#304 - 3 Things I Did to Restart My Instagram... Again (While Posting Less)

A few months ago, I was sitting there looking at my Instagram insights and I had this very clear thought. What the hell is the point of this? Not in a dramatic way, in a very calm, very tired, very, I've been doing this for over a decade kind of way. Because here's the thing you probably already know about me. I don't love social media. I've never pretended to. I actively dream about the day that I never have to do it again. But I'm also a small business owner. So, Social media is one of those just eat your business broccoli things, right? You don't have to enjoy it, you just have to do it. And I had been doing it. I mean, I've got the systems, I've got the prompts. We have our whole Cash Money Content System that has been a game changer and I use every single week. So it goes out, it goes out on time, it's fast and you know, it's good. But to me, I was still finding it pretty boring. I was bored of my own content. So I was kind of phoning it in, and I could feel myself phoning it in. And whenever that happens, our engagement falls off a cliff, which it did. So I decided I either need to give up completely or go all in. Those are the only settings that I've got. So given that giving up was currently not on the table, I decided to plan a comeback tour doing 3 things. And amazingly, They worked really bloody well. We picked up nearly 1,500 followers just this month, which is unheard of for our very dead accounts. My posts are actually getting seen again, and I'm posting less than I was before. What did we do? Well, that's exactly what I'm gonna walk you through today. Build it, automate it, scale it. This almost feels too easy. Time to build a grown-ass business. The Doing It Online Podcast. Here's your host. Kate McKibbin. Hey, hey there guys. I'm Kate McKibbin from hellofunnels.co and welcome to the Doing It Online podcast. Today I'm giving you the full breakdown of my Instagram comeback tour, the 3 specific and strategic things I did in the order that I did them and why each one was chosen on purpose, plus the strategies behind them so you can steal them too. And I wanna say this upfront, not all of these are gonna be right for everybody. The thinking behind them should give you enough juice to know which ones are, because my whole approach to social has always been pretty much the same. My goal is to absolutely maximize the outcomes from social media while minimizing the impact it has on the rest of my life. It doesn't get to take more time than it's actually worth. The effort put in has to match or be substantially less preferably than the return we get for that effort. That's the deal. That's always been the deal. And when the return drops off a cliff, you don't just keep doing the same things harder and hoping. You've gotta change something. So let me describe where I was because I have a feeling some of you are sitting in exactly this spot right now. Look, I wasn't stuck. I hadn't ghosted my account. I wasn't sitting there even saying, I don't know what to post. The posts were going up 5, 6, sometimes even 7 a week, and they were fine. They were competent. But let's just be honest, they were beige and I could feel it. That's the part that got me. You can absolutely tell when even though you're doing your best work or it feels like you are, it still comes out flat. And then you look at the numbers and you go, yep, well, they agree with me. So what are we going to do about it? And personally, I think these things always go through phases and waves depending on what's going on in other parts of your business, what you're excited about, where your attention lies. And anyone who's been creating content for any period of time, I know you've hit this wall as well. This is not the beginner wall where we don't know what to do. It's the other sneakier wall where you know exactly what you should be doing. You kind of feel like you are doing it, but still something is not landing anymore. That's where I was, and my conclusion was pretty simple. Something has to change. Not let's just post more. Personally, I think that's terrible advice. What I was posting had to change. So this is what I did. Number 1, I planned out a kickstart. This was 2 weeks of posts, 4 posts a week, and I built those whole 2 weeks around 3 brand new, crazy valuable lead magnets. Now, the lead magnets are where I actually spent the time, not the posts for this. I sat down for an afternoon and I created 3 really, really good, juicy, I need to have it now freebies. And when I say good, I mean I could have literally charged for these. Like, one of those was on my list to create and turn into a front-end offer. Not a fortune, but, you know, they could have been $9 or $19, something in that range. They were definitely good enough to sell. And that was deliberate. And here's the bit that mattered even more than that. I didn't just sit down and think, you know, what would be helpful or what would seem like it was valuable enough to charge for. I actually did the research on the specific topics and formats first. I went and looked at what people out there right now, you know, on the interwebs were actually losing their minds over. What those outliers, those things that when people shared them got hundreds, if not thousands of comments. And we've all seen those, right? We've probably even saved a few. And when I found them, I went, right, that's the thing. That's what people are wanting and getting excited about and engaging with right now. Now, obviously I put my own spin on it. I'm not out there copying anybody, but at least the topic or the format wasn't a guess. I had the evidence to back it up. And that is so crucial if you're gonna spend the time doing this in the first place. So I created 3 super hot freebies, set up the ManyChats for each one, and then created really simple posts. Nothing clever, just, hey, look at this cool thing, want it? Comment below. That's it. That was pretty much the posts. Then I added one extra little trick just to make sure the algorithm was paying attention, and I'm calling it the list loop because as well as sharing those freebies on Instagram, I also promoted them to my email list. Which yes, is a very normal thing to do. Everyone does that. But normally when you promote a freebie to your list, to people who have already opted in, you either send them to a landing page or you just send them the thing. You've already got their email address, right? You're not necessarily out there wanting them to re-opt into anything, but not in this case. I didn't do that. Instead, I sent them to the Instagram post. You want it? Come over here and comment on this post and I'll send you the link to get it. Feels a little counterintuitive, but what it meant was I took a bunch of people who already knew me, already liked me, already opened my emails, and I pointed them straight at the post that I wanted to get engagement on, which meant that post got an influx of real comments pretty close together from real humans. And that was way more engagement than it would have gotten on its own. And it sent a pretty strong signal to the algorithm. Hey, Come over here and pay attention. That was the whole idea. Now, that wasn't enough to kickstart it on its own, but it got the ball rolling. Okay, step number 2, I decided to create a content series. Some of you guys have probably already seen it, and I wanna be really clear that I have tried this idea before a couple of times actually, and it has never really worked. You know, the whole 100 tips for this or 30 days of steps for that, right? I've done those. They're fine, but they're kind of forgettable. They're a bit same, same. So because I really wanted this to work, if I was gonna put the effort in again, I went and did the research first. I went and looked at which creator serieses, is that even a word, actually popping off right now? And as you probably know, the whole content series, they're having a bit of a moment right now. Instagram has even built out specific functionality for it. And the ones that were genuinely working, the ones that I personally kept seeing and kept engaging with, They actually, when I thought about it, all had one thing in common. They had personal stakes. The person was publicly setting themselves a challenge and then documenting whether or not they pulled it off. Now, most of the ones I found, they tended to be, you know, social media growth challenges, follower challenges, as is always the way on anything that does well on Instagram, right? They were, let me add an extra 100,000 to my account, or let me grow this brand new account to 50,000 followers. And to be fair, that wasn't a challenge I was interested in doing. That wasn't why I was doing it. Other ones I saw were for people maybe brand new and starting a whole new business, or people who've been let go trying to recreate their income. None of those applied, but they all had a similar thread through them, right? So I knew I wanted to do a series, and I realized what I needed was a real why, something with actual Something people would genuinely care about and want to jump in and, you know, cheer me on for. And here's the thing, I actually already had one. I just hadn't really said it out loud yet because behind the scenes I'd already set myself a challenge. It was just kind of big and scary. And it actually came up recently at a mastermind I went to where I was chatting with one of the other attendees. We'd had a few wines, as you do, and I said to her, you know, look, I don't really care about any of the fancy stuff. That's not me. All I really want to do is pay off my house in the next year or so. That's it. That's like 100% my goal. And the reasons for it are, I'm a mom. I don't know what's going on in the world. You don't know what's going to happen with yourself or with your health, any of those things. Like, I would just like to feel like my family was looked after, was secure. And if I could do that, I'd also feel like I'd properly achieved something. And you know what? She looked at me and she went, oh my God, That's my goal too. And then she said the most important thing. You should share that because for a lot of people, paying off your home is one of your big dreams, even though every financial planner on the planet will tell you that it's probably the worst thing to do with your money. But whatever, I'm not a financial planner. That's not what this is about. So I sat on it for a bit and I kept turning it over. What if that was the personal stakes? What if I just said it publicly? And it properly terrified me. Which in my experience is usually a tell. So I thought, okay, big girl pants on, let's go. And I started planning out the series and the first post I put up actually got the best engagement of anything I've posted in years, like years. Now I'm not gonna pretend that I've got this all nailed down or the hard bit is over. The challenge is going to be keeping the cadence up, the interest up, and that bit is genuinely still ahead of me. But there is actually an unexpected benefit that I did not see coming. The whole process of creating content and coming up with ideas for content has actually gotten easier because when your content has a real purpose and an actual through line, you're not just sitting there every week going, what shall I post about? You've actually got a story. So there are check-ins, there are results to share, there are decisions to explain, there are things going wrong that I can talk about. And they don't just seem random because they're all part of this bigger story. So for someone who's been making content for as long as I have, hello, my Instagram account can almost drive, it's actually made the whole thing feel fresh again, which I did not expect. And to be fair, I'm not mad about. Okay, thing number 3. I'm almost embarrassed to say this, but I have been boosting my posts. Not all of them, mind you, just a few strategic ones. And this was actually another mastermind conversation that I had. Someone else mentioned they were doing it and how and why. And my immediate reaction was, that makes sense. Why the hell not? Because as I've said many times on this podcast, I personally feel like I'm on the algorithm's naughty list. I don't know what I did to piss it off, but piss it off I have. And it doesn't seem to matter what I do, I can't get off it. So at some point you have to stop praying and dancing to the algorithm and just pay it. It's about $100 a post, and I do that for 2 posts a week. And it's specifically the series posts that I'm boosting because when I go and actually look at the insights, and for the first time in ages, I might add, those are posts that are actually bringing in new followers. Amazing, right? That's the whole logic. Put the money behind the thing that's already working, not the thing that you kind of wish was working. And the other reason I'm only boosting some posts and not all of them, and I actually didn't really think about this at first, but it's been a pleasant surprise. is when someone comes through on a boosted post and they like it, they will click through to your profile and then they see everything else anyway. So boosting a couple of posts a week doesn't just lift those 2 posts, it drags the rest of my content up along with it. So every other post I put up is getting seen more and I'm not paying a cent extra for those, which is exactly why boosting everything, in my opinion, would be a total waste of money. You only need to pay For the right front door. Now here's the other part I didn't expect, and it's the reason that I do this again. It also means I don't have to post as much. That is an amazing trade-off for me. I'm now doing just 4 posts a week. 2 of them are the series posts, and these get batched together in one big go. And then the 2 in between, I'm kind of just having fun with. If I see a trend I like or something that makes me laugh or an idea I wanna play with, That goes up. One of those 2 is usually also pulled from the weekly podcast, and that's put together entirely by Claude. So actually, really, I'm only having to find one post a week and put my own spin on it. That's it. That is the job now. And the time that gives me back and the brain space is worth so much more than the $100 I'm putting behind the post. So if I can spend a small amount of money to amplify something I'm already putting time and effort into, hell yes, I'm going to be doing that. So that's my comeback tour. Strategic value that people actually already want, a series with real stakes, and a small budget behind posts that are working. And I want to leave you with the bit underneath all 3 of those because it's the actual lesson. None of this was about just doing more. There is no spraying and praying here. I didn't fix boring content by making more of it. Every one of these 3 things was me going, what am I already doing and how can I make it actually matter? The freebies made the posts worth commenting. The email list made the posts worth showing, and the series made the ideas easier. The budget then made those posts work harder. And the one that moved the needle hardest was the one I almost didn't do because saying it out loud made me feel uncomfortable. Make of that what you will. Obviously not all of these are gonna be right for everybody or suitable for everybody's account or budget. It's always about making it work for you, but right now we are actually growing again. Our posts are getting seen, which just feels so much better and makes the whole thing feel worth the time and effort. So for now, it's a win-win. Who knows, 3 months from now it may have changed completely, but that's fine. That's what we signed up for with social media. Alrighty guys, that's it for today. If you love this episode, please share it with someone else you think would get some value for it, and I'll see you next week. Bye. That's it for this episode. Now go build it, automate it, and scale it. I love the show, guys. You're awesome. For more strategies and resources, visit hellofunnels.co.