Increase your conversation start rate

You had a dream of building a business, maybe even a purely digital one. You set up your legalities, got your LLC and business license… chose a name, made a business Instagram (or another social media platform), and then you froze. Stuck in a trap of so much to do and not sure what to do first, you began visiting other profile pages, consuming more content than creating, and ultimately feeling like you didn’t know where to start. Well, after reading this, my hope is you’ll have some direction, then all you need to do is TAKE ACTION!

Let’s first break down the phrase “Social Media.”

“Social,” meaning… be social! If you think about it, social media was meant as a connection point even when a connection in person wasn’t available. We became instantly connected, yet equally distant. Now let’s extrapolate this to a real-life scenario. I want you to pretend you moved to a new city with opportunities all around you, but the caveat is you never left your house, yet you had the expectation that you’d make friends… Sounds crazy when you read it out loud. This is the equivalent of creating an account and not posting, not engaging, or really, not socially participating! 

“Media” is defined as a way of mass communication, broadcasting, and publishing, on the internet. Essentially, create a message, post, video, or any other form of content… and then POST it! The media which you create is meant to attract the social component. This then gives you the opportunity to… you guessed it, be social. 

Take home from breaking down that definition: if we want to make internet friends (or get clients), we need to do 2 things: 1. Engage with other accounts  2. Create opportunities for other accounts to engage with us. 

If you think about it, the opportunities to do this on the internet are endless, so what holds people back from trying? FUD - fear, uncertainty, doubt. What if they don’t like my content? What if they don’t respond to my dm? What if... What if…What if…What if THEY DO!?

Now that we’ve established you need to create content and engage with others’ content, I want to give you an actionable tactic to help you establish more of the conversation opportunity piece. When you’re first starting out, you need to be welcoming all your new followers with a direct message. This will do a few things: 1. It gives you the opportunity to help should they need 2. It allows you to figure out where they are coming from 3. You can then take that information and leverage it to attract more clients. 

When a new follower appears for you, send them this message:

“Hey [First name]! Great to connect! What brings you over to my page?” 

This open-ended question immediately increases your chance of a response, but not to 100%, so don’t get discouraged if you strike out a few times. KEEP GOING. This is a pivotal lesson in the business-building journey. From this dm prompt, if they answer, keep the conversation going. Ask more questions, get more answers, invite them to a group if you have one, send them an opt-in link to a piece of content or training that you think will help, give them a blog you wrote, and share another post you’ve created that think would help! This is creating a little more of a conversation system for you! 

Once you have that strategy down, get more specific. Here’s the 2.0 version of this:

When I comment on someone else’s IG and start to get an influx of followers or make a post that I think is responsible for followers, I tweak the message like this:

“Hey [First name]! Great to connect! Out of curiosity, did you make your way to my page from my comment on [other account’s name] account / the reel I just posted about [insert topic]?

The specificity of your question here will increase your dm conversation start rate, which will increase your total number of potential clients! 

The barrier to starting this strategy is so accessible to you right now! I challenge you to start it today! When you get your first convo, do me a favor and shoot me a message to let me know it worked! Time to go be social!