Introduction

Welcome to our discussion about social media outreach. In this episode we are going to talk about outreach strategy to get followers on social media in general and Instagram in particular.

I am Bill Strand and you are listening to the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast. Of course, these principles can be applied to any topic, not just reptiles. My decision to speak directly to the reptile community officially reflects the strategy of niching down, but, in reality, it is because this community is my passion. Strategy or not. This is where I want to be. But, please, apply these concepts to what you are passionate about and want success on Instagram for – Whether it is reptile related, a passion for Bavarian cuckoo clocks or the zen of changing your car’s oil.  The outreach strategies for niche topics will be the same.

How Social Media Works

Outreach is one of the three parts of social media strategy. Outreach is the bait you send out into the digital ocean with the intention of enticing some of the billions of accounts out there to visit your profile. The next part, Conversion, is convincing your profile visitors to become subscribers, or in Instagram’s case, Followers. Then finally, Retention is the strategies you put in place to feed your followers what they expect from you so they stay your followers. And, as we went over in the last episode on Social Media Promise and Purpose, these three stages are aligned and focused by the promise you make to your followers as to what they will get with your account.

Promise and Purpose Reprise

As a quick recap, the promise you make to your followers is what they can expect if they allow you on their personal feed. Are you about Ball pythons? Emerald Tree Boas? Iguanas, Chameleons? You are letting them know exactly what you are offering them if they tap follow.

Now, many of you will be having your Instagram account because you are selling something. Remember the promise you make to your followers may very well not be what you are selling. For example, If you are selling bicycles, posting a picture of a different bicycle every day may get old pretty quickly unless you are looking for a demographic of people that get excited by the subtle design differences of each bicycle. No, a more likely promise is something along the lines of “adventures within your reach”. So it is an account showing all the different places around the world that people ride their bikes to. From the bread store in Florence to the beachfront in Australia to the Redwood forests of California. So, you see how this account would inspire people to think about how bike riding could be their ticket to making their lives more exciting? And how your account will allow them to live this life vicariously while they are getting around to getting their bike out? And how all the beautiful scenery puts your bike brand foremost in their mind when they decide it is time to get a bike? So, in this case, the purpose of the account is to gather followers and inspire them daily so that they purchase your bikes when they decide they would like a bike. Your promise to your potential follower that you will communicate in your posts and on your profile is to share adventures that can be reach by bicycle. Your followers will get very tired of you reminding them what bikes you have in stock, but they will be more than open to the occasional marketing post in stories if you have filled their daily train ride to work with visions of fun around the world. Remember, the fruit around the seed. The seed, or your reason for doing this – the mundane way you get the money to pay the mortgage, needs to be there or else you’ll not be able to continue for long. But once that is in place and understood, make that fruit something you will have fun with and will provide your target follower with joy.

And, one more comment about your promise to your followers. It can be as specific as a crested gecko every morning or as general as “Learn about keeping chameleons”. The specific one is easy to fulfill, but it is limiting. The general one is more complicated to carry out, but allows great freedom in what I can do to fulfill that promise. How much structure and how much freedom you give yourself is completely up to you. The point is to be able to communicate it clear enough that the people coming to your profile will have a clear understanding of what they are getting with your account.

Outreach Strategy First Steps: Understanding the Algorithm

            Before we can start an outreach strategy, we need to understand the playing field. Every social media platform has their own algorithm that figures out what to show people who are looking for specific search terms and another algorithm that figures out what to show on each account’s home feed. I will illustrate with Instagram. Your potential follower on Instagram will have two ways to discover you. The explore page and their home feed. The explore page is what you get when you type in a search term. If I want to find pictures of Emerald Tree Boas then I type in Emerald Tree Boa in the search bar and a software algorithm will decide what images and videos and accounts it should show me. This isn’t an easy job. With between one and two billion active accounts, the Instagram algorithm needs to sort through all of that and figure out what the best images are to show someone, like me, who wants to see Emerald Tree Boas. Do you think I’ll be happy with a red-tailed boa? No. Will I be happy with a green tree python? I do love them, but if I search for Emerald Tree boa and you give me a picture of a green tree python I will not be impressed or happy. So, how does a software algorithm figure out not only what is in the picture, but how good of an image or video it is? Because it has thousands of images and video to choose from and, even if it shows me all of them, it needs to figure out the order in which to feed them to me. So, the algorithm reads the caption and looks for keywords. Keywords are searchable terms. So, it will look for “Emerald Tree Boa” in the caption or account name or bio profile. Hashtags are keywords with a hash sign in front of them. Hashtags are the method that Instagram allows us to tell it who should see the content. So the author of the caption would have something along the lines of #emeraldtreeboa or #Coralluscaninus in their hashtag collection. And then Instagram watches the behavior of people it shows the images to.  If keywords and hashtags help the algorithm know what the content of the image or video, the behavior of the people that view it will help the algorithm rate the quality of the content. If you put the hashtag #emeraldtreeboa at the bottom of a picture of a ball python the algorithm will quickly see that it is not making emerald tree boa people happy. The algorithm will see few likes, shares, comments, or saves. And there will be very little time spent viewing it. So that image will be dropped way down the list.

            The algorithm that determines what you see on your feed is very similar. It carefully watches your behavior to the content it shows you and will show you more of what you interact with and spend time on. You can play with this on your feed. I have never searched for iguana pictures. But, if I start liking every iguana picture that comes across my feed or is on accounts I visit I will, miraculously start seeing more iguana pictures come across my feed. You can also do this by simply spending more time looking at certain images. The Instagram algorithm is getting more and more sophisticated and better and better at giving us what we want to see. And it is on this playing field that we will be sending out our posts and bringing back potential followers

Outreach Strategy Second Step: Know your Ideal Follower

So we know the game board and the algorithm we need to feed. But we cannot create a fully effective post until we know who our target follower is. Ironically, the challenge here is not to know who your ideal follower is, but to keep yourself from the addiction of follower count. You see, if you have a niche account that is focused on the well being of mudskippers there will be a core audience that believes as you do and will form a powerful close-knit community. But it will be limited in size. You may get frustrated that your follower number is not growing as much as you think it should. Let’s get this out of the way right now – the more basic and slapstick your content the more likes you will get. And that often means the more follows you will get. But these are the wrong followers unless you are running a basic slapstick account! You are looking for the followers that will be active members of your community. Be constantly aware that if you dumb down your content you will grow a much bigger group, but it will be filled with people that enjoy the more basic and slapstick content. And you will lose the more serious community members. There are consequences to each approach. The more general the outreach the more followers you will have and the less focused they will be. The more focused and quality your outreach the fewer followers you will have, but they will be the highly focused ones. There is no right or wrong between the two. Just make the decision as to what best serves your purpose for having the account in the first place. And then stick to that decision. But also remember, just because you are focused does not mean you can’t have a high follower account. It is just that it takes more time to build up a solid base for your community. Expect that and be okay with that.

Outreach Strategy Third Step: Create a Deliberately Crafted Post

            So, now we understand the playing field and we have our expectation for followers under control. Let’s talk about creating a post. The job of this post is to show the world what they can expect from being a follower on your account. You have three priorities in making a post.

• Whatever you send out there, it needs to reflect what you promise your account will deliver. This means that if you are a tortoise account you do not post pictures of whales from your sailing trip. That will confuse both the algorithm that is trying to figure out what kind of content your account produces and the potential followers out there that follow you because they like your whale content. If this is a personal account then have at it and do whatever you want. If this is a marketing account then each post should reflect what a follower can reliably expect from you.
• Accurate Keyword & Hashtag description. Your captions are getting more and more important. In the beginning, Instagram judged the images just by the hashtags the creator put on their posts. Instagram is working themselves towards doing a keyword analysis just like Google does when they scan your website and figure out who to send to your site. So when you create your posts you need to keep both the reader and the algorithm in mind. Make your caption easy for people to enjoy, but use words that people looking for your type of account might use. For example, the scientific name for a Panther Chameleon is Furcifer pardalis. The person that searches for Furcifer pardalis is different from the one that searches for Panther Chameleon. And this is something we need to keep in mind. The experienced community talks differently than the beginner community. If you write captions like someone from the experienced community then you will be more likely to be presented to experienced people. Is that what you want? If you are making an account for beginners then you would use the words beginners use. So, know your intended audience and use words they would use. That is how the algorithm will know who to pair you up with.
• There is the constant balance between quality and quantity. The more work you put into your posts the fewer posts you can put out. And in a world that seems to be rewarding quantity more than quality you could be thinking that you are just hurting yourself by putting in the effort. Believe me, spending a coupled days planning and crafting the perfect panther chameleon care carousel (which is an Instagram post that allows you to group ten images together) felt like I was serving the audience of my Chameleon Academy account. But what post went viral and hit 24 Million views? It was the video where I put the theme of Mission Impossible to 5 seconds of a chameleon eating. Soooo, what does that tell me? Well, it doesn’t say anything. Because a great percentage of the people that followed me because of that Reel were not beginning chameleon people trying to get started with chameleons. The 12 people that followed me because of that care summary were true followers and the 175 people that saved it were happy followers. I served my community with that post. Was it worth it? And that all depends on how you are measuring success. What is your purpose? Is your purpose served by the number of followers you have or the number of superfans that are within your followers? Now, growth is important. So before this series is over we will be going over how to produce quality content AND get followers.

Outreach Strategy Fourth Step: Use Analytics to understand your post’s performance.

Anytime you are setting up a strategy you need to set up tests to determine how the strategy is working so you know if you need to tweak your approach. So, I would like to introduce you to analytics that will help you hone your outreach effort. Analytics are how your accounts and each of your posts are doing. Analytics are free and part of professional accounts. Definitely switch your account to professional if you are at all serious about Instagram. And don’t worry you don’t have to prove anything to them about whether you are a professional or not. It is a simple toggle of a value in the setting menu. If they ask, tell them I vouch for you.

So, first of all, we want to know how many of our followers and how many non followers have been reached by each post. Luckily, Instagram gives us this exact break down –  except for Reels which is very strange. So, on other posts, tap the “Insights” button on your post and you see it all. On the insight screen you can scroll downward and you will see a circle graph that shows how many accounts your post has reached and it is broken up into followers and non-followers. Instagram shows your post to more of you followers if the initial follower group seems to like your content. So a high follower count is a good sign that you are giving your audience what they want. The non-follower number is how many people not following you have seen your post.

And, yes, we do know where those non-followers came from. Below your follower/non-follower ring graph there is a breakdown as to where the non-followers saw your post. So with these numbers you can determine if your hashtag strategy is working to get your post out into the world.

Scrolling down further gives you the Profile Activity section where we can see how many of the people looking at this post then went to check out the profile. These are the people that can then be converted by a optimized profile. Presumably, this would almost all be non-followers, but anyone checking out your profile would be added to this number. I think it is safe to assume they are non-followers that were interested enough with your content that they decided to check your profile.

The reason why these numbers are so important is that your Reach number tells you the quality of your post (the more of your followers that like it, the more of your followers Instagram will show it to.)  And it tells you how good your hashtag/keyword strategy is in reaching people. And what you are shooting for is to get as high of a percentage of profile visits from that non-follower number as possible.  And then your outreach has done its job. It is time for the Conversion stage to kick in and that is the subject of the next episode. Conversion is where we strategically construct our profile bio to accurately describe our promise and get the people who would be true followers to tap the follow button.

To recap, with analytics we can tell how good of a job our post did reaching our followers and our non-followers. W e are told how many of them found the post from the hashtags so you can measure the effectiveness of your hashtag strategy. Now, keep in mind that your hashtag number here will include both followers and non-followers so don’t assume that is just non-follower reach. With the Profile Activity analytics you can tell how many of the people that saw your post were curious enough to check out your profile. And then how many of those tapped the follow button.

Would you like an example? Let’s take a recent post I did of a still image of a Jackson’s Chameleon. As of today, That post reached 2,371 followers and 1117 non-followers. Of those 3488 accounts that saw it, a grand total of 19 checked out my profile and 10 became followers. So what does this tell me?

It tells me that this is a fair to middlin’ post. A good image post gives me a reach of 8k, 12k, or even 20k accounts. A reel has the potential to go viral to reach millions, but we don’t have full analytics for Reels so I can’t use those as tutorial tools! But, okay, this was a under performing post compared to my normal levels. And everyone will have different levels. So don’t compare yourself to me. Half of you are thinking you’ll never get to that level and the other half are wondering why I am not embarrassed to share those numbers. You know, we all work with where we are. But, this means that I am looking at this post and trying to figure out why it didn’t perform as good. Looking at the analytics allows me to do this.  And only 19 of those 3488 checked out my profile? If we assume they were all non-followers, which is probably, but not certain, then this post got a paltry 1.7% of curious non-followers curious enough to check the profile. But I have some good news from this post. Over 50% of the people who visited my profile converted. So by doing this analysis I can tell where I need to focus to improve and where I am doing it right.

Now, I have to put in the caveat that none of these numbers is 100% clear. For example, the number of people visiting your profile includes followers and non-followers. We assume the majority are non-followers, but we need to remember that this is a rounding up. Follows are another one. If your hashtag strategy works so well that you got in front of a person that just loves your content they may hit the convenient follow button right there in the explorer and they may totally bypass visiting your profile page. This means we are over estimating the effectiveness of the profile to convert. So, these analytics are good for pointing us in the right direction, but they should be considered carefully.

Outreach tools (IG features that get you in front of others)

Let’s now review the tools that Instagram gives us to be noticed. There are two classes of outreach. First is the way we present ourselves to the Instagram algorithm and the second is the way we present ourselves to the people viewing our content.

Your Bio Profile

I know the first thing you think of in outreach are the posts, but, I am going to start with how you present yourself to the algorithm. Remember that we have to communicate to the algorithm what we are all about so that the algorithm will show us to the right people. So set up your profile in a way that tells it who you are. We will do a deep dive into profile strategy in the conversion phase because the bio profile is the last critical step towards converting a viewer to a follower. But we have to get in front of that person in the first place and part of that is letting the algorithm know who we are. And we do that with keywords. Those same keywords we talked about for our posts we want to use in our profile bio. Ideally, you are also using them in your account name. The Chameleon Academy will be easier for the algorithm to profile and beginners to search for than, say, Googley-eyed friends. And I don’t want you to stress if your business name is not a keyword. I am saying that is the optimal approach, but not doing the optimal approach doesn’t mean you will fail. So, pick and choose what of all I am saying that fits your situation and what you want to do. If your name does not have keywords in it then it just means you need to do a bit of marketing to connect the name of your business to the topic of your business. I know. For a number of genius reasons I called my caging company Dragon Strand. Well, no one knows from the name that I sell cages and no one could ever tell that I made chameleon cages. The reasons I did that were not necessarily bad reasons. But, good or bad, the fact is that I have had 9 years of people being confused. I still sell everything I can make, but I am sure I have lost customers because of the confusion. So, what is important is you know the consequences of your decisions and you made the choice you believe is best.

Posts

Normal image posts used to be the norm on Instagram back when it was an artistic photo sharing app. Single image posts are still common and can still provide reach. The reason why this is a question at all is that Instagram came right out and said they were now a video sharing app. And all of us on Instagram collectively said, but wait, that sounds like you are trying to be like TikTok and Instagram said, essentially, yes. So Instagram is forcing a move to video by giving video much more reach than a still image. Short form video to be exact. These are 60 seconds or shorter and are called Reels. Anything longer than 60 seconds is called IGTV and that reach is less than still images. So, yes, it seems the world is falling into the pit of short videos. And this is because it is so easy to turn off our brain and just collect little dopamine hits from short form video. You don’t have to read anything or think about anything. Just scroll and scroll and scroll. And this is why so many content creators are at a crossroads. Do you let Instagram force you to change what you are doing so you get reach or do you stick with what you do and watch people around you who do reels shoot up in followers? Because that is a real possibility. A valid and usual answer is that you do a bit of both. Spend some time giving Instagram what it wants and spend some time providing a content feed that feeds your followers.  Just realize that the more Instagram pushes Reels the more the audience expectations will shift in that direction. So, although you will be able to build an account on still images, you are working with legacy tools. So I need to encourage you to work on getting comfortable with Reels if you are going to stay on Instagram. Unfortunately, there aren’t many other places to go that aren’t doing the same shift to short form video.

And the reason why this video shift is causing angst on Instagram is that anyone that had an established account before August 5, 2020, built their accounts on images. That is when reels showed up. They didn’t even get a full year before, on June 30, 2021, Instagram announced it was a video sharing app that was embracing people coming there to be entertained. So it is like learning another language. Some people can do it and some will fall by the wayside. And right now, we are seeing that filtering going on.

That said, let’s go over all your outreach tools. Obviously, you are still able to post a single image. And you are also able to group things together and post a progression of ten images or videos called carousels. This can be a strong tool in telling a story and are quite popular. Carousels are effective in giving information to your followers. I do care summaries about chameleons in Carousels and they are my most saved posts.

And then there are the video forms. As said before, 60 seconds and under is called a Reel and is the #1 growth tool right now. Instagram is so invested in Reels that it got a content creator to recommend that we all post three Reels a day. Which is slightly insane and a quick way to flush your quality down the toilet. How do you make three Reels a day and maintain quality? Obviously, if you can pull it off then you have the golden IG ticket and will grow tremendously. I will not do that because this practice will add to my follower count, but will not add to the quality of my community. Those people I am reaching with entertaining videos are not the people that can help me with my purpose. So, yes, I get the benefits of having a high follower count. And, let’s be honest, there are undeniable benefits to having a large follower base just from the appearance of it as far as prestige and people seeing you as an authority. But those excess followers will not be engaging at a valuable level, purchasing anything from me, or getting any benefit from any of my posts that are not entertaining.

So, I personally, cannot do three Reels a day. Or, more accurately, I choose not to spend my time doing that because I wouldn’t be doing much more than just Instagram. And this actually applies to everything I am telling you. I am sharing with you the best strategy and tools to make Instagram a success for you. But you have to take all of this and figure out how it fits into your entire outreach. For me, Instagram is a major focus of mine, but not the only focus. I make conscious choices as to how much time a day I spend on the platform. And this means that I do not always follow best practices and I specifically have chosen not to follow the high growth practices suggested by Instagram. So, you will not see me making three reels a day even though I can tell you right now that that is the best way to grow on Instagram. Remember that your strategy on Instagram is a subset of your overall digital marketing strategy. You have limited hours in a day. Choose how you spend those wisely. You can do one thing excellently or three things effectively or six things barely passable. What serves your purpose best? That is for you to answer.

Hashtags

There is one outstanding discussion that belongs in the Outreach section. And that is hashtag selection.

Hashtags are the word that is after the hash or pound symbol. The hash symbol is the sign to artificial intelligence that the next word describes what is in the picture. They are metadata that is added to your post by you. Metadata is data about data. For anyone who grew up checking out books from the library, the card catalogs were the metadata. They gave you the author, publisher, publishing date, and a description of the content of the book. It was data that described the content. Likewise, us adding hashtags is adding an easy way for the Instagram algorithm to know what is in the picture. As artificial intelligence rises to mind blowing levels the need for hashtags will lessen as the AI will be able to scan the image and analyze what it is. But I suspect that is far off from now. Of course, in technology terms, that means least until November.

You may be surprised to learn that hashtags are controversial in the Instagram community. Instagram itself keeps changing their advice as to how many hashtags we should use. The app limits us to 30 hashtags per post. And it has for as long as I can remember. A while ago, though, Instagram came out and said something along the lines of 8-15 hashtags were ideal. But testing 8, 15, and 30 hashtags on a post showed that 30 hashtags got the most reach. And then last year, September 2021, Instagram announced that 3-5 hashtags were the sweet spot! And you watched all the Instagram gurus, happy for more content, proudly proclaiming that you needed only 3-5 hashtags! Except, anyone who actually tested it realized that 30 hashtags still got you more reach. So, there are two take aways from this 1) don’t believe anyone who thinks they are an expert. Test it yourself. This goes for getting husbandry advice on Facebook to hashtag usage advice in Instagram and 2) We have little idea what Instagram is up to. And either they don’t either or else they have some master plan that is not terribly clear. The bottom line for you is to know that there will be a great deal of conflicting advice about hashtags and that as of March of 2022, there does not appear to be any penalty in the algorithm for people using the maximum 30.

Now, since we have a purpose to carry out, we want to target the right non-followers. To reiterate, if you sell turtle care books you only care about followers that might be interested in learning about turtle care. You have no use for people who like ceramic turtle figurines or people who think the video of a turtle walking is the height of cute-osity. If you are attracting those people then you will have a high follower count (yay! Prestige!), but an empty wallet (not-so-yay! Top Ramen….). So remember how I keep talking about taking care of yourself and keeping your purpose in mind? A high follower account filled with people who aren’t aligned with your purpose is like eating cotton candy for dinner. It is fun on the surface, but the end result is not healthy.

So, let’s get to the selection strategy. The easiest way to come up with hashtags is to go to an established account like yours and see what they are using. The drawback to this is that you might be cheating off of someone who is cheating off of someone else. You would be surprised at how many people do not understand how the hashtags work and how to select them so use this only until you figure out a good strategy for yourself.  But yeah, I get it. Hashtag research is actually tedious. There are a number of apps that you can pay to come up with hashtags for you, but honestly, you know your niche better than any software does. I wouldn’t bother with that unless you have a very general subject. But no app is going to be able to understand the chameleon world better than I do or determine which hashtags are best for my specific needs.

So, put aside an afternoon and let’s do hashtags.

First, I come up with a number of words that describe what the image is

Second, I come up with a number of words that describe the person that I think would enjoy the image.

Then, you type those words into the search bar and see how many posts are to each of those words. You will get responses back anywhere from less than 100 to many millions. In my niche, chameleons, I find into the 100s of thousands and if I graduate to reptiles or pets in general I start touching into millions. You want to make sure the hashtags you use already have momentum. See, people choose what hashtags to follow based on how much of the content they like has already been posted under it. This is why you don’t make up your own hashtags. Because no one else knows it exists. You want to tap into an established community. Don’t start your own hashtags until there is a benefit to you for it. And then you need to invest in filling that hashtag with good content to develop a community around it.

Now, it may make sense to then pick the hashtag with the highest number of posts. And to be clear, the number you see associated with the hashtag is the number of posts to that hashtag, not the number of people following it. We do not know how many people are actually following those hashtags. But here is the trade off. The higher the number on the hashtags the more competition there is. If you breed panther chameleons, you will be king of the mountain for hashtag #maleambilobepantherchameleon. There are fewer than 100 posts there and your post will be the top of the heap for years. Literally. A post from 2015 is still showing on the front page of that hashtag. The test post I did back in December 2021 is still in the top three. So, if anyone follows #maleambilobepantherchameleon they will definitely see your post. The question is how many people actually follow that hashtag! Now, if you go to #pantherchameleon, there are 212k posts and your post will be on the first page of the recent explorer results for three hours. Go up to #pet which has 121Million posts and you will show up on the first page of recents for all of 31 seconds. So, spread out your hashtags across highly used to rarely used and you can switch things up between different posts for more coverage. Now, once you have candidate hashtags actually check them out and make sure they are what you think they are. #chameleon, at 1.4M posts has chameleons, but also cares, bicycles, tattoos, comic books, and even a cow. So there are a wide variety of interests following that hashtag. So non-follower coming from that hashtag and curious enough to check out your profile may not be the follower you want. #chameleons, plural, still has a variety of thing, but is more heavily the actual lizard. It has 218k posts, but a higher percentage of them are going to be what I am looking for. How about #cutepet with 1.3M posts? Checking that one out returns a sea of cats, dogs, birds, and other warm blooded creatures. Do I think a cat and dog person would like to see a chameleon? The only way to find out is to try it, but go in knowing that you are giving that hashtag content that doesn’t fit with what the people following it expect.

How much do you try to break new ground with people that are increasingly more distant for your core audience? That is up to you to decide. No one knows how it will go over. The point is, though, that you know what you are experimenting with. If you experiment with a picture of a green tree python on #cutepet, #cuddleup, and #soulmate and get no followers from it, you are not left in the dark as to why. Who knows? #soulmate may love your greentreepython. But if you are deliberately experimenting then you know that you have 10 hashtags that you know are spot on five that are somewhat related, and five that are a real reach as to whether those people are interested you can start seeing what is and isn’t working by looking at your analytics and seeing what combination brings people to look at your profile and then tap the follow button. And, nobody can do this for you. You have to go through this hashtag analysis for yourself because it will be different for every account.

As for how many you should use? I make up a list of hashtags that I think are relevant. I don’t try to fill up 30, but if I have 30 then that is how many go on the caption. And, by the way, that is another thing that Instagram is confusing on. They came out and said they want hashtags in the caption, not put in the comments like many people like to do to keep their caption clean. Well, there may be a version of the algorithm in the future that only looks at the caption, but the tests I have run show it isn’t here yet. So, if you do like to put your hashtags in the comments section, just keep your eye open on your reach from hashtags analytics. If that plummets suddenly then Instagram may have changed their algorithm to support the announcements they made last year. I think we have learned that when Instagram announces something you cannot assume the date it will be live.

So, let’s recap this study of Outreach.

• Make sure your posts reflect the promise you make of what content following your account will provide.
• Use language that your target follower would use.
• Use a concise hashtag strategy
• Measure your effectiveness via the analytics provided.
• Experiment and continuously try new things

Always be trying new things

And I’d like to close up this episode by highlighting that last point to always be experimenting and trying new things. The fact is that social media is always looking for something fresh. All those TikTok trends are very cool, but as soon as some expert produces a template for it to make it easy you can be sure the trend is on to something new. So it is easy to get caught in the game of following the latest trends and catch the wave early. That certainly is a strategy and, if you have the time to do that then more power to you. But I want to encourage you to chart your own course. Try your own things. Be okay if they don’t work out. Just do what you think makes your account a better place to be. I encourage you to do your own thing and build your own place not to be what you think will bring the most followers, but to be the best at serving your followers. Do you see that subtle distinction? Now, I am taking a rare break from what I normally say. I do business start-up consultation and when we talk about websites and social media my standard approach is to give my clients best practices to optimize their outreach for human readers and not try and game the system. Because the search engines crawling your webpages and the algorithms scanning your profile and posts are so sophisticated these days that they are able to judge the quality of your page based on structure and the responses of people when they visit. This means if you build an outreach that makes your community happy you will be rewarded. And that still is the best advice. I admit, though, that the recent moves by Instagram to push short form video is a move that is more for what they think is their survival rather then for the best experience of the various niche communities. So, this is a rare instance where I have to advise that you build your account to best serve your followers…and you play Instagram’s Reels game. Consider it the price of admission. They say that they are doing this video shift because that is what the users are demanding. But that doesn’t ring right at all. Anyone who loves short form video already has Snapchat and TikTok. They aren’t sitting on Instagram wishing they had more short form video. From what I can see, this is simply Instagram trying to force something because they want to be part of the new trend. And, to be fair, I am sure there are forces at work that I do not fully appreciate. The people at Instagram are very intelligent and eat and breathe the social media space so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to judging their intentions. But, as for how it affects us, we have to weather this change in direction and acknowledge that we need to take into account Instagram’s agenda when we plan out how we will serve our audience.

Just for fun, this morning I posted a reel and a still image which looked the same on my grid. For the still image I had carefully chosen hashtags and gave it a 45 minute head start before I posted a reel from the same photo shoot, did two haphazard hashtags, and overlaid some cutesy trendy music about the cutest paws on the internet. In the span of two hours here are the results. The still image has reached 985 accounts while the reel has reached 3,636 accounts. Check out the March 14 post on the Chameleon Academy account to see my experiment with the brightly colored panther chameleons.

And you need the spirit of experimentation at all times because the algorithm is constantly changing. One of the huge benefits of Instagram is that they are adding features all the time. It is comical how shameless they are at copying features from other platform, but they do it well and they have become the best combination of the best features every platform has come up with. And they are aggressively growing so this is the right platform for us to create a home base. Not a perfect platform, but the best we currently have. With these constant changes comes tweaks in the algorithm that you continually need to stay on top of. Obviously, I will be sharing the relevant updates as they happen. But you need to be testing out new ways to work with your account. The algorithm and the communities are so complex that we all essentially live under different conditions. I will give you the high level changes, but you need to try them out to see how they are affecting you personally. It is just like a care sheet. A care sheet gives you the basics to set up your cage, but you have to adjust them for your specific environment. So, experiment and do not be afraid to try new things. Every day is literally a new day on social media and the disaster of yesterday fades away quite quickly! So, have fun! It is even better if you can have fun with some Reels thrown in. You know, toss a coin to your Witcher.

And with that I will leave you to meditate upon how you can optimize your outreach. You have the strategy, the tools, and a way to measure success. Get familiar with it all. Practice with each one to the point where you are comfortable grabbing any of them to accomplish the goal of the day.

If you have any questions you can reach me at bill@reptileentrepreneur.com. If you like what you hear but would like more personalized attention for your specific case, I do start up consulting. If you are patient, then just stick around here because I will be leading you through the entire digital e-commerce business creation process throughout 2022. One step each week.

Thank you for joining me here. It is great being in the company of the people who are building the foundation of our reptile community. Don’t be shy to drop me an email telling me your experiences and questions. I have a jam packed topic schedule this year, but there is always room for important questions whose answers would serve the community.

This is Bill Strand signing off.

Take care of yourself, take care of our reptile community, and let’s see what we can build.