3 SECRET Growth Hacks You’ve Never Tried 😳🔥 Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 345

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness.

0:36well, that's awesome. And that's marketing. There's never just one thing that you're going to do. That's just going to be it. So I have three tactics that you probably have never tried, never heard of that are kind of awesome. Take three seconds to try costs nothing. And I want to rip through them. So two of them are about social media. Then one's about email. So the first one is related to LinkedIn. Okay. So you're like, Oh, you know, I want to get more engagement on LinkedIn. What could I do? Is there any little trick, any little hack? Well, I'm going to give you one that works really, really well.

1:05And it's this idea of waking the dead. Have you ever gone back intentionally to old posts of yours on LinkedIn and commented on your own old posts? You're like, what? Why would they do that? Now, if you go back and you actually comment on any of one of your old posts, it actually tells LinkedIn, hey, this thing's active again, and it starts to circulate a little bit more. But that's not exactly what you want to do. If you actually go back to posts that are from three months old and older, you can go back to a year, two years, whatever, and you go back to those posts and you comment on those posts again, first off, people that are connected to you are going to get a little notification that, you commented on that.

1:54In addition to that, if you tag somebody in that comment, they're going to get notified about that post. They're going to go back to that post. That post is going to get recirculated again. And then what you really want to do, and you want to be very intentional about it, is you can go back to these old posts. I'm going to give you the stat as to why you should and comment on your posts. Maybe it's from six months ago and you write, you know, this is still true or this aged poorly or, you know, we're doing this differently now and then tag a few people in it, right? And then here's what we found.

2:26This is so wild. So we ran this test across 50 different LinkedIn accounts where we commented and the person commented or the company page commented on posts that were from three months to 12 months old. And it increased profile views and overall account engagement by 20 % for personal accounts and 25 % for company page accounts. And all you did was go back to your old content and re-comment on it. This takes no time. It costs you nothing. It's super easy. Try it with three old posts today and wait 24 hours and see what happens. You're going to see a little bit more profile engagement. You're going to see more overall engagement with your overall content.

3:09And this is a great thing to kind of put in your arsenal and do as an ongoing thing. Now, let's talk about the Instagram hack before we get into this email tip. So on Instagram, something that's really under the radar that you can do is sharing your own reels. What are we talking about? So when you put out a reel, which is the best form of content on Instagram easily, and again, this applies just similar to LinkedIn. That's not just for your personal page. That's for your company page or your personal page. This applies the same way on Instagram. It could be your company page or your personal page.

3:44When you put out that reel, what you want to do is you want to share that reel within the first 30 minutes, that's key, to 20 different people. And when you share it to 20 different people, what you can't do is just say, share, share, share, share, share, and with no comment in it. You need to share it, each with a unique comment when you share it. Because if it's not unique, it's going to look like it's a bot activity. And you share that real, you know, with whatever you want to say, I thought you'd love this one. This one's so cool. This one's on point for you. that want to make you aware of this one, whatever it is, share it 20 times.

4:20When you do that, what you're doing is a few things. First off, you're making some micro ambassadors for your content, for your brand. People will feel like they want to engage with it. They see that little red dot, all this stuff. But not only does it do that, it actually increases your overall engagement significantly. Okay. So what we found in World Data Research found that by doing this with reels, it increases the overall engagement on your post by over 40 % versus not doing it. So you want to share to 20 different people, each with a custom note. You don't automate this. You don't get some sort of piece of software to do it.

4:57And you change the comment every time you share it. Okay. And it does incredibly well. It kind of gives it that little boost right out of the gate. And by the way, 100 % Instagram does not view this as a negative. This is not something they're going to ding your account for. This is not view as you being a spammer or anything like that. They love it because you're helping to circulate the content on their platform. And the key thing is that you are not just spamming everybody with the same message. So 20 people's key. You don't want to go more than that. This last tip is kind of bonkers. So this was wild.

5:33We didn't mean to trip into this tip. It's a subject line tip. And the tip basically is, and we messed it up for our client and then we went deeper and tested it. We were doing, the client wanted to do for our agency personalization in the subject line, first name personalization, which by the way, isn't great anymore. You know, J comma, whatever, but they wanted to do it fine. Who cares? Fine. When we sent it out by accident, we screwed up and all we did was put the person's first name. So the subject line literally said for, you know, zillions of emails we send out, it just said, you know, J, that was it in the subject line or Mike, that was it in the subject line.

6:11It was just the person's first name, no other words. And the open rate was sky high. We're like, wait a minute, what's going on here? So then we decided to go further and said, we got to run a test. So we ran the test 15 more times with consumer clients and then 15 times with business clients and saying, okay, what's just personalized with first name? That's it. And we want to see what that does. And this is not a test you want to do all the time or else it won't work. But if you've never tried this, I don't care how boring your B2B brand is or what consumer category in, try just doing the person's first name.

6:46That is it. On average, we saw it lift open rates for our emails over 25 % for that tactic. I never would have tested that. So that's a super random one to try is just first name in the subject line. All right, before we get into since you didn't ask, which is the totally ridiculous portion of this podcast. I want to let you know that this podcast is exclusively presented by Emma, which is my email sending platform from Marigold. Emma is awesome. And just for listeners of Do This Not That, they're offering you all the first three months at 50 % off. Come on. You don't like your email platform.

7:22If you go to jschwedelson.com slash Emma, that's jschwedelson.com slash emma you can get right here right now 50 off the first three months on the sending platform that i use send out my emails it is incredible all right let's get into since you didn't ask so my uh my son just graduated high school and uh before he heads off to college him and a bunch of friends they just left on a trip and he's sharing uh they're going to some hotel, whatever, and they're sharing. Him and like four of his friends are sharing a hotel room, and they're going to have a great time, whatever. But it got me thinking about the most ridiculous thing that happened to me.

8:05I don't know why I share these stories, but this one was kind of funny. So when I was in college, I went on spring break to Cancun, and it was out of control. I mean, straight up, it was bonkers, but I'll never forget. So one night, everybody went out, like everybody, it was a zillion people went out and we all lost each other while we were out. And when we came back to the hotel that we were staying in, I was, I was alone. I didn't know where anybody was, whatever. I don't know. It had to be three in the morning. I don't even know what time it was. And I, you know, I went out. Okay. I'm not going to lie.

8:43I had a good time. And when I went out like, I gotta get back to my hotel room. So I find, and the whole hotel was filled with a bunch of college spring breakers. It was out of control. So I get to my hotel room and I get there and the door to my room was like slightly propped open. I have no idea why. And the lights were all off because everyone was already sleeping. It was like, forget it. It was so late. And so I go in the room and everyone's like sharing beds and whatever. And I climb into bed and I just pass out. I don't know how long, maybe a half an hour, maybe an hour later. I have no idea.

9:16But then all of a sudden I hear a click and the lights turn on in the room and I'm like, what's going on? And then I hear this person. It was this woman screaming in my face. I was in the wrong room. I was one floor lower than where my room was. And she's screaming in her face. She goes, what are you who are you I go I don't know I don't know where I am what's going on and she's like cursing at me everyone's like throwing things at me get out of here I had no I mean to be woken up from a sleep like that I was so confused and I was in the wrong room I was one floor off and these people thought I was like out of my mind and trying to break into their room I'm like no I'm like I'm a regular person I'm just in the wrong room and I'm an idiot I'm a straight up idiot I shouldn't be in here oh my god I'll never forget that moment because I was like what what happened I was so confused so yeah that's um that's really the level of intelligence of the person that you're listening to right now in this podcast wow I don't even know I I don't even know what to say about that.

10:26Listen, I appreciate you all. And you should check out, by the way, Eventastic is coming up in just a few days. June, what is it? 5th and 6th. It's free. It's virtual. I will be there. It is the world's largest event about events. If you put on webinars, if you put in in-person events, if you go to events, if you do exhibit hall sales, if you do public speaking, care about public speaking anything, eventastic.com. We have only about 100 virtual seats left. We have 11 ,000 people are going to be there. You should go and register now. Eventastic.com. See you there. Later. You did it. You made it to the end.

11:06Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. and hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.