59. Why Your Content Gets Views But No Followers (And How to Fix It)

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to Social Content Made Easy, the podcast that helps you simplify content creation, grow your audience, and make sales on Instagram without spending hours glued to your phone. I'm your host, Nicole Iologio. And each week, I'll bring you bite-sized actionable strategies to help you confidently create scroll-stopping content that actually grows your business. So if you're sick of wasting hours creating content that no one sees and just want a simple proven way to show up while having some fun, you're in the right place. Let's go. A theme I keep seeing among people coming into my DMs is that they seem to be getting views, but they're having trouble turning those views into followers. And I get it because I know you post a real-- and let's say, finally, my real is doing well. It's getting 5,000, 10,000, maybe 50,000 views. But then you go and look at your followers and you gain two people from it. So what is the disconnect there? It feels super confusing. It feels like what you're doing should be working because the views are increasing. But it also makes you question your content. Posting on Instagram is very much an ebb and flow game. It's going to be really good. Sometimes it's going to cool down other times. It also depends on how user behavior is changing. So if user behavior changes, then we need to adapt with it. I'm super proud of you for listening to these episodes because you are going to be up to date with the most current versions of what's working on Instagram. Today, what we're going to do is break down exactly why this could be happening right now and what to fix in your content so that actually turns into followers. This is really, really normal right now. You need to know that views do not equal alignment with your content. Views do not equal trust. And views do not equal conversion. Instagram is really good at showing your content to people that might be interested in it. But it's not always the right people that are going to save, share, follow. So let's chat about the real reasons why this is happening. So first, it could be that your content is just a bit too broad. It could be like signs that you're burnt out, right? If you're doing signs that you're burnt out, that could be for anybody, right? It could be for college students that are burnt out. It could be for wives that are burnt out, husbands that are burnt out, moms, dads. It could literally be talking to anybody with that. Another one is morning routine tips. We need to get more specific than just morning routine tips. Like my morning routine that takes me five minutes, and I don't have to sit in journal for a half hour. Or morning routine tips as a busy mom of three or whatever you are. Another one that could be too broad, it's like motivation to keep you going. Way too broad, way too general. So it's gonna get views because yeah, it's relatable to everybody, which makes sense. So more people are going to view it. I want to know if I'm burnt out, right? I want to know some morning routine tips. I want some motivation for me to continue to push through. But the problem with that is that it's not specific enough to your niche and it doesn't call in the right person. Someone isn't gonna necessarily follow for that. So remember that I want you to speak to a specific group of people. I don't want you to speak to everybody in your content. Reason number two, could be that you're accidentally attracting the wrong audience. So if you're posting like super trendy content, dances, memes, silly content, that's gonna pull in random people or people outside of your niche. It's gonna be people that want entertainment or maybe see you as more of an influencer than a business. They're not necessarily gonna come to you for help. A bad example of this could be point of view, you're tired of your job and then your caption talks about it. Well, I think most people are probably tired of their job so they're going to be reading it. But let's shift that to get into more of a specific subgroup of people. Point of view, you're a service provider struggling to get clients. That is way more specific. Might not get as viral potential, but we'll draw in the people that you need to be talking to. Remember that not all views are good views. Just having the end goal of going viral is not gonna do anything for your account. The main purpose of our stuff on Instagram is to get you the right people that come in and follow. I would much rather see a real get 50,000 views and a couple thousand followers rather than a million views and three followers. That is way more important that we get the right people on our page that need to see our stuff. All right, reason three that you might not be getting follows from your content is that you're not really giving them a reason to follow. So maybe your content's good, but you're not positioning yourself well enough. You're not sharing their identity and you're not sharing your unique perspective. So this is what I would do if this happened. So if someone landed on your page, would they immediately know why to follow you? From your content, from your bio, do you give them a good enough reason to follow you? So ways that you can fix this is remember to reinforce your niche constantly, which means talk about their specific struggles. Talk about the struggles you used to go to, talk about the struggles your clients or your customers go through and how you're gonna fix that for them. And then repeat what you are known for. You're not gonna be talking about it too much. The things that your audience knows you for the most is what you need to continue talking about. Another reason you might not be getting follows is you actually don't have any follow conversion built into your content. So you're not telling people to follow you or your call to action is two weeks. So instead of leaving your caption with like, "Hey, I hope this helps, thanks." You need to let them know, like, follow from our content on this or leave an open loop. Like if you're interested in learning more about this, I share a lot about that here. I do that a lot in my content and those are the ones that always lead to more follows. Remember that people need direction. They need to be told what to do next. They're not just gonna guess about it. Another reason that people might not be following you is that your content is just like a one-off nice to know type of post. One good post that gives them like, a beginning of middle and an end at ends, that's not a good enough reason for someone to follow you. That's a great piece of content. It'll probably get a lot of saves, but you're not giving them an open loop to continue to follow you for more information on that topic. It's kind of just like, this is nice to know, I'm gonna save it and I'll come back to it later. People are gonna follow you when they're expecting more value, when they're excited to get more of the thing that they want from you. So how do we fix this? I recommend starting a series, a talking head series, a carousel series. You can reference future content. Like I'm gonna be talking more about this next week, tomorrow, whatever the case may be. That really builds a nice flow with all of your content. So you're always chatting about what you're gonna be sharing next or maybe what you shared last week or how it relates to your audience and how it's going to continue to relate to your audience in the future. Okay, so let's chat about the fix. So what do we do instead of what we're doing right now? First, you're gonna get more specific. You're gonna talk to a specific subgroup of people. You're gonna talk about one problem that they're experiencing and you're gonna talk about one outcome that's gonna happen. So instead of how to organize your house, it's gonna be how I organize my house as a working mom with four kids and a messy husband. That's gonna be the shift right there. That's way more specific. People are going to be like, yes, this is exactly me. I need to follow this person. All right, fix number two. Adding a following hook. Your content makes someone think I need more of this. So some examples of that is I give examples like this every week or I talk about blank every week or this is what I help with here. I love the follow open loops. If you're interested in this, I'm gonna be sharing way more about my journey with blank. I'm gonna be sharing way more tips to help you blank. That really is going to draw people in to actually press the follow button so that way they don't miss anything from you. And then fix number three is we need to actually look at the analytics and optimize for follows. So ask yourself, did this post bring in followers? Actually pull up the analytics and see. I don't want you just looking at which of my posts got the most views. That really doesn't matter for anything. Look at the followers. Followers per post is gonna be way more important than just your views. Once you find those that are bringing in followers, try to make them better and do more of them. All right, fix four. We're adding clear call to actions. So before I was talking about your hook in the beginning or the middle of your content, you also need a call to action at the end. So like follow for blank. I share blank here. This is what you'll learn if you stay. Fix number five is gonna, you're gonna take some of your best performing posts and you're gonna turn them into series. So if something performs well, make it apart too. Go deeper into expand on it until you're completely finished and you've talked about this as much as you possibly can. Then you're gonna wait a couple of weeks and you're gonna do that series again. A post that performs well needs to be repeated. So turning it into a series is a fun way to give your audience more value. All right, I needed to talk about this because so many people are coming into my DMs asking about trial rules. We need to talk about it. All right, so what are trial rules? Almost everybody has access to trial rules right now. Trial rules are reach focused content. So Instagram is going to push your content out to new audiences, meaning people that don't follow you. Now, trial rules can be great for visibility. Some people are having really, really good luck with it. But they are not good for conversion. So we need to be strategic with this type of content. When do we use trial rules? If your goal is to get more reach, more exposure or if you want to test content or try to get more followers, those are good reasons to use trial rules. Do not use trial rules if you don't have time. If you're already struggling to post your normal in-feed content, don't start posting trial rules. I would much rather see you be consistent, meaning three to seven posts a week on your actual feed. Before you start thinking about trial rules. you need to nurture and love on your your current audience or else they are going to leave. If you just go all in on trial rules and then you forget about your current followers, that's not good. You should also not rely on trial rules if you're not converting your current audience yet. So if you're getting some follows but they're not buying, you really need to nail that down first and then I would start with trial rules after that. Trial rules can totally bring people in but your content still has to convert them once they land. So like your in-feed content needs to be able to convert them or your stories need to be able to convert them into buyers. The best strategy that I found for me and my clients is that we use trial rules occasionally. We pair them well with a specific message and we do it as top of funnel brand awareness content. So for instance what we do with trial rules is we want to do things that bring in follows. So let's say you post something to your normal feed, it brings in more followers than normal. Definitely use it as a trial rule. Leave the hook but change up the video, change up the hook and leave the same video, use a different audio, try different ways of that message that you use to get follows on the first one and use that as a trial rule. I need you to remember that views are not the end goal here especially when we are a business on Instagram. Followers are not even the real end goal. The real end goal is aligned followers that trust you and buy from you. That's the real end goal that we're going for here. I hope this was helpful. As with all of these episodes I love ending with a recap and an action challenge for you. So your quick recap is that views do not equal follows. Broad content does not equal conversion. Specific content does lead to aligned growth and should lead to sales. What you need to do this is you need clarity. You need to be able to position yourself as the person that is the expert and that people want to keep coming back to for more advice and you need direction for your content. Meaning you know you're going to be doing a series. You know what post are going to bring in follows. You know what posts are going to bring in sales. Okay your action challenge. What you're going to do is you're going to take a peek at your last five posts. Which ones got follows. Now if your last five posts didn't bring in any follows I want you to look at your content for the past year and see which content brought you followers. Which ones got you views. What I want you to do with the views. Pick the ones that got you the highest views but not necessarily followers. I want you to take that and make it more specific. What likely happened it was is that it was broad or that you used the trending audio. But take that and make it more specific. Try rewriting the hook. Adding a stronger called action. Then you're going to repost it again as a new version with a different video. I really don't want you creating more content. I want you to improve the content that's already working for you. Now if you want extra help creating content that doesn't just get views but actually brings in followers and clients. That's what plug-in posts helps you do. That's my membership where you get weekly posts based on what's currently working. Example ones to follow, video filming instructions, captions, stories, carousels, scripts for talking head reels. And we get on a live call once a month to really dive deep into your content and see what's working, what can shift. I do Instagram audits on it. It's really fun. If you're interested in that the links below. I'd love to have you in. But besides that I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. If you love this episode I would be so grateful if you could review it or take a screenshot and tag me on Instagram. I will repost it. I'm so excited for your new content. Please get into my DMs after this episode and let me know how these shifts are working for your business. I love hearing from you. I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you next time. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I hope you're walking away with at least one actionable take away to make creating content easier. If you love today's episode it would mean the world if you could take 10 seconds, leave a review or screenshot this episode and tag me on Instagram @insta.amplified. I'd love to connect and see your new content. Always cheering for you. See you next time.