No engagement on your content? 3 things to try…
Audience, Medium, Topic, and Your Real Potential.
“I had been taken it really hard when I didn’t get engagement after every/any post, thinking it was a reflection of my value.” — fellow content creator.
It’s Not You. It’s Them.
Which audience is seeing your content will make a big difference in whether you get any / enough responses to your article or video or whatever content you’re posting.
The easiest and most reliable way to test audiences, to reach enough different people, is to use Facebook Ads’ Detailed Targeting feature.
- Use the Ads Manager to create an Ad (for the Objective, try “Engagement”), and turn on the Split Test feature.
- In the next step, the variable for the Split Test should be Audiences — you will be able to test up to 5 different audiences at once.
- Each audience should be the same in terms of location, gender, age, language, but different in the Detailed Targeting.
- Choose just ONE interest to target per audience, e.g. try a different popular Author that your ideal audience might like. For more accurate testing don’t combine interests.
- For the actual Ad itself, choose “Use Existing Post” and select a post that is a good representation of your message or typical type of content.
If you were testing 5 different audiences, then for just $15 — or $5 per day for 3 days — you should see an obvious difference in which audience is most responsive to your content.
FYI: I’ve got an online course on how to do Facebook Ads effectively.
The Medium Matters.
Additionally, which medium you choose for the message can matter a lot.
I’ve noticed that for cold audiences (people who don’t know me yet), they don’t like my videos. I’ve learned to be fine with that — physical attractiveness isn’t one of my assets… but it may be true for you. If so, use it!
Instead, cold audiences respond much better to my written content.
As for images, I don’t like using them to reach cold audiences because I don’t know whether people are “liking” my content for the image, or for the content itself.
Therefore, when I advertise to cold audiences, I usually just use my Text-only postings, for example, my FB posting about 3 stages of content.
Then, once they’ve engaged with my text-only content and have built some trust in me, they’re more likely to want to see some of my videos too.
For you, it may be the same, or it may be different. If you’re above-average in looks (don’t ask your mom or your best friend — try to be calmly objective) then video is a natural asset for you to reach cold (new) audiences. If you’re not sure, try it out. Your ideal audience might just like however you are on video.
Hot Topic?
The topic matters a lot.
No matter how brilliant of a communicator (or how ineffective) you feel you may be, if you are talking/writing about something that your ideal audience cares about, you’ll get a lot more responses, than with other topics.
So you’ve got to test many different topics, answer different questions, delve into different issues, explore different ideas.
For example, the news media has noticed that they get a lot of clicks whenever they talk about Donald Trump (whether on the left, it’s the lies he’s telling now, or for his supporters, whatever policy he’s advocating.) So they keep talking about him.
In your own business, or content areas that you want to build a business on, list out all the possible topics and related ideas, and just start trying as many as you can.
It’s like you’re starting a buffet: offer the largest variety of dishes that you can, and then notice what the diners go for, and then make more food like that! But if you’re only offering one or a few things, you are very far from exploring your potential.
Do You Realize Who You Are?
The Real You is unlimited potentiality.
How good can you get? No one knows.
How smart could you become, or how effective at communicating? You have no idea.
…so don’t judge the current snapshot of your abilities.
If you judge your value by the quality of what you’re currently putting out there, you’re creating negativity that blocks you from further potential.
Be mindful: when you notice self-judgment, breathe deeply, gently release, do an energy reboot if you’d like, and return to the practice of creating.
Aim for quantity. It will naturally lead to quality.
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