BIG BOOST from Liking + Commenting on Your OWN Posts? + Jay Overshares!! 📈 Jay’s SCOOP | Ep. 399

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This, Not That podcast, presented by Marigold. And today, I'm going to talk about stuff on LinkedIn and Instagram I'm not supposed to talk about. Should you be liking your own post? Should you be commenting on your own post? Does it help? And I'm going to rip through all of it, because you know what? People are like, should I do that? Is that cringe?

0:33Is that stupid? Am I wasting my time? And here's the secret, and I'm going to break it all down. It helps to drive engagement on Instagram, on LinkedIn, and on other platforms. So let me dig into it right now. So first off, let's talk about LinkedIn. There's a tactic that I do that I've been doing for a long time. It works incredibly well, and now I have some data to support it. So when I post something on my LinkedIn feed. Okay. And within the first 30 minutes of me posting that, not only do I like my own post, but also I will like the post from different company pages. My company has some, my company has some company pages.

1:17We have one for subjectline.com. We have one for guru media hub, uh, and for another agency that we have, and I'll just change the thingamabob and I will like it from those different accounts. And so right out of the gate, my post will have like three or four likes. Now that sounds incredibly cheesy. Trust me, I get it. And if you're saying, well, I don't have other company pages to do that. Why not? You could start a company page in three seconds, right? You can go on LinkedIn, you start a company page, you stick a logo on it. Like I created a company page for this podcast, the do this, not that podcast company page.

1:51The page is 20 followers. Nobody cares about that page, but I can now use that page to like and comment on any social media posts that we put up. And you're like, well, Jay, that is embarrassing. That is fake engagement. That's garbage. And here's the deal. And there's data to support it now. When you see a post and it has no likes and no comments, you scroll by it. You're like, oh, maybe this isn't good. Maybe this is a piece of garbage. Whether you believe that consciously or subconsciously, it doesn't matter. That's what we do. Now, when you see something that has like three to nine likes and stuff, it feels like, oh, this thing's kind of working.

2:27Maybe I should jump in and pile on. Then when you see anything with 10 or plus, 10 plus likes or whatever, like, oh, this thing's valid. I got to get all involved with this. And so we looked at a hundred different posts of various types. And in the first 30 minutes, we commented and liked from these different company pages. And then for the other posts, we did not. We went to see, did this change engagement? We found is those posts where we liked and commented from three company accounts versus not at all had a 40 % higher overall like an engagement count when the post finally fizzled out after a few weeks.

3:10Beyond doing that tactic, which I know is like, are you kidding me? Here's the one we all really wonder about. The one that we all really wonder about, and this is on LinkedIn, Instagram, I'll break down Instagram in a second. Should you like your own posts, period? And should you comment on your own post, period, from your account, not switching to another company page or whatever? And here's the deal. So this company called Just Connecting did this massive, massive study, okay? And they looked at 1.3 million posts. They just did this study. And what they found is that engaging with your own LinkedIn posts does increase reach and visibility, okay?

3:52Actually to the tune of about 17%, meaning that if you like your post, it helps. But then when you really want to do, you then want to comment on your post and you then can tag people in the comments. You could ask a good question in the comments to kind of get it going. So people think, oh, that hurts. That hurts circulation. It does not. It helps. I'll tell you somebody who does a great job with this is Justin Welsh. Now you may follow Justin Welsh because he has like a million plus followers on LinkedIn. He's a monster, but what he does, and he says, and he does this all the time. He actually waits an hour.

4:25I think that's too long. Okay. He waits an hour and then he'll go and he'll comment on his own post. And what he does on his own post is he shares a bonus tip. So he goes in after an hour and he puts a comment on his own post. He writes bonus tip and like all capital letters, colon, and he goes, you should blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then that bonus tip gets like circulated to more people. They come back to the post. The other thing that is huge is actually resharing your own LinkedIn post. And you could do this 12 hours later, 24 hours later. It also gives an incredible lift. So in general on LinkedIn, if you're playing the game of, hey, I just put a post out there.

5:05I hope it does well, you're not really playing the game. And as cheesy and as gimmicky as this sounds, it works. Now on Instagram, let's talk about the value there. There's absolutely no value whatsoever of you liking your own posts on Instagram at all, other than the social proof that it actually, actually has a like, right? You want it to actually have a like, but it doesn't actually like on LinkedIn actually helps you circulate it when you like your own post and comment on it. It doesn't do that at all on Instagram, but there is one tactic that actually will increase your comment volume overall by about 20%.

5:43And this is per Instagram. And that is pinning a comment. I don't think enough people are doing this. So on Instagram, you can write the comment, or if somebody else wrote an amazing comment that gets people talking, that's great too. So let's say you put a post out there and then you go on your own, it doesn't matter if it's company page or personal page, you go on your own Instagram post. And then you say something building off of whatever the post is, right? You could say, and when we do this, we think this, what do you think about this? Whatever, something like sensational. And then the way that you pin a comment in a post is you just hold down the comment, right?

6:20And then it says, do you want to pin it or not? And you say yes. And then that comment will stay at the top of the feed for everyone to see. And then that's the reason it increases people commenting is it's the most sensational comment and then people jump in wanting to react to it and give their answer to it, whatever, as opposed to just the comments being like, hey, great post or I agree or who cares or whatever. The bottom line is with social media, you need to feed the beast. Okay, you do. You have to put out great content that doesn't suck, obviously, but then you also have to understand the little things that kind of trigger other people to want to engage.

6:55And if you think it's cheesy, you think it's gimmicky, you think, oh, that's so loser to do that. Yeah, it is, but then don't be on social media because what are we doing here? What's the game? We're trying to get more people to see our stuff. I don't know. That's the reality. All right. Since you didn't ask coming up, that is the ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous push on this podcast, which I want to take you through because I have stupid stuff to share. But before we do that, this podcast is exclusively presented by Emma. Emma is an email sending platform. Listen, you don't like your email sending platform.

7:24I like mine. I do. Emma's incredible for attention, marketing, loyalty marketing, you name it. EMMA, it's from Marigold. Now, just for listeners, this podcast, here's the deal. They gave us this offer, 50 % off for three months. Your ESP is too expensive. 50 % off for three months. What do you got to lose? All you got to do is go to jschwedelson.com slash Emma. That's jschwedelson.com slash EMMA. Check it out. All right, let's get into since you didn't ask. So I just finished watching the Biggest Loser documentary on Netflix. And by the way, I'm sure you won't be shocked to know this. I probably saw every episode of the first 12 or 13 seasons of The Biggest Loser back in the day.

8:09I was all in on it. It was terrible. I mean, I'm a horrible person now that I think back because all I was doing was like, oh, wow, at least that's not me right that's what i did watching the show and i probably was eating something while i was watching it which is even weirder um but yeah and it's kind of messed up now that i think about it you know i feel bad seeing these people who kind of did the show lost the weight gained the weight back that sucks i will tell you because i told everybody on the show that i was going to be very transparent about this so here's my transparency i a few months ago i i told on the show i said i was going to go and try one of those weight loss things in the wagovi the ozempics the whatever the shot so i did that i did it so i went out there and i got um uh and by the way i don't think wagovi is ever going to sponsor this show so hopefully i'm not doing anything irresponsible by talking about them i'm just talking about my experience you do you if it works for you i'm all for it i have a lot of friends that it works for don't even don't at me okay i get it so that's my disclaimer so okay so i used wagovi all right I went on a govy and there's like these different dosage.

9:17You move up in the dosages after like one week, two weeks, whatever it is. Okay. So I start with a govy and I'm on the lowest dose, whatever. And I start taking it and I'm an idiot. My wife's like, you're not doing this right. Because I basically was like, if I take the shot, then I can eat whatever I want. And she's like, no, you have to kind of lean in. You can't just be eating more because you think you're taking the shot. It magically works because at that low level, it wasn't like suppressing my appetite at all. so it wasn't working out of the gate and then i went to the next level okay and here's the good news bad news it started to work right so i wasn't as hungry i would sit down to eat i couldn't eat all my food that's the way it works i'm like okay this is working but something happened for me which i ended up googling and finding out and talking to my doctor it only happened to like two percent of people winner winner over here so what happened was after like a few weeks on this thing I developed the craziest I mean I have anxiety anyway but I developed the weirdest anxiety ever like the littlest thing would freak me out right like I'd be in bed I'd be like I turn to my wife I go is the door locked she's like what like and like I'd like I'd like wake her up I should have did we lock the door and she'd be like yeah we always locked the door what are you talking about and I'm like I gotta go downstairs I don't think we locked the door and I would lose my mind.

10:36I mean, the littlest things, you know, were setting me off. It was, it was why I mean, and forget it. I couldn't handle anything at work. I couldn't like respond to an email. I was like, I was like frozen. And I'm like, what's wrong with me? I thought I was having, I didn't know what, I was just not my personality. So I started Googling everything. And I called my doctor. He's like, you know, we've had that a few people that have like, I don't know, a baseline anxiety or whatever you got. I don't even, I'm not on medication for it or anything. Not that that's bad. You should be, if you need to be whatever he's like, yeah, it like exacerbates it.

11:09Is that the right word? And it makes it like way, way, way, way worse. So I'm like, Oh, this is very bad. So I stopped taking it because I was like, this is wild. And then within two weeks I was back to being myself. And I was like, Whoa, that was wild. I guess what happens is in order for the weight loss thing to work. It messes with your brain a little bit. And I guess if you have other stuff in your brain, it maybe makes it a bigger deal or a lesser deal. I don't know. That was my experience. That doesn't mean it's going to be yours experience. I know it helps millions of people. It's great.

11:44Everybody should do it. I don't care. I'm telling you what happened to me. So now I'm back to being a regular person. And now I have to try to not shove french fries in my mouth every time I see them, which I'm working on. I'm actively eating way more salmon than I want to. It makes me nauseous every time I eat it. I like salmon. It just makes me nauseous. What am I talking about every time? Anyway, I appreciate you being here. What can you do? Listen, Guru Conference is coming up. It is our giant free virtual email marketing event. You think that we're going to have unlimited seats? We're not.

12:15Okay. We will run out of seats. We have Nicole Kidman's going to be there. We have Donald Miller, Amy Porterfield. We have, I mean, it's wild. GuruConference.com. It's free. It's virtual. The world's largest email marketing event. I would say we're going to run out of seats in the next probably two to three weeks. So I would grab one. You're awesome. Keep it real and peace out later.

12:57marketing 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.