Now, I just told you engagement was important. That is kind of true to us. Engagement isn't as important of a metric of success for us, and it's not as important of a metric of validating whether we want to work with an influencer. It does still largely drive the algorithm. Unfortunately, it is the most common input into Instagram. Other than scrolling, it's the most common thing that you do, is like something. So engagement is a big driver of the algorithm, and to get great reach, you do need to probably get pretty good engagement. It does happen that you can have less than great engagement and decent reach. Usually, we see that when someone has really engaged stories, but I digress.

What can you be doing to get more engagement today? I think we're going to throw some examples up here real quick. It's just a very small example I think of what you can do tomorrow to improve your engagement. I have a friend, she's an artist, she's super talented, she lives upstate, she messaged me and said-- she sent me this photo here and she said, "What's going on with Instagram? I hate it. This is the worst engagement I've ever gotten."

I was like, "I have a couple of ideas for you. Let's chat." She came in and we had lunch. She was telling me the story of how she just had her second baby and she generally would do her art from 10 PM to two in the morning. Because of the children and because she had to get up so early, she just hasn't had as much time to be creative. She hasn't had as much time to work late at night as she wants. The collection of art that she just released is really pared down and it's really kind of minimalist and stark. Some of that was because she just didn't have time to work on it, but it also for her felt like a representation of where she was in her life.

I sat there and I was like, "Okay, that's the story." If you looked at her first post it just said, "Hey, here's some new work that I'm releasing." It got like 77 likes. I said, "Do you know what? Post essentially the same photo again, post the same photo of that work again but tell that story in your caption. Just tell a little more personal story." The next day she posted a photo of the art again, she told that story and it got 270 likes and 30 comments. Almost, was that four times as much engagement? 400% increase in engagement just on the caption.

I think that people underestimate captions one, and they underestimate what stepping back and taking the time to actually think about what story you want to tell and think about what we talked about, educate, inspire, entertain, are you doing those things? Or are you just dialing it in and saying, "Oh shit, I need an Instagram post for today. Let me just grab this photo, and I'll say, Monday vibes or something." That is a bullshit post and it's going to get bullshit engagement.

I think what a big takeaway from Quigley's episode was how much time she's spending on her captions and that she thinks first about what she wants to say and then she translates that into a photo. For my friend who's an artist upstate who's not trying to be an influencer, but is feeling the same frustrations you all are, that engagement is harder to get when she opened up and told a real story about herself was a little vulnerable.

400% increase in engagement. You can do that today. You can say that my next post, I'm going to try and say something impactful, I'm going to try and say something that is honest and true, and feels like something that is worth spending a minute reading and double-tapping and liking because I don't care about your Monday vibes. That's not interesting to me, that doesn't get me closer to you. It's just you throwing noise into my feed. You can't throw noise into people's life and expect them to thank you for it.