• I don't remember who I spoke to. There's some influencer who I talked to recently who's saying that this year they went back to engaging with their audience instead of going on and doing a bunch of random engagement with people. That's been really helpful.

    We talked follower retention a good amount. It is probably one of the most ignored numbers in the space. How do you keep the followers you already have. A good way to do that is by engaging with them. Answering your DMs, answering your comments, going into your followers accounts, liking, engaging. Things like that.. How much time? I don't know. I think there's very successful influencers out there that spend no time, and there's people that are very disciplined about it. Like everything we talked about on the show, my advice to you would be to track it and test it.

    You can build experiments for all of this stuff. You can say, "I'm going to engage one hour a day everyday for the next seven days. I'm going to write down at the end of the day how many followers I gained, how many I lost, et cetera. My engagement rates. Then the next week I'm going to do two hours and the week after that I'm going to do three hours." Then you're going to have three sets of data. You can look at growth rates. You can look at engagement rates and you can say, "Is it worth me spending three hours a day to get an extra hundred followers a week? I get 50 new followers a week when I do an hour, and a hundred when I do three hours."

    That's a choice you can actually make instead of saying, "I don't know what to do." You might find that engaging for three hours doesn't get you anything. You might find it gets you four times as many followers. You have to test, experiment, track it, built very simple spreadsheets, be disciplined. You only have to be disciplined in that way for a few weeks as you're running your experiments. Then you have to go back and test those experiments every six months or so and see if it's still working.

    The platform changes constantly, so the things you did six months ago likely don't work today. Test, track. There's this piece of advice in the business world that's generally like, "We improve what we track." It's something like that. If you are tracking things and if you are taking down data and running experiments, you will get better in those places. If you don't track it, it gives you a way to ignore it and just say, "Oh, this isn't happening." Avoid the problem. Track it, test it. Let me know how it goes. I think you could test it for a week.

    I think that would give you good enough data. The nice thing about Instagram is because the scale is so big now, the volume's so high. A week will give you a pretty good idea. Now, what you want to do with that as well is you want to build a model that allows you to extrapolate the results out over a year. When you build your model, if you say, "Okay. Right now I engage zero hours a day. I am going to engage one hour a day." Let's say your growth rate today is 1%. When you engage and hour a day for a week, your growth rate went to 1.3%, 1.4%.

    What is interesting there is when you extrapolate that out over the course of an entire year. Like compound interest in the financial world, little changes, especially if you're following this over 50,000 or 100,000, little changes in percentages have huge impacts over the course of the year. You want to make sure you build something that can extrapolate that and lets you see where am I going to be in a year so you can make those decisions.
    Episode #122
    - Improving Engagement, Future of Influencers, Staying Grounded