You Ask, I Answer: Organic Social Media Growth on Instagram?

In today's episode, Joel asks, I work in CBD, so advertising isn't an option most of the time. Have you found any successful tactics for organic social media growth on Instagram? Hmm. Well, it depends on what you mean by organic growth. Because there are a number of different metrics that you can work with.

I would assume though that you're probably talking about either uh audience or engagement, maybe not even conversion, because uh you wouldn't necessarily need to run well, I guess you would need to run ads for that. Um so we have to be clear first on what the goal is. What are you trying to do, and then that's when you start busting out the uh the social media data science. So the way to tackle this and to find out what's working for other companies here in your space or not, um, is number one, put together a an exhaustive list of as many uh business accounts uh in the industry you're in, uh the C B D industry as possible. Uh just be a a spreadsheet or whatever.

And step two is to extract the data, the public data from those accounts. There are tools like uh Crowd Tangle, TalkWalker, uh I'm sure there's many others. I would use Crowd Tangle for this. Um to extract the post level data, which is gonna have the account name, uh, the size of the account posting, uh, the number of likes, the number of comments, etc. And that will give you the raw data you need to start understanding what's working for accounts in this space.

Step three is to group the accounts together by account name and then summarize the changes. So if you're looking for uh um uh audience growth, number of followers, then you would have take that spreadsheet and roll it up by date by individual day, um, and then by the size of posting the change in size of posting so you know do they do they gain fifty more followers that day uh whatever the case may be uh or the the different types of engagements but you'll have a summary spreadsheet and that will take what could be you know a many thousand line uh spreadsheet and boil it down to you know uh a couple of thousand lines depending on how many accounts we're talking about once you've identified that and you you've summarized it you should know at that point um who are the top twenty-five percent of accounts uh that have grown the most by the metric that you've you've decided you care about the most you know likes comments uh things like that and at that point you'll make you'll you'll through the data science tool of your choice from a spreadsheet all the way up to to you know Watson Studio or whatever um you're going to take that uh data and feature engineer it so you're going to extract additional features from the content itself so things like the emotions written uh the post length uh how many words is the description the post type is it a video is it an image is it a carousel is it IGTV uh the image subject what's the what's the the picture or the video about etc. Uh this step typically does require uh more of those advanced data science tools again there's something that you can find in R or Python or Watson Studio and what you'll end up with is a essentially a really large spreadsheet, a really large table, of these accounts, their posts, all the features that you engineered, and then your target uh your response variable, whatever that is, if it's audience growth, if it's engagement, etc. You run a regression analysis against the response variable and see what correlates the most. To figure out, okay, now what if posts on Wednesdays that are that are joyful and have a picture of uh a grow house, if that's your hypothesis, then you can start testing it, putting those out on your account and prove true or false that that type of content matching those variables actually does drive the outcome that you're looking for.

And this is a is an iterative process. You'll keep doing this over and over and over again, either proving true or false different combinations of variables until you're at the point where you're like, okay, now I've I've got something that has statistical significance and that um leads to the outcome that I care about. Now, this isn't the easiest thing in the world, but this is the best way to get at what's working, especially in industries where you're appealing to a very specific set of audience, right? It's not the general population. If it's like you know, if you're in B2B, for example, this is a technique you want to use in B2B as much as possible, because you don't have a ton of people you're looking at.

You're probably looking, you know, your average B2B company is probably only looking at 500 customers, right? Um do this too with your customers' accounts. Do this too with your customers of competitors to find out what's working for them. Anyone in that industry, boil it the data down so that you have you can build a testing plan to see what's working, and you may find that non-intuitive things work. You may find that sometimes they may not even be a there, right?

People you what you may find is that people in your industry are just flailing around, trying everything, and any growth they see just happens to be luck. Um that is a possible outcome of this experiment, but you won't know that until you do the uh the scientific analysis and testing of all these different variables. So give that a shot. It like I said, it can be done in a spreadsheet. You'll not be happy, but it can be done in a spreadsheet.

It would just require a lot of manual work. You you your best bet is to use modern data science and machine learning tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, but it can be done in a spreadsheet. Um see what you come up with, see what you find for uh what factors drive growth. So that's that would be the approach I would recommend. It's going to vary by the way, it's gonna vary by industry, it's gonna vary by time.

Uh tactics that worked two years ago may not work now. Ta hell, tactics that worked six months ago may not work now. So be aware of that as well. Uh take a look at what's happening in your industry. And if there's another industry that's like yours that's either highly regulated or unregulated, uh you may need to pull in some of their content as well to see what works for them.

It's a really good question. It's a tough question and does require uh you know some some heavy lifting on the math side, but it will give you answers that you can then take action on. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comment box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. We'll talk to you soon.

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