You made the big, bold move and started your online business. Yay, you!

Now, you know you have to have some sort of content marketing strategy for posting on social media. So you put something together and start posting to Instagram…and the engagement or results aren’t as quick as you’d like.

This makes you second guess and change your strategy every other week and copy what every other Virtual Assistant or Online Business Manager is doing. Or, you stop showing up online consistently because you’re worried you don’t know what you’re doing.

Sound familiar?

If you’re only hearing crickets when you post, let’s go over my top three tips to help you get the ball rolling with your engagement:

1. Wait AT LEAST 90 days before you change your strategy and expect to see results.

It generally takes around 90 days/three months to start seeing your content marketing strategy pay off…IF you are being consistent. That means every time you STOP posting regularly and RESTART again, you’re pushing back your results. No more of that!

Let me tell you a story: I started doing 2-minute trainings on my Instagram stories in April of 2019. For the first 3-4 months, it was only my clients, my friends, and family who watched them.

But I kept showing up and giving a massive amount of value. People took notice and started engaging with my content more and more. It didn’t happen overnight.

And now, 2-minute trainings (and IG stories in general) are a huge part of our sales strategy. When people sign up for THE START, we ask what made them sign up for our program. Guess what the #1 answer is?

“Sara gives so much value in her 2-minute training that I knew I’d get so much more if I paid for her program.”

2. If you want more engagement, give more engagement.

I have a Rumi quote to emphasize my point here:

“Open your hands if you wish to be held.”

Meaning, if you want something, you have to be willing to GIVE it.

Want kindness from others? You gotta be willing to GIVE kindness. If you walk around like an a-hole, the likelihood that people are kind to you is pretty low.

Same is true for engagement on your content. Want people to like, save, and share your posts? Do that with other people’s content, too!

Want your audience to comment on your stories, participate in polls, and answer your questions? Go do that on their story slides.

Think about how you feel when people DO engage with your content. It feels pretty dang good, right? Then, you probably go click on their account and engage with their content too. The same will happen for you the more you give it back.

Now, an action step for you: Go set a task for yourself to spend five minutes a day engaging with aligned accounts on social media. Do this and I PROMISE you will see an engagement spike just from that small amount of targeted time!

3. Serve the ones you have right in front of you

One of my favorite authors, Glennon Doyle, gets asked this same question often at speaking events:

“How do you grow a community?” (or something along those lines)

And her response is: “You have to serve the people who are already in your community and stop worrying about others showing up.” (again, paraphrasing here, but you get the point).

Do you hear that? Show up 100% and SERVE the ones who are listening to you RIGHT NOW.

An easy way to think about this is to look at the ten people who continually like your posts. Imagine they were all sitting in a room with you to listen to all of your thoughts around content management, podcasting, Pinterest, SOPs, whatever it is that you’re into.

You’d be JAZZED to have a captive audience, yes?

So, treat those folks who listen now like they’re important, valued, and appreciated. More will come when you show up for the ones you have right now. Even if it’s only your BFF and your mom.