Kassaundra 0:00

I've seen a huge increase in the number of follow trains happening in the TPT community, and we need to talk about it.

Kassaundra 0:19

Welcome back to Schooled in Socials. With it being Social September, I knew I needed to address the most alarming Instagram strategies I'm seeing as of late - follow loops and engagement pods. While on the surface, they may sound like a good idea to grow your community, today, we're gonna dive deep and talk about why they're actually counterproductive to your success on social media.

Kassaundra 0:43

For those of you who might be listening, and scratching your head, wondering what I'm talking about, no worries, here's what they are. A follow loop, or also referred to as a follow train is when someone puts out a post basically asking for follows. And if you follow that person, you comment that you've done it, and the person you followed is then quote unquote, obligated to come and follow you. And typically, you're supposed to keep it going by adding the same post to your page and repeating the process. The idea is that you'll get a bunch of followers in a short amount of time. And an engagement pod is slightly different. Engagement pods are typically a group made up of people in the same niche, who have basically promised to engage with every single post of each person within that group. Some groups have different rules about what counts as engaging, sometimes you just have to like the post, sometimes you're expected to comment on and save every post, the group determines the rules on what engaging looks like. But the original idea was to boost engagement on people's posts.

Kassaundra 1:53

So at face value, these ideas seem good, right? Build your community and get more engagement. What could be bad about that? Once upon a time, that's what I thought too, which is why I want you to know that if you're currently doing follow loops, or are in an engagement pod, I want to make it clear, I am not throwing shade your way with this episode, because let me let you in on a little secret. I was in an engagement pod. And I participated in follow loops. When I started out on social media with my Teddy's plate page, which is a toddler food page I ran before I decided to leave teaching and pursue social media full time, I would jump on those posts that were asking for follows. And get excited when people followed me back. And I would religiously engage with each and every post of the people who were in my engagement pod. That was until a very lovely mom in the toddler feeding sphere, who also happened to be a social media manager in her day job explained the downfalls of those strategies. And now, I feel like I need to pass that wisdom on to you. Because when I say I dropped these quote unquote, strategies like a hot potato, I mean it.

Kassaundra 3:15

So let's jump into the issues with follow loops first. The number one problem here is that this method of growth is seen as spam by Instagram, and is thus technically against their Terms of Use. In fact, the follow for follow hashtag, which you've probably seen on some of these follow train and follow loops posts is banned. And using it or a variation of it can lead to community guideline violations. And if you receive a community guideline violation, Instagram can restrict who sees your posts for a certain timeframe. So you would see your reach drop, and you would find getting engagement difficult until those restrictions are lifted, which is something I don't want to see happen to any of you. The second issue here is that if you do a follow for follow, and the only people following your page are other teacher sellers, which is what typically happens, people from your niche end up following you. And you end up following them versus your target audience following you, then the algorithm is going to start thinking that the people who find your page most helpful are other teacher sellers, and not the actual teachers in the niche that you're targeting. So it's probably not going to recommend your content very much to your actual target audience. So the result is you'll end up with a bunch of followers, but you won't be getting a lot of engagement or a lot of results because the right people aren't seeing your content. Finally follow for follow can lead to a lot of inauthentic followers who aren't actually going to engage with your content. People who just hit the follow button so that you will follow them back.

Kassaundra 5:01

Now when it comes to engagement pods, the dangers are much the same. Again, the type of activity where you're commenting on every single one of someone's posts can flag your account for spam activity, which again, is against Instagrams community guidelines, and could lead to a community guideline violation for your account. And since you've probably joined a group of teacher sellers in a similar niche, having them always comment or engage with your content is going to teach the algorithm that those are the kinds of accounts that want to see your content, not your actual target audience. So in short, you'll have a ton of comments on your posts, but it probably won't serve its purpose or drive any sales for you. Finally, the biggest issue I find with engagement pods is inauthenticity. It's a lot of work to go through and comment on everyone's posts. So you're likely to see a lot of that's cool or nice, you know, all of those generic things that anyone could say about any one of your resources or the information that you're sharing, it kind of turns out to being like those very unhelpful five star reviews people leave for us on TPT are just like three words like this was great, you know, and so you're putting in a lot of effort and time and others might not be and you're all giving the algorithm the wrong signals. And it just ends up being very counterproductive. Now, this isn't to say you can't have a group message with other sellers in your niche to support each other and ask questions to and give encouragement. I don't want to squash camaraderie in this space at all. But we just have to be cognizant of how these strategies that someone might want us to participate in can hinder our goals.

Kassaundra 6:49

Now again, if you have participated in a follow loop or engagement pot in the past, or still are now there's no shame in that - you don't know what you don't know. And that's why I'm here to delve into the things that pop up in our teacher printer space, and give you the lowdown so that you can choose the actions that most align with your goals.

Kassaundra 7:11

So then next time someone invites you to a follow train or engagement pod, feel free to send them my way. In fact, feel free to share this very episode with them. I would love to help show them a better way to get to their big goals.