This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "How We 10Xed Our Social Media Engagement With This Simple Hack" (published January 7, 2020). The excerpt is a single-speaker spoken presentation (labeled SPEAKER A) in which the creator explains a social media growth strategy: writing natively and authentically on platforms (rather than fully outsourcing), spending ~10–20 minutes a day producing personal posts, tagging relevant influencers (example: a tweet tagging Ben Horowitz that reached ~70,000), and preferring native posts/carousels on LinkedIn and Instagram to boost engagement. The speaker also advises outsourcing design/editing but keeping the authentic voice (citing Gary Vaynerchuk as an example), recommends trying the approach for 2–3 weeks, and closes with calls to action to subscribe, comment, and view more content.
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Today we are going to talk about how we 10x'd our social engagement using this one simple hack. But before we do, don't forget to subscribe, whatever platform you're coming from. If you're on YouTube, hit the bell button to get notified when we send this stuff out because it's going to help you grow faster both personally and professionally. The hack, right? The silver bullet here. We're all looking for a silver bullet, right? When I think about our engagement, I was looking at our, our Twitter earlier in the week. I put out a tweet basically talking about 7 lessons I learned after interviewing 300 entrepreneurs or high performers, right? In that tweet, I basically tagged one of the authors of the books. I put the most recommended book in there, which is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and I tagged the author Ben Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the premier venture capitalist firms in the world. And they've invested in amazing companies around the world, right? I wrote this thing out. It took me like 5 or 10 minutes to compose the entire story, and I did put some thought into it, right? It really came from the heart. And, um, basically he retweeted it, so it exploded, right? So it went from, you know, typically I might get like 4,000 or 5,000 reach per day on Twitter. In this case I got 70,000, right? You know, from that, from that one tweet. So that's more than 10x, right? The key thing I'm saying here is this: it's because I decided to start writing again on some of these social channels where I wasn't outsourcing the work anymore, right? So I wasn't having— it's just not fair to have someone from my team expect them to understand my life experiences and what I've been through and all those interviews that I've been through and expect them to write how I write. My point here is that once I started to pick up the pen again— not literally, but picking up the keyboard, whatever— I just started writing from the heart. And I've been dedicating maybe 10 to 20 minutes a day on social media, and some posts they'll do Okay, but the ones that take off, like they really take off. Like the other day, I just wrote something about you know jet lag and you know this jet lag app that totally stops jet lag. Like I flew to Australia, no problems, no jet lag. Flew back to LA in four days, no problems. Just because I used that app, right? If you're wondering what it is, let me know in the comments if you actually want me to make a video on that jet lag app, and I can talk about the details and the benefits around it. All right, you know all that to say, you know what we were seeing previously with some of the videos that we were posting to LinkedIn. This is a LinkedIn post. We're getting like 1,000 views on it. Like these videos will repost to LinkedIn and they just wouldn't do that well, right? And they'll get 1,000 views or so. We threw this one up. I think it's gotten like 16,000 or 17,000 views on it, right? And that literally took me 5 to 10 minutes to write these videos. If you add in editing, you add in all the man hours, it definitely takes longer than that. So my point here is that, you know, the last couple of years when I look at, you know, how a lot of people have been doing this, they've been outsourcing a lot of their work that, that's been going on with Twitter, with Instagram, with LinkedIn, right? When I started to pick up the pen again, I started to write. Like, and I started to post natively to these platforms where I'm not just kind of reposting from like a, using a social media tool where it looks like all distorted when I, when I repost it, it actually works out really well. Like I just wrote something on LinkedIn yesterday and, or not LinkedIn, on Instagram, and I think it was the highest performing post and it was just a carousel of me. I think it was like a, like an Apple Note, right? It was like we use Apple Notes, we use screenshots, we use all these different things, but it's a carousel where people can scroll through it and that got like 90 saves on it. And then it got like 30 shares or so and it got like a bunch of likes on it, right? And a bunch of people followed me as well from that post. I'm not saying I have a big social media following, but what I'm saying is like when we, when I see this happen on big, bigger social media accounts with a couple hundred thousand followers or so, this works even better than that, right? So I'm saying for like, you know, our small social media accounts where on LinkedIn I think I have like 15,000 followers or so. I think on Instagram I only have like 4,400 or so. So it's not huge. My audience really comes from the blog and it comes from the podcast. But again, when you write natively, when you take the time to post organically to these channels, it's going to go a lot further than you deciding to outsource the work to somebody else. And I think you need to outsource some of the work like the design, the editing, um, and there's other elements like when you look at Gary Vaynerchuk, he, he knows he's not good at grammar. He knows he's not a good writer. So he has a copywriter come in, helps him with the blog, helps him with actually writing the copy on LinkedIn. But Gary still very much writes on Twitter. Which is what he's used to because he grew on Twitter and he writes on Instagram because those, those channels, it's very much like texting, right? You don't really need to have good grammar there. You got to understand where your weaknesses are and you have to understand where your strong points are. For me, my strong points are probably more around audio and more around writing. I, I used to enjoy writing all the time, right? And I wrote my entire book myself and I've edited like those edits. I went through the edits, um, rewrote everything myself. I didn't have some ghostwriter come in and do that. I'm not saying I'm not going to have a ghostwriter in the future, But I'm just saying like, that's what I actually enjoy doing and that's what my strengths are, right? So understand what your strengths are, post natively to these platforms. I recommend you just try this for 2 to 3 weeks or so and we'll see where it goes, right? Sky's the limit. So let me know what you think in the comments. Agree, disagree, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. Whatever platform you're coming from helps us grow, helps you grow. And if you're coming from YouTube, check out the next video over there and we'll see you tomorrow.
