get down to the strategy of keeping followers. The bottom line for keeping followers is to develop some sort of relationship. At the most basic level, you can develop a relationship when your followers can count on you to be there. In this case, being there means having a consistent posting schedule that they can count on and start to expect you will be there when they look for your content. Keeping a schedule is most deeply effective on YouTube and with Podcasts. But on social media you can tap into the same relationship building trust by posting on Instagram or TikTok on a regular schedule. Being consistent develops a trust that you are stable whether they are there or not. So they know they can count on you. Consistency also goes for the content you produce. This has been a constant theme in talking about social media. Have a consistent topic through all your posts and the Instagram algorithm knows what you are about and your followers know what to expect when you post. Posting on a consistent schedule and a consistent topic develops a comfort with your brand. They know you are dependable and what you are about.

So, #1 point in retention. Be consistent in subject matter and posting schedule

That is a high level truth that will bring you success in any social media outreach. When you dive further you need to get to the tools of relationship building. I am focusing on Instagram this year so I am going to use the Instagram tools as examples.

First RetentionTool: Your Feed

The first tool is your feed and this is what we talked about just now. Being a constant presence with a predictable subject. That is not to say I can’t throw in a surprise, but if I am doing it on my chameleon account it should be a surprise that has to do with chameleons.

Second Retention Tool: Instagram Stories

The second tool is your Instagram Stories. This feature gives you the opportunity to post pictures and video that last for 24 hours and then disappear. These pictures and videos are shown in a slide show format and flip through each 15 seconds, Your followers are notified that you have posted to your Stories and they can tap and watch your story slide show.

This feature is a powerful way to connect with your followers on a more personal level because it disappears in 24 hours. It is expected that you will post things that are more spontaneous and less important. Who are the people you are the closest to in life? It is the people with whom you share all the day to day unimportant things. Of course, nobody really wants to know that you brushed your teeth tonight…like last night…and the night before…but if you had some random thought about life and wrote it over the picture of you brushing your teeth it all of a sudden becomes a highly relatable experience. I have used stories for sharing news, sharing thoughts, sharing notifications of things coming up, reactions to daily news, and anything else that comes to mind. And there are built in methods for allowing your followers to engage with you, give their opinions, and ask you questions. It allows you to connect on a day to day basis. Stories have become so popular that some people are just stories surfers and ignore the feed! This trend was recognized and that is why you have people announcing in their stories that they have posted in their feed. They are trying to get the story surfers to get into the feed! So, you may ask, if I really liked the Snapchat days and the idea of casual 24 hour long content appeals to me, can I just do stories on Instagram? The answer is yes! If you are consistent and your content is good then you will have people making it a point to click on your stories whenever they see you have updated. The one concession you will have to make is that Stories are not a good outreach. Non-followers do not see your stories so you will have to post something in the main feed as Outreach to let people know they need to follow you.

For most of us, though, stories are a great way to do many random touchpoints and offer a more casual relationship building environment. On my chameleon account you will find random images of what my chameleons are doing during the day or 15 second videos of my thoughts on something or answering a question. On my Reptile Entrepreneur account I often run Instagram tests where I compare the reach of reels and images or reach from using hashtags located in different places in the post. All of these would make great videos if I made them a project, but I can slam together an IG story in no time flat and post it up. I have greatly enjoyed this and have developed some regular viewers. As long as I continue to deliver value I will have my viewership grow.

Third Retention Tool: Instagram Live

I love the Instagram Live feature. This allows you to do a live video and for your followers to join in. They can type questions and comments in the chat bar and you can answer them live. You can even pull them up on camera in a split screen if you want to have a conversation with them that every one can watch. So this feature gives you the opportunity to add a significant level of personal touch to your account experience. I do a weekly live session for my chameleon account and have been thinking about starting it up for my reptile entrepreneur account. The challenge is that everyone has to be available at the time you go live and this is difficult to arrange. Instagram allows you to schedule a live session in advance so that can help align your follower’s schedules.

A live session will be a show for as long as you want and you can give a presentation, or just hang out. Remember, though, that people treat live sessions like they do the feed scroll. They expect their attention to be grabbed and maintained. Showing up and asking your followers what they want to do is a way to empty the room. My suggestion is to watch some lives going on and decide what your style is and what you can maintain. I can share my personal experience where I gave a ten minute presentation and then opened it up to questions. Although I did pretty well and people stuck around, I realized I was passing up a great opportunity to interact. I mean, these people probably listen to my 30-45 -100 minute podcast every week. Do they really need to go to chameleon class again? So, I have started with much more interaction and then ease into what ever I want to talk about. I have learned to keep my talking short.  But live sessions have quickly become my favorite tool.

Fourth Retention Tool: Direct Messages

For the exact same reason that DMs (or Direct Messages) are effective for Conversion, they are effective for Retention. This is where someone will feel like there is a level deeper personal relationship because they are actually conversing with you. Instagram has a robust Direct Message feature that allows you to communicate with followers and non-followers. It also is one of the three places where you can include a live link to some other place on the internet which means you can send them to your website or YouTube channel to immerse them even more in your Outreach.

Fifth Retention Tool: Guides

Oh, I love Guides. It is one of the least know features of Instagram, but is very powerful for us. Guides allow us to group posts under a certain topic. This allows you to create a Guide with, for example, general FAQs, Husbandry for a Corn Snake, How to construct a cage for a Basilisk, A list of the best foods for your tortoise. All you do it plan this out with multiple image or video posts and then post them one at a time to your feed over the next days. Once you have completed with your series you group them all into a Guide which will then be accessible from your profile menu bar. The huge advantage of this is that you can then send the link to a guide to anyone who is asking a question that you hear often. This increases the engagement on those posts, shows an uncommon level of professionalism and organization, and convinces the person you are DMing with that they are following the right account. These things are huge for retention. If you are wondering how this looks and works then go to my Chameleon Academy account. On my profile menu bar you will see an icon that looks like a page folded in half. When you go there you will see a guide for FAQs, and guides for the three most common chameleon species kept as pets. I have used links to these guides to answer questions in my DMs countless times. Now, you may ask why I do this when it is easier and more comprehensive to create a webpage for this. The answer is that I do have an extensive webpage for this. But, I get better response from the people that ask me questions if I give them a resource on the platform they are on. If they are on Instagram they want to stay on Instagram. So I have done these guides as a mid step on the way to convince them to go to the website. I truly believe that part of their reluctance to get off Instagram is that they do not yet know me and don’t want to go through the hassle of following an outside link until they are confident I am worth it.  And, that’s fair. But, bottom line is that I have the information in many different forms. They can select which ever one they prefer.

How to maintain

These retention strategies are actually quite straight forward. The concept is to figure out what you want to do, be consistent in your messaging of what you are doing, and then do it. Sounds simple. Why the fuss?  Well, because coming up with all of that may not be that clear right away, but the main thing is, once you are on your way, keeping it up for weeks and months and years is not easy. In fact, you will probably do swimmingly on your first week. But once you have your plan down and start taking on other priorities you will find the turbulence that we all get caught up in that destroys best planned schedules. There is only one way to buckle down and make it happen. You need to be focused on one topic, batch your content ahead of time, and be obsessive about spending that one or two days every two weeks or every month creating your content for that time period. Yes, you can do stories spontaneously. And Live sessions are scheduled. But I do not know of anyone that is able to maintain a consistent and reliable schedule when they have to think about it every day. The caveat to this statement is if you are a typical reptile person and you take 20 images of your pet every morning because he is just that awesome. In that case, I admit, you are a constant creator of content. But if that is you then I challenge you to take it up to the next level. Instead of just posting random images and surface level Reels every day when you think about it, thing about how you can create content with above average value. Here is where you are able to stand out above the crowd of people posting whatever pictures come to mind. On my chameleon account I did week long tutorials which I turned into Guides because that is what is in my personality. What is in your personality to offer your followers beyond daily eye candy?

But, whatever you do, planning ahead of time and batching up two week’s or a month’s worth of posts has the advantage that you can sustain it long term. Burn out is a huge issue in social media because our victories are a flash and then forgotten. So we are constantly under pressure to create. And the best way to be creative is to give yourself time to create. Very few of us can do our best work on the spot with a deadline of immediately on a daily basis.

The relentless suck

And here is where we have to touch on the most serious danger of social media for us creatives. And that is that there is no rest and no down time. Even if you batch your content ahead of time, there is the constant pressure to monitor your posts, respond to every comment, reply to Direct Messages, be engaging on the Stories feature, and show up for Live streams. Add to that, the feeling that you need to keep up on all the newest features and the trends that are on those new features. And it is a 24/7 platform. When you have thousands of followers they can interact with you only once a week and you still can spend hours answering direct messages. And, before you know it, you better start batching your content again or you fall behind. And with the constant daily social grind, falling behind means things get unpredictable. You are choosing which things get done on the spot.

And there is real pressure to always be on. If you listen to Instagram’s official spokes-influencers they are saying, for optimal growth, you should post three Reels a day. And…there is your contract. You spend your days churning out loads of easily consumed content and your social media platform will reward you with presenting you to accounts with the chance of getting followers. Do you feel like you might be a rat on a treadwheel chasing little bits of cheese dangling in front of you? And when you finally have a good day with engagement and follows…well, welcome to tomorrow where you get to start all over again. Productivity and setting realistic goals is the subject of an episode or two in itself. It will be a constant subject on this show.

The reason why this is all so important is that retention is a long term strategy. We are establishing your brand and this is not a sprint. It takes time for the social media ocean to get used to you being there and to slowly latch on to you. So a strategy that has you posting three Reels a day, 10 Stories every day, two Live sessions, and posting relevant, but completely soulless comments on 50 related accounts a day will bring you aggressive growth. But if you can’t sustain it more than two weeks then what good is it? You will do much better having one image post a day and keeping it up over the entire year. You need to find a strategy that is consistent, but sustainable and healthy. Remember, this podcast here is not dedicated to your wild financial success. It is dedicated to making your life better. And that means crying in your Ferrari is not our goal. I want you smiling, content, and fulfilled and I don’t care what car you are in. Bills paid and something going towards retirement every month is where I want to get you. Nothing says you have to stop there and I hope to get a call from you while you are picking out your Ferrari, but I have a clear vision as to where my work is done. Build on that and take it as far beyond as you wish. Just, don’t ever give up that level of satisfaction and contentment.

For today I want to bring up two high level points regarding setting goals and self-expectations.

First, Know the difference between Need and Want.

I want the concept of the Minimum Necessary Deliverable to enter into your vocabulary. Be clear of your end goals and determine what is the minimum you need to do to achieve your goals. And then give yourself a limited time to do it by. “But I want to do better than the minimum!” Great! Then finish the minimum early and do the bonus level. But you have to be done when the clock runs out or else you will fall behind on everything else ahead of you. These are the kinds of things we had to learn when doing homework in high school and college. And if you didn’t learn it then then you have to learn it now. I, personally, flew by the seat of my pants in college and I made it work. But I have never in my life run into a multi-deadline grind that I have as an entrepreneur on social media. The most grueling job under the most ineffective manager during my professional life was easier than this! So realize that carrying a full social media load is likely like nothing you have ever done before.  I am not discounting other stress and multi-tasking jobs. But this is the hardest because there is no sandbagging. And, that is where you make things appear harder to your boss so you actually have time to do it at a relaxed pace instead of like a maniac cutting corners.  The problem is, you are the boss and you know what your limit is and you are likely using your peak output as a guide as to what you schedule for yourself every week. And you start falling behind because you don’t account for the downtime it takes to recover from working at peak performance for an extended period of time. Figure out what the minimum deliverables required are to meet your goals. Set time limits and sandbag like there is no tomorrow. If you can get your social media down to being completed in two or three days of the week then you are in a sustainable cycle. That allows for maintaining your business, your life, and having room to work on growth opportunities. The most valuable deliverable is the one that actually gets delivered. The one you keep working on is worthless.

Second, You don’t have to do it all

Understand that my job here is to present to you the ideal execution for social media. Everything I am saying should be considered things to do for best results. But, no one says you have to do all of them! Have you ever looked at my accounts and wondered why I am doing various parts of what I preach on different outlets? Why am I not doing best practices on every outreach?

Because there isn’t enough time.

I literally cannot keep all my outreaches at 100% all the time! Yes, that is my goal. And, yes, I am working towards that with processes and bringing in help where I can. But let’s take stock here. For my main outreaches, the Chameleon Academy and Reptile Entrepreneur,  I have two Instagram accounts, two websites, two podcasts, two youtube channels, a TikTok (should be two), a smattering of Facebook activity (should be more) and, oh yeah there is the maintenance of everything that I am doing for my caging business that is a huge part of paying that mortgage. Add to that the planning and developing of new projects to keep things fresh and moving forward. So, apply best practices on that workload and we find I should be working a….380 hour workweek. That should do it….opps, I was suppose to be working on that email list. So 382 hours. Oh, I should be promoting the merchandise shop and the affiliate products so that should go to 394 hours. Yes, there is some exaggeration there. And, yes, repurposing content for different platforms helps. But that takes time as well. Now, most of you aren’t trying to shoulder the load of maintaining growth on two shows simultaneously. But, honestly, my schedule felt this packed when I had one show. I got good enough in content production to squeeze in my second show and now I am back to maximum. Boy, if that isn’t a microcosm of my personality….

If you don’t take control over how much time you spend on your social media and content creation activities, they will expand to fill all your available time and you will never get the feeling like you are on top of things.

And, how important is this?

This is how burn out happens. And when it hits you hard it hits you hard and the creative center of your brain will slam shut and you are dead in the water. You are frustrated you can’t create anything and/or even hating that you have to. You know you are in serious danger of hitting that point when the random thought crosses your mind to bring out the calculator and see if it would be easier and more profitable to get a job at the burger joint down the street.

Realize that Instagram and social media are just part of your overall strategy. Depending on what your business or outreach is, there are many more aspects to what must be done and makes you successful. So, accept right now that Instagram, or any social media, is just one of your many tools and you should allocate a certain amount of time to it. If you do not put boundaries on when you will be on it and working on it then it WILL expand to fill the available time. With everything that I am sharing about how to work Instagram it is important that you understand all your tools and the best strategy, but it is also important that you pick and choose what works best for you to implement. Let’s not fool ourselves. Yes, you will do better if you follow everything. This is why companies have dedicated social media teams. And, you are correct, if social media accounts in your field do all these things and you don’t, they will grow faster than you. Kind of stings knowing that all you have to do is twice as much as you are doing and you could do better than them! So….what are you going to do? You know that them having more followers doesn’t hurt you in the least. You know it is a just an ego competition which no one else cares about.

I am going to suggest just keeping an eye on what is in front of you. Concentrate on how to serve your followers the best you can. Keep your activity to a level where you can sustain it so your followers can count on you. Stay the course and keep consistent. This is how you will reach your goals without crashing and burning out.

Conclusion

In conclusion, retention strategy is the marathon. It is the long term strategy. And this is what defines the core of what you are. The core of Retention strategy is consistency. Definitely try new things all the time and evolve the strategy, but show up in a way that your followers can count on and start looking forward to.

This concludes our four part series on Social Media Strategy. It started with understanding your purpose, which is what you are getting out of all this. From there we developed the promise that you would give to your followers as to what you would provide them. The Outreach Strategy was us enticing non-followers to come to our profile and our Conversion Strategy was convincing them to commit to the follow. Our Retention Strategy was easy in concept. It was simply fulfilling the promise we made in our outreach and conversion. It is the execution of the Retention Strategy that is the challenge. Long term consistency is key.

So, where do we go from here? We keep at it. We continue to experiment and see what our audience likes of our content and we do the balance between attracting followers that like our content and optimizing our content to be more effective.

We will do one more episode on social media where we explore TikTok and then we will enter into the second quarter of 2022. In this first quarter we concentrated on establishing a digital homebase on Instagram. In the second quarter we will explore eCommerce. How do we make money on the internet. By the end of the second quarter we will have created a logo for your business and then link your Instagram account to a print on demand storefront to sell T-shirts and other items with your logo on it. So, by the end of this quarter you will have a digital product to promote and be able to make as much money as your marketing skills can inspire. Of course, this exercise isn’t meant to be the road to riches. It is meant to show you how to set up the systems so you can apply it to whatever your business is. But, if you are witty or artistic nothing is stopping you from loading up as many designs as you want and turning your Instagram account into a full blown business. My job is to empower you with the ability to turn your vision into income generating reality. Your part in this is to take these techniques and run with them! Just drop me a line somewhere along the way and let me know how it is going!

It is time for me to sign off. Somehow it seems like there should be Spring break after the first semester, but we are barreling headfirst into our second eCommerce quarter and I am excited to see what you all come up with!

I also invite you to join me on the Reptileentrepreneur Instagram account. I implement about half of what I know I should on that account, but I do enjoy interacting with you all. And it is there in the stories that I post the various tests I run on the Instagram algorithm. So, if that is the kind of thing you enjoy seeing then come on down and hang out with a small group that enjoys talking about entrepreneurship in the reptile community.

Thank you for joining me here. Take care of yourself, take care of our reptile community, and let’s see what we can build.