WORKWEEK

1 simple strategy that any brand, in any industry, can steal

Lately I’ve been consuming a lot of Nick Bare’s content.

He’s a content creator in the fitness industry who coined the term ‘Hybrid Athlete.’ Dude runs marathons and lifts heavy shit (and makes great content).

Oh, and he also happens to run a $40M+ dollar supplement company, Bare Performance Nutrition.

And after a few weeks of paying attention to his Instagram content in particular, I noticed a specific post format he would use periodically to print Instagram comments on demand.

1,195 comments.

1,051 comments.

891 comments.

Printing engagement. On repeat.

The best part about it is that the format is insanely simple. And you can take the same underlying strategy and apply it to your brand — no matter what social media platform you’re on.

Okay. So what’s this strategy?

He’ll post a picture of himself after one of his runs, share how many miles he did (either that day or that week as a whole)…

And then use a simple CTA like:

‘Drop your morning miles 👇’

… and prompt his community to share how many miles they ran.

He’ll post an engagement prompt using this format once every 1-2 weeks.

And people eat this up every time.

(A note on the cadence: when you find a format that ‘works,’ you should re-use it regularly, but be mindful not to overdo it. Nick does a good job of nailing this balancing act.)

Why it works 🤔

The mechanism behind this is so simple.

People just love to brag about themselves.

Admit it… you love to show off a little 😉

And a lot of the best engagement questions on social media just put people in a position to brag. They tap into human nature.

In Nick’s case, he is giving his community an opportunity to brag about their daily or weekly mileage.

He took a niche specific topic (running mileage) and paired it with a fundamental characteristic of human behavior (our desire to show off).

On top of that, the prompt is also super low friction to answer. It’s just a number.

A lot of social media managers mess up engagement questions by making them too complex.

Engagement questions shouldn’t require a paragraph to answer. They shouldn’t be super open-ended.

Here’s another example of an engagement question Nick used that did well, but not quite the same numbers:

This example is niche specific — but see how it’s more open-ended?

Instead of just requiring a simple number to answer, it could require a paragraph. So it only got 522 comments (still nothing to roll your eyes at).

I want to be clear. This isn’t bad. Sometimes less engagement is better (often higher quality engagement). It’s all about understanding what the goal of a particular post is.

But if the ideal outcome of a post is ridiculous amounts of engagement…

The prompts should be specific, and require a simple answer:

• A few words
• A number
• An emoji

This is how you drive more comments on these types of posts.

Let people brag about themselves.

Make the post stupidly easy to answer.

And of course, make sure the topic of the post is niche-specific (like Nick’s is to running).

It’s really that simple. I’m not going to try and make it deeper than it is.

That’s all I’ve got today.