FLOOD YOUR NICHE

Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

One thing that’s become very apparent in my short time operating this business is that the clients I work with are generally leaving tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of social media engagement on the table.

Now part of the reason for that is that I only work with fun clients. MMA promoters are often too busy getting punched and strangled themselves to have good social media. I’m hoping to fix that.

But even businesses like the fashion brands I mentioned in Fashion Ads for Instagram, businesses which exist entirely on one social media platform, often don’t know the first thing about social media branding, not even the specific techniques necessary to gain engagement on that same platform. To them, social media algorithms are part of the Holy Mysteries, forever unknowable. “Just keep posting, and eventually someone will care.” “Reminding the world that I exist.”

There are 5 billion social media users out there, and if your current best strategy for getting the algorithms to connect you to them is “post thirst traps” or “inspirational quotes”… well…

I got news for you: once you get your social media game dialed in, you won’t be “reminding the algorithm” of jack. You’ll be forcing your content into the eyes of everyone who uses that particular app and has any interest in your content at all. The algorithm will be your slave. You will flood your niche.

For every social media app, there are specific knobs, buttons, and levers which you have access to (but don’t understand) which control how the algorithm treats your content. Once you do understand those knobs, buttons, and levers, all you have to do is press them, and viola, engagement.

The algorithm, fundamentally, is on your side. As long as you’re not posting extremist hate speech or gratuitous gore, the algorithm of any social media app wants you to succeed. Instagram, TikTok, and Google are all businesses too, the only reason they even made algorithms was to better connect viewers with great content. All you have to do is be that great content and you’re made. Your tickets to your promotion will sell out in days. Your shirts will fly off the rack. You will make money.

There are 5 billion social media users out there, and if your current best strategy for getting the algorithms to connect you to them is “post thirst traps” or “inspirational quotes”… well…

You just need to keep reading.

SUPER BASIC BASICS

You need this stuff to even have a business. If you haven’t made it at least this far, get here first, then start caring about TikTok likes.

• A NICHE: Does your business do everything ever? No? Then you have a niche. The deeper niche you have, the better. Some niches are predetermined, ex. if you’re a fight promotion your niche is fighting. Your Social Media success is entirely predicated on the algorithms being able to put you into one very small box, and then show that box to very many people. If the algorithm can’t even figure out what box your account is supposed to fit into, you get nowhere.
• A WEBSITE: I recently had an MMA promotion tell me “websites are outdated”. If you’re reading this, you know who you are, and I want you to know that you are wrong. Proof? You’re on my website, right now, enraptured. This website is about to make you a ton of money. It’s worth it. We’ll expand on this later, but the purpose of a website is to be the central hub for your business, with your various social media channels spreading out from it, drawing from it, but all being modified in various ways to target their specific algorithms. Your website is a spider and your social media is the web. (Now in reality, your website is it’s own social media channel, and the algorithm which controls it is “google search results”, but I won’t be focusing on SEO in this article.)
• A WAY TO MAKE MONEY: Duh. Some form of conversion that you can meter. You have to be selling something, that’s kind of the whole point. Usually tickets or clothes, if you’re being drawn into my (entirely passive and SM-based) funnels.
  
  
  

GENERAL STRATEGY

The aforementioned website nucleus is critical.

You are going to create an “Integrated Online Experience”. The plan is simple:

1. Target as many relevant social media apps as you can, using the tips and research I’m about to drop on their algorithms to get as much attention as you can.
2. Make it as easy as possible to drive that traffic from the app to your website, which will be very nice and pretty, and which will do the converting.
3. Make it as easy as possible for your customers to get from your website to any of your other social media accounts, converting not just to sales but to extra followers, which will then allow you to do de facto passive retargeting whenever you post new content (in addition to the email list you’ll have, of course).

The website is the nucleus of your internet presence, not your social media accounts. This is because it’s only on your own website that you have full control over how your content is displayed, and can shape the experience to suit your specific conversion needs. The social media apps, while essential for driving traffic, limit you with the requirements they impose on you to get that traffic. You should absolutely be selling from them if they have that functionality (like Instagram does) but you should never rely on it.

Oh, and ideally the website should be completely free. If you’re not selling tons of products (enough to need a database of SKUs), then a static website generator like Hugo (what this site uses) should be more than enough. Sure learning html and css is a pain, but in the long run, for a small business, it’s completely worth it.

MAKING AN EXAMPLE

From what I’ve seen, most smaller fight promotions have basically no online presence, and the the few that do don’t have integrated online experiences. You find their Facebook page, find the crappy frontend they sell tickets from in one of their posts (not their bio), have to look them up again on Instagram cause no links, the website they say is theirs has nothing on it, maybe the domain has even gone to auction, and other than fight card pictures and some clips from previous events, they never post anything, on any account. No consistent stream of content, no real content at all. And let me be clear: that’s for most active local promotions, not dead promotions. Promotions with cards scheduled, right now. That’s what it’s like to try and get information about them from them.

Now lets look at https://www.instagram.com/ufc/

The UFC doesn’t have one website nucleus. They have like 20. If you check their linktr.ee, you see everything that they’re doing right now, and you can quickly go anywhere else in the UFC Integrated Online Experience. It’s honestly not perfect, they have some problems just caused by the sheer size of their business, but it’s definitely better to have a social media account like theirs than it is to have one like most of their flagging competitors (especially if you are one of those flagging competitors)! Look carefully at their profile, you’ll see they’re applying the principles we’re talking about below.

HACKING SOCIAL MEDIA

Now for the good stuff.

You’ve got your business. You’ve got your niche and your brand, now you just need to know how to flood social media for maximum return.

Well, unfortunately it’s different for every site. It gets insanely nuanced, as evidenced by Fashion Ads for Instagram. That article covers only one real aspect of one type of Instagram post. It’s a great article, read it, but understand that there is A TON here. Too much to go into right now. However, there are some general principles.

• ENGAGEMENT IS KING: Every algorithm is always going to reward things that make the users use the app more. If they stay watching your video content for longer, if they tap on your posts more, if they check your profile and click your bio link more, you’ll be recommended more often. Focus on getting and keeping peoples attention, and not simply showing x thing happening in your business today.
• ANALYZE AND COPY WHAT’S GOOD: You go to Instagram’s discover tab right now and look at the content formats you see there, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s working. The stuff that’s recommended to you shows you how to get recommended to others.
• CLASSICS STILL WORK: Clickbait works. Sex sells. Shock grabs attention. Good jokes get shared. Make your audience feel something.
• APPS FAVOR NEW FEATURES: Right now Twitter is trying to take Substack’s niche in long-form written content, banning their mention and adding new long-form tweet features. This is a bad bid by Elon to try and compensate for his purchase of a failing business at an atrociously high price, and it’s likely to fail in the long run. Still, right now, you’re a complete idiot if you’re not using those long-form tweet features as much as possible, as you can bet your butt that Elon’s told all of the algo devs to make sure that this new content format gets favored and recomended over the old stuff. Same is true for new features in apps with actual FCF. If it’s new, use it religiously.
• PROFILE CONSISTENCY: The visual manifestation of “finding your niche”, your profile on every social media site should have content that, when looked at in aggregate, presents a legible, consistent theme. This is where things get really designer oriented, but you’ve already got a brand, right? Just copy over the brand colors and brand theme. Try to make your social media profiles match your website branding as much as possible.
• POST A LOT: Yeah, no brainer really. It doesn’t matter if your posts are absolute bombs, if you only drop one of them a month you’re irrelevant. Sudden virality is getting rarer and rarer, you want consistent work. Post once a day at least.
• VARIETY IN YOUR NICHE: This is a tough one, but the basic idea is that if you’re only posting one type of content, using only one strategy, or anything along those lines, you’re not really “flooding the niche”. You want many different types of content, all falling within the same niche. If you’re a fashion brand, you shouldn’t just have photos of hot models wearing your shirts, you should also show iPhone video of the process of making those shirts, and professional video ads of models in those shirts, and jokes relevant to those shirts, and shock ads relevant to those shirts, and everything else you can think of, while simultaneously still optimizing everything to the algorithm’s liking, to maximize engagement. You never be doing “just one thing”.

If the above list seems short, it’s because the setup steps and general strategy are going to be what eats most of your time. Once you know what you’re doing, and you get a rhythm, 100x social media growth really is as easy as following the above principles, and it’s a ton of fun once you figure out how to implement that final point and you get to be creative. Well, at least it is for me.

I may start to write more about specific sites, like the ways I’ve learned to hack Instagram, but I think I’d rather just do it, and once it’s done I’ll review the success. Definitely more to come, at some point.