526 – Get more customers and boost your business: Tom talks Engagement Techniques

Episode 526 – Engagement Techniques
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and twenty six of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're doing a follow up to last Monday's episode five twenty three. That one was my simple, five step social media strategy that will save you tons of time and effort getting the success you want with what I call the necessary evil social media. But this is episode 526 and this is about engagement techniques. It's probably the most critical thing you could possibly concentrate on on your social media. So that's what we're going to talk about today and hope you didn't miss episode five twenty five that was on internal linking or simple things you can do to link between the pages on your site to get people to stay longer and make the search engines happy and all of that. All right, hope you'd like to make money. I hope you like to make money for listening to this podcast, and you can make boatloads of it by referring my products and services. So just email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com and we'll be glad to tell you how you can promote stuff that makes sense for you. How to do it safely so you don't get spam complaints and get kicked out of the program and all that stuff.

[00:01:42] So get in touch now. Make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. This will help you with your affiliate commissions and you're selling your own stuff and everything because I show you these either cheap or free techniques that we use. I've been using for over 20 years to automate my business, the stuff that the best stuff that you would just take it forever to do if you didn't use these simple tools that are outlined in the book. And we sell the book for twenty seven bucks, but it's years free for listening to the show. So pick it up at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app. It's screwthecommute.com/app, and you can put us on your cell phone and tablet has all kinds of cool features, and we teach you how to use it with video and screen capture, and it'll really be cool when you take it. Take us with you on the road. All right. I always got to tell you about this great program we're doing for persons with disabilities in my school. That's Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's the only licensed dedicated internet marketing school in the country and digital marketing school, and it's certified to operate by SCHEV the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia.

[00:03:05] Only one. So we have a scholarship program that we're doing for persons with disabilities to get them trained in digital marketing so they don't have to kill themselves to try to get to a classroom somewhere. And then they can legitimately work from home also. We have one lady that's a school teacher and she, you know, she's got all kinds of physical problems and had to take five weeks off, you know, disability stuff. So she she emailed me the other day, says, I really see the value of this because I need to start working from home. It's all these different things she's got going with her joints and arthritis and things like that. So. So thrilled to death to help her and then two other people in the program are blind. All right. And they're making great progress. So. So we're going to get five people through, then I'm going to roll it out and big time to foundations and corporations so we can help loads of people get them hired or in their own business. So. So help me out on that. We have a Go Fund Me campaign at IMTCVA.org/disabilities and you can see their videos and what they're doing and something you can really be proud to be part of. And of course, the link is in the show notes.

[00:04:21] And let's get to the main event your social media. I call it the necessary evil. And as you would heard, if you go back to episode 523, which you should, because it gives you my five step simple method so you're not wasting time and overproducing content. And that's that sounds counterintuitive. But most people are making too much content and not getting any engagement, which is what this episode is about. Make sure you go back and listen to episode five twenty three any time you want to go to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number. That one was 523.

[00:05:02] All right. Now let's talk about engagement techniques. First of. Well, you don't always need to promote the heck out of your business. I mean, sometimes you can just do fun things to get people interested and see that you're fun to deal with and so forth. So if you just hammer your own products all day long, people get sick of that after a while. So keep that in mind. You can do other things but promote your business. However, a lot of these engagement techniques should be geared and make sense for your whatever business you're in. And it could be anything jewelry, makeup, it could be leadership techniques, customer service. You know, there's a myriad of people that listen to this show. You have to gauge the engagement technique to make sense for your business, but don't do it every single post because that gets boring.

[00:05:55] All right. Another thing, especially if you're starting out or if you go to your your social media accounts and you see zero engagement, which I just saw a very prominent person. The other day, I was reviewing their stuff for them and they had zero engagement. They kept just pump, just punching out all kinds of stuff every day, but not one person, zero. People were reacting to it. So that's just a waste of time. Nobody's ever going to see it. You're just using. You're just, you know, you're just doing nothing. It's basically other than wasting time. I suggest that you do what we call prime the pump. And well, when you listen to episode 523, you'll learn that you shouldn't be posting as much. You should be posting less with higher quality and more engagement. And so today's specifically on engagement. But if you have no engagement now, you can't see, you know, just because you put up a good post doesn't mean you're going to instantly go to good engagement because nobody's seeing it. See, that's the problem. Facebook and all these other places are are saying, Hey, nobody likes your stuff. We're not going to bother showing it to anybody. So that's just the the ways of the world. So you've got to tell your friends and colleagues what you're doing and get them to help you out and you can help them out, too.

[00:07:15] But one of the things that I'm going to mention it again that I made a big deal of on that episode five twenty three was micro tests because you can do everything I'm telling you today correctly. But if you fail the micro test, it's again, it's still worthless. So the micro test means that. Within about an hour of when you post something, if nobody engages with it, the deal is done, it's done, everything's done. You wasted your time making the post. Nobody's going to see it. And and you failed the micro test. So this is what the social media does. All the social media do some form of this if nobody reacts to your stuff. They just quit showing it to people. They're not going to waste their bandwidth, showing stuff that nobody likes. I mean, by no engagement is kind of like saying Nobody likes your stuff, say so you must pay attention to when the most chance is that people would see your stuff. You look at your analytics for the social media, see when the most people are on that are in your target market and when your friends and colleagues would be most likely to go ahead and respond if you ask them to. If you tell them, Hey, I just put a new post out at about one o'clock, please engage with it, you know, so they got between one and two or three to to hit it for you to really help you see.

[00:08:46] So that's called micro test, and I went into more depth than that on episode 523. But if you fail the micro test, you just again, nothing I tell you today is going to help you. All right. So now I'm going to give you a bunch of engagement techniques and certainly there are others, but this episode is all you need to massively increase your engagement. I highly suggest that you pay attention to this topic and any time you see something on social media that makes you want to engage. Hey, write that down and you do the same type of thing on your social media. Ok, so I'm just going to give you a bunch of these. You'll probably want to print out the show notes on this and get the transcript that we provide for you. But anyway, first thing is ask questions. You could say, Hey, do you think all work at home courses are scams? I mean, that's one that I would use. You can do polls. Example, do you think social media is fair when it bans people and yes or no, as all they have to answer? And then of course, after you wrap up the poll after so long, you can invite discussion of the results as in you tell them, okay. Eighty two percent said no. Why do you think that is? And then get people talking and giving their opinions say.

[00:10:09] Next thing is, quizzes, personality, quizzes seemed to go very big, like, are you a Big Mac or Caviar? You know, so people answer that. Test your knowledge quizzes like, let's say, who started Earth Day and then they gave you answers to pick from. And you can include some funny ones, actually. Who's attributed? And I met the guy one time he wandered into a speaker's meeting in Washington, D.C., one day. This is very unassuming. Guy is almost looked like it was a guy that was had dementia and was lost. You know, he was losing his faculties, but he was the greatest guy. He's very down to Earth. Earth, right? Get it. So his name is John McConnell. Or you could put Greta Thornburg or Kim Kardashian if you wanted to be funny. So quizzes and that was a test your knowledge, quiz questionnaires and application, so you can learn more about the person. It doesn't have to be public, but I send them to screw the computer application, which is how you apply to get a strategy session with me at no cost. But I mean, it's a tool for me. I want you to join my darn mentor program so I can save you from all the wolves out there and really teach you the stuff that you need to know. But if you have no interest in it, I make you go through an application process.

[00:11:40] And if you say No, I couldn't afford you, I can't do it. Well, it doesn't make sense for me to talk to you and you to talk to me. So anyway, that's that's a quick questionnaire, application kind of thing. Another thing lots of fun. Show your dog, cat or ferret or I don't know what gerbil, you know, so show pictures to get people to upload. That's all engagement. And. Don't just talk about yourself all the time, you can invite others into the discussion, so if you say, tell us, tell everybody about your business. Well, that's giving them an opportunity to showcase themselves in front of your people. But from your perspective, it's engagement. Facebook and the other places see that, oh, people are engaging. They don't really care what they're saying. So much is just the fact that you got them to get on that platform and talk and and do stuff. That's engagement. Uh, you can have question and answer sessions where, hey, you could do a Facebook Live and invite people to ask questions on your topic and then you answer them live, but you see that the questions are all coming through in a fashion. It's considered engagement. You can share other people's content. This is called curation, where you're sharing curated content and asking for opinions, for instance. Now, you could say something like I saw this article in the Wall Street Journal, what do you think about it? But for maximum engagement.

[00:13:21] All right, unless you have a highly analytical audience, don't share stuff that's too long because people are busy and asking them to read a seven thousand word article or something will reduce your engagement. Uh, let's see what else we got here. You could do share your best clean joke or share your best dirty joke. If that's your audience, you could share news stories, say, you know, make sure they're credible. Or you could even share a news story and say, Do you think this news story is credible? That's an engagement technique. Or it could be. You share a credible news story and then ask people what they think or know about it, or if they know any other sources about the news. Another engagement B share a meme and ask people to share their favorite memes. You know, there's some hysterical memes out there, I tell you. And that's one thing I do once in a while. If I need one, I go to Google Images and I type in whatever I'm talking about, so and so, and then the word meme. And then it brings up all the memes about that topic. And then I go to the source and a lot of times they're they want you to share it. So I hit their share button, share it to my account. And there you go. So and then ask people to respond to it and you can offer free downloads.

[00:14:48] We do this frequently because my as you'll learn when you go back to episode five twenty three, I want people to heck off of social media onto an email list so I might offer a free well like I do on this show. The automated automation book, you know you have to opt in to get it. So that builds my email list. That's what I'm most interested in, because that's where the big money is. Then you could actually come back and ask people to comment on the free download to see if they liked it or they didn't like it. What they liked about it and all that, that's all engagement. And then you can do certain kind of games, this falls under the category of gamification, I think I did an episode on this a while back. You could do something like, Do you know what this is, game? Do you know what this is game? And you could take like a super close up picture of something, you know, some little part of something and have people guess what it is. Or it could be some antique or older thing from the the sixties. I say, that's antique. You know, I was already alive at that time, maybe like a carbon copy. This is something that had a real piece of carbon paper in it. And I bet you a lot of people that listen to this show never even seen or heard of it.

[00:16:09] So do you know what this is? Is a game it could be something relating to your business or it could be just something from the old days. You could have upload contests, you could say something, let's say you were in the quilting field, you could say, show yourself holding a quilt that you made and tell us its story and then have some kind of contest where people vote on it. That's all engagement stuff. Another really good one is the showcase, your best customer, your best employees, vendors and invite others to do the same. So they say one company has everybody wearing the same T-shirt and and telling how great their team is, you know, because if you pick out one employee, you know, the other ones might feel alienated. But but sometimes, well, it's that I'm the employee of the month every month. You know, when I when I started, my business was just by myself. Anyways, showcase people. They love it. You make them the stars, they love you more and they get some promotion out of it, but you get engagement out of it. Then you could have like a coupons for comments. So in other words, you're giving them discounts. If they if they put a comment and they get a discount coupon or some big discount or enough comments in a month, get you a free something or other. But you've got to make sure you put some rules on that because you just don't put, you know, have people saying, great, you know, great post, you know, over and over because that looks spammy.

[00:17:47] So you might put some rules on that. And then you set deadlines like if you're going to give a coupon away for something, set deadlines so that it creates urgency. So there's just a bunch. I didn't even count them up. But if you did even a portion of those things regularly, it's going to just skyrocket your engagement again. You got to prime the pump if you're starting with nothing. But if you already have, you know, a decent amount of comments, you can really double triple or quadruple them easily with just a few of the things that I covered today. So. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Hey, help me out on that Go Fund Me campaign. Any little bit helps. Hey, if you need a tax deduction before the end of the year, I can make that happen for you in a in a great way. That's going to get you a lot of training and, you know, if you're in business anyway, but we'll discuss it. Just email me at Tom@screwthecommute.com if you'd like to discuss it, and we'll help those people out that have disability. All right, that's my story. And I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.

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