Beyond Hacks: Building Real Influence on Social Media

The answer is that there is no shortcut. There is no shortcut to you showing up every day with valuable content to your audience. The essence of these “hacks” is trying to give you a shortcut around something that is a crucial first step: being on social.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Vista Social podcast. It’s the show where we go behind the scenes on how we’re building an awesome tool for social media marketers. I’m Reggie, one of your hosts, and today Vitali and I are going to explore hacks. Well, I mean, really just the fact that there are no hacks when it comes to social media management.

And I think this is kind of funny because, I mean, product development, like you’ve been in this space for a while. So we say “hacking,” you know, there’s the code and we always picture the person on the computer typing a bunch of code and all of a sudden they’ve got a million dollars in the bank account. This is a different type of hack. What are we talking about?

Social Media vs. SEO: Why Algorithms Are Different

So, I think there is this thought process that sort of goes along these lines, that there is a way to figure out an algorithm or to figure out the sort of way the networks work and to find a way to sort of hack that process to your own benefit. And to some extent, I’m old enough to kind of come from the marketing world that was very sort of SEO heavy.

And everybody pursued SEO, and everybody kind of implemented strategies to have the websites sort of ranked higher. And I feel like that world was always really all about knowing how to hack or how to predict Google’s algorithm, right? So if we only have enough keyword density on the website, if we only link our pages in a certain way, or if we only had a certain backlink, then we can hack it and tomorrow, right, our site will just be ranked.

And I think to some extent, it’s still sort of operates the same way, that world of SEO, where there is still an attempt to hack or to kind of influence the sort of the algorithm in your favor and get ranked. I think social media is more difficult from that standpoint because it’s not at all around, you know, how many times you’ve mentioned a certain keyword. It’s really about the quality of the content.

The Follower Harvesting Myth

So, one that comes up a lot, let’s talk about this one, but artificially inflating my audience count, buying followers, buying likes on my posts. What good does that do for somebody?

I mean, yeah, so I think there’s buying, but then there’s also what I think some perceive as, “Oh, this is just the smartest thing ever,” is, “I’m going to follow a bunch of people, right, and they’re going to follow me back out of curiosity perhaps, and then I’m going to sneakily unfollow them. And as a result, this is how I’m going to grow my followers.”

And I think this is, I’ve been in this long enough to remember this coming up. And I think some people refer to it as like “follower harvesting” or something like that. And it pains me to continue to see these questions being asked by users, and I’m just so, I mean, I feel so bad for the user who is asking the question because I feel the level of misguidance, right, that that person has, is that it’s the fact that you will have more followers would not change anything about your content, the quality of it, and the way you are being perceived.

Building Relationships vs. Making Sales

It does. At the end of the day, if you’re on social for a business purpose, and it could be a creator whose business purpose is to grow their audience to somehow monetize that right, through sponsorships, whatever that might be, then at the end of the day, all of these hacks that we’re talking about, they do nothing to increase the likelihood of you making that sale, of getting that customer, of getting an engaged audience member who’s going to become part of your fandom or whatever that might be.

But you’re right, the auto-follow, auto-unfollow, I’ve seen things like, but also I think like, something that you’re talking about now is, um, let’s say sales, right? To some extent, I even find fallacy in in that, like, in a sense that if you’re on social, right, you are not selling, right?

Selling is what happens once your content or once your material, whatever that is, videos, images, once that gets into people’s minds because it’s interesting. And then, and then maybe once that influence is in place, you can try to monetize that, right? But it’s carriage before the horse, right?

The Auto-Engagement Trap

No easy answers to this question, by the way, but still that’s, there’s no shortcut. I think that’s the answer. The answer is that there is no shortcut to you showing up every day with valuable content to your audience to in order to build that audience, to then eventually be able to convert that through, you know, providing value to them in the sense, in the sense of a product or a service or whatever that might be.

But yeah, absolutely. The essence of these hacks is trying to give you a shortcut around something that is a crucial first step of being on social. Also, it creates this false sense of progress, right? So for example, auto-liking comments, right? All right, so you you get a comment and and and you liked it.

The interaction with the comment is intended to just think of what the comment is. Comment is, all of a sudden, you’ve achieved your goal. You posted a piece of content, and somebody actually took time to react to it. So this is probably the most important part of building that relationship that you’re looking to build.

Starting Small and Authentic

Well, I guess to start, I mean if if we go extreme, whether the choice is either I’m not going to be on social or I’m going to be on social and use and auto-like, I’m going to buy followers, like, the result will be the same. I agree.

But if we’re going to take a less dramatic approach, there are some small things that a brand could probably do to start, right? So I think one thing that I hear a lot in my conversations as we’re onboarding in customer service with Vista Social, new agencies and marketers, is they didn’t all start on six different social networks, eight different social networks.

It’s really doing a little bit of research before you get started and figure out where is my target client most active? Where do they hang out? And let’s go hang out there and building a strategy around that first. Let’s build some valuable content there first. You start seeing results then and and that, right, you’ve got some more bandwidth to expand.

Embracing What You Already Have

Yeah, I think the the not trying to do too much would be good advice. And I think focusing on really the essence right of whatever your purpose is, and we speak mostly to sort of businesses here, and not necessarily shy away from that sort of sometimes maybe brands and maybe more so even people just naturally they sort of undervalue or under sort of don’t respect enough who they are and what their business is, sort of thinking that in order for them to succeed somehow they need to be kind of looking better or looking bigger or having a bigger office or having a better storefront or wearing a better, you know, suit or something.

And they’re really underappreciating the fact that that’s, again, not what social media is all about, right? So social media is all about the world as it is. And if you look at, you know, some of the more influential people out there, they’re not, they’re not, not every time anyways, right, to kind of showcase their expensive cars and, you know, shiny objects. But a lot of them are very simple people living, you know, very simple lives.

Spotting Illegitimate Tools

I think what makes it difficult is the presence of tools that do attempt to do it. So I just wanted to kind of maybe maybe give a couple of sort of points on that. First of all, most networks, if not all of them, I should probably say all of them, specifically prohibit such behavior, meaning that if you’re using a tool that offers that type of functionality, it’s not a legit tool. It’s not a tool that’s been authorized by that network to do the work.

And there is a very easy way to spot these tools. A tool that asks you for your password to your social profile is the tool that you don’t want to use. Any social media management tool out there that is legit will never ask you for your login ever because there are other more secure ways of gaining access to your profiles for legitimate purposes.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

Yeah, I think again, I think the hacks is really just a misguided way of looking at what it requires to be successful on social media. Focus on brands that are successful, maybe look at some of the peer brands, you know, of your size, try to understand their strategy. Try to again, like you said, try to limit your exposure on social. Don’t have to be on X, let’s say if you are in a restaurant, maybe as a restaurant you want to be on Instagram and that may be it.

If you feel like you’ve got some extra videos to share, consider YouTube, consider TikTok, but just sort of use reason. Focus on quality of content. Be careful with your passwords. And it’s not really about the followers as much as it is about engagement. Even if you have, if you have a thousand followers, and you can see that about many brands, right, they would have, you know, tens of thousands of followers, but then you look at their content and they’re getting just maybe a handful of likes, if any.

All right, well, thanks, Vitali. Talking about hacking is always exciting, especially with an engineer developer in the room. Thank you guys for joining us for this episode. Again, if you have ideas, if you want to join Vitali and I here in the studio, talk about an experience that you’ve had on social, make sure you head over to VistaSocial.com/podcast. We’ll catch you on the next one.