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.