active reactions | Beyond Your Side Hustle

After a week of training the algorithm to serve the right content, you spent another week reacting with context and commenting with gratitude to the content you appreciate that falls within “The Five.”

If this all sounds foreign or crazy to you, go back to Week 1 of this series and start there.

Adding Valuable Comments

You’ve likely “liked,” reacted with context, and commented with gratitude on several thousand posts by now. These are the baby steps to get you ready for the best way to grow awareness around you, your business, and what you do through engaging with others.

There is a subset of users who choose to never read the comments on social media, due to the frustration that many posts generate. Generally, these are casual users of social media who aren’t trying to build a community, so they don’t realize the value of comments.

We are now social media power users, and the next step is to actively engage in the comments of posts we find value in.

This is the time to actively participate in the conversation that is social media. As you are no longer simply a consumer and broadcaster of social media, you engage with the creators that you consume. Their content starts a conversation, and you are responsible to offer relevant, contextual, and valuable comments in response. Your conversations will create a community for engagement and growth, so long as you offer value and they respond in kind, just like real-life conversations.

For Twitter, use replies in the same manner, as they serve as the platform’s de facto comment system.

Share Others’ Content You Find Valuable

Aside from Instagram and YouTube, social platforms natively build re-sharing content into their interface. During Week 2, you commented with gratitude on the content you found value in for the platforms without built-in reactions as you worked on the context of each post.

Week 3 changes that slightly, altering the focus from commenting with gratitude to re-sharing that valuable content with your community, using what you would have commented as your commentary for the re-share.

Here’s how this would work for the various platforms:

Twitter – “Retweet” it with what you would have commented, to share with your community what you found value in.
Facebook – Share their post directly on your Facebook Page with what you found valuable. If you are already scheduling posts, you’ll need to share the valuable post’s link on your page in Publishing Tools.
LinkedIn – Use the built-in functionality to share a valuable post with your community, adding what you received from it.
TikTok – React to the video that offered you value with your own video that outlines your take-aways.

Integrating these sharing activities will help you to share more content from “The Five” without having to create as much of it yourself.

Something you’ve probably noticed throughout this 3-week practice is that we didn’t mention creating content.

Here’s why: We wanted to completely overhaul how you interact on social media.

In Week 1, we focused on overhauling your feed to serve you valuable content that you can engage with. This set up the platform to work for you, instead of continuing to serve the same stuff that wasn’t helpful.
In Week 2, we continued training that algorithm and added the contextual reactions and gratitude. By focusing on context, you not only prepare for better interactions, but you also consider how it fits into your content strategy and which platform would be best to showcase it.
Finally, in Week 3, we started sharing others’ valuable content that fit into “The Five,” so that you include it in your content creation and engagement going forward.

All of them combine to help you create and share more relevant content with your community, building engagement into your online activity, and re-align your future content creation. With this new mindset and activity, you now have a new path for content creation, as well as an engagement plan for any platform you use.

Continue Training the Algorithm

In Week 1, we set up our “New Feed, New You” content service, and we liked thousands of posts from that content that brought us value. Most, if not all, of the “liked” content added value for us in “The Five.”

As we progress into Week 2 and beyond, continue to seek out that content as outlined in Week 1. By maintaining this practice, you ensure that the platform serves you and your needs. Your continued use of relevant hashtags to serve useful content and looking for connections among your favorite relevant creators should also never cease. It is the backbone of your growth and helping find new content to explore and appreciate, as well as a bevy of new connections to engage. These activities should always be a part of your experience on the various social media platforms going forward.

Slightly Change Your Behavior

Instead of simply “liking” posts from the creators you receive value from, choose to react with context, where applicable, or comment with gratitude. We started with liking posts to help train the algorithm to serve you the content you want to see and rid yourself of the content that isn’t adding value. We took off the chains that were holding you back from reaching your potential as an active and engaged participant in the right conversations for your community conversation.

You aren’t done letting your community know the content that adds value to you. We’re just altering how you share with them your appreciation by adding context.

React with Context

If you’ve read much of our work, you already know that content is a very important part of your digital strategy. What may be more important is to understand and create context around that content.

As you continue the efforts of Week 1, add the practice of reacting with context on the platforms that offer the option. So, when using Facebook and LinkedIn, choose the appropriate reaction to the post you appreciate seeing in your feed. This active contextual examination helps you identify why you appreciated their content. For example, when someone shares a career update on LinkedIn, you should opt to “Celebrate” rather than just give it a thumbs up. Being able to point to why you appreciate their content will help you add value in later engagement. By moving beyond the very passive “like” only training we undertook in Week 1, we are setting the stage for active engagement with this simple change.

Comment With Gratitude

You’re probably asking how you should go beyond “liking” posts to train the algorithm for the platforms that don’t support multiple reactions on the platform.

For the social media outlets that simply have a “like” or “favorite” option (Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), continue to like or favorite the post. Then, take a moment to offer a brief comment or reply that offers the creator context around WHY you appreciated it. Simply saying something like “Thank you for explaining how that tool works” would be an appropriate comment on Instagram for a video. These comments should be simple and focused solely on the context of your appreciation. This will let the creators know what about their content you appreciated while also getting you in the habit of sharing contextual comments and replies.