EP078: Tips for More Authentic and Organic Social Media Reach

Welcome to the Perfect Practice Podcast where we share the most innovative strategies to help you build a successful functional medicine business, attract your ideal patients, serve your community, and get paid what you're worth. Each episode is packed with practical steps that you can take to immediately grow your influence and serve more people. Our mission is to share golden nuggets from successful practitioners, technology experts and innovators from around the world. Your host, Sachin Patel is a functional medicine and success coach, international speaker and best selling author. He's calling in all his favors to bring this information to you so you can create your perfect practice.

What is up, my fellow colleagues? It's Satya and I hope you're having an awesome day. I'm outside enjoying the sun here in Toronto. It's been a beautiful streak of weather. It's really humid today. And fun fact, my sod has finally come in and I have the privilege of cutting a freshly sodded lawn for the first time in my life. I also had the honor this year of watching my street. Our court just got repaved this past month. My driveway is going to get repaved, my lawn got resolded, my backyard is officially done. Our pool is actually going to be remarbilated. So fun fact. Concrete pools are epic and amazing, but they also require unique upgrades and investments in them every about 25 or so years. So we've refinished the inside of the pool, we redid all the coping, we built a deck out back. So some major projects in my life, this was about an eight month project, have started to come to closure and it's the last down to the last, you know, 5% of those details which are the most important, 5% of the details because it's a, it's how, that's what the final product is that people see. So what does this have to do with getting more engagement? Because that's why you tuned into this video, right? Well, it has to do with this understanding that everything in your life is a metaphor for everything in your life and that life is basically a self repeating pattern at every scale of the cosmos. So if you've got unfinished projects in your life, you probably have other unfinished things in your life as well. And so life is a macrocosm and a microcosm. So what does that have to do with engagement? Well, the first tip I want to give you to increase authentic engagement is to be your ideal Facebook follower. Be that for somebody else. So I'll give you an example. Yesterday I spoke with an amazing young chiropractor and she's just signed up as a coaching client, loves functional medicine, has a relatively busy chiropractice, sees the need to shift into functional medicine because it allows her to have all five freedoms. And she told me she's been following me for a year, but I hadn't seen a single comment that I can recall or an email or any engagement from her because her name popped up for the first time when she scheduled with me. So in my mind, I thought that she had just ordered my book and called me. But no, it's been about a year. And so because she's not engaging with me and she's even purchasing with me, what I had to explain to her is that not all of your purchasers are going to engage, but if you want more engagement, then you have to engage first. And that was one of her things. She's like, I'm putting this content out there and nobody's engaging. And I asked her, well, how much content are you engaging in? And her answer was negligible. So if you're not engaging, then it's hard for others to engage with you. One tip, I'll give you another one. Is that be the first. So if you can be the first person to comment, the first person to like on somebody else's post, just authentically, I suggest doing it authentically, but being aware. So you're doing it authentically, but intentionally. You're being the first to comment, the first to show your support. Because when somebody posts something in the first few minutes, they're paying the most attention to that post because they want to know, did it go through? Is it landing? Does it make sense to people? And if you're the first person that's responding, then guess what, you're setting up the universe to do the same thing for you. You're attracting more authentic engagers. So if you say something in your mind, why not type it out? Okay? Because if that's what you want, you've got to become that person first. Another way to engage people in social media is to ask questions. So I would love to know where you're from. You know, if you're watching this, please let me know where you're from. Love to give you a shout out if you're live. And I definitely will respond to every comment that comes in. So the cool thing about asking questions is that it gives people a call to action. It gives people an opportunity to engage because you're not just making a statement, but you're allowing for people to share their viewpoints or their opinions. So I certainly invite you to share where you're from. And I certainly invite you to share something that you feel is an authentic way for you to get more engagement. The other thing is knowing some of the keys of especially the Facebook algorithm. And one of those aspects of the algorithm is the difference between a like and a heart. So, you know, Facebook is designed by social engineers, so they're paying attention to every little detail. So, you know, it's by design that you have to hold down the like button and then be able to choose, you know, other emotions like a heart or the hug thing that they have now, the angry face, whatever. So when you put a heart, that shows a higher level of engagement. So you can encourage people to drop a heart because that will get more engagement, which means more people will see it and that's going to increase your influence. But you could also do that for other people. So if you believe in other people's messages, then you should do that as well. Instead of liking their posts, love their posts, show some emotion and comment and that you'll attract that into your own practice as well. And then taking steps even further, once you identify hyper users or hyper commenters, hyper likers, then you can also message these people and just send them a note of thank you, saying, hey, I really appreciate your support. It means a lot to me. Thank you, thank you. And if there's anything that I could do to help you, please let me know. Because, hey, they're supporting you, they're helping you and start that relationship. Start an authentic relationship, not just one that is based on likes and comments, but an actual relationship. Because that's when people want to start working with you is after that development of the relationship. Another thing is ideally you want to use real organic images versus stock images. So if you're going to be sharing images, if you can tag people, if there's images of groups or even if you tag yourself, then that's going to increase the reach of that, of that post. So if I'm putting a picture of myself and my wife, tagging her would increase the reach of that post. So use real images, tag people, check off all the little boxes because then it's going to reach as many people as possible. Right now, a lot of big companies, multi billion dollar companies with multi million dollar budgets are not marketing on Facebook. So if you choose to follow those guidelines and not spend money on Facebook this month or minimize your spending on Facebook this month, then, you know, use, you know, really good organic strategies. But if you are going to be paying Facebook and marketing which from a business, all politics aside from a business perspective, is a really good thing to do because, you know, they're looking to fill these spaces and it's cheaper right now because there's less competition for eyeballs. So knowing that, you know, from a business perspective, it is a good time to double down on Facebook ads. So if you ask Matthew Loop and you read his book and you email him right now, he's going to tell you that double down on it. And that's totally okay as well. So it just depends on where you stand. But one's a business decision and one might be more of an emotional decision. The other thing that I want you to do is be consistent. That's probably the thing that gets overlooked the most. You know, you all have great content, you all have great information to share. Remember, you live in a bubble. So, you know, you might think everyone knows what you know because all of your circle of influence is other healthcare practitioners. And in a room full of them, you might feel average or maybe inadequate. And that may not be fair to you because even being inadequate in a circle of influence like the one that you might have is far superior to what that person is getting right now. You know, I'd rather somebody take me in the right direction and take longer to get in the right direction than somebody take me really quickly in the wrong direction. So keep that in mind as well. So I hope that helps. I hope that gives you some insights on things that you can do organically. If you found this helpful, then please comment below what your favorite takeaway was. If you are doing things that you find are helpful, and certainly this is not an exhaustive list, I could talk about this for an hour, but for the sake of time, I hope this gives you a few things to consider and work on. Get your message out there, tell great stories. I had yesterday for my mentorship group, Jennifer Hoodie came and she did an amazing presentation for us all about copywriting. So how to structure your copy, how to get people's attention, how to get people to engage. Like there's five Cs and I'll let her share what those five Cs are in a future webinar that we're going to do. But that helps too. So how you write your copy is massive. Anyways, I gotta run. Gotta start the rest of my day. Hope you have an amazing, amazing rest of yours. Bye for now.