You’ve outgrown the food court at the mall

I’ve been talking to a lot of you about setting up newsletters, and the biggest challenge seems always to be, “How do I get my followers on Instagram to subscribe to my Substack?”

I’ve said before that social media is like the food court at the mall.

When you set up shop at the mall, yes, you’ll have lots of foot traffic, but you’re also bound by the rules of the mall – opening hours, delivery schedules, branding, etc.

But look at you – your food stand built quite a following and you expanded.

You set up shop in a nice downtown space – you set the hours, the vibes, the branding, and the music that plays while serving your customers.

Now, as a business owner like that, how much time will you spend at the mall?

Sure, some of your old customers are there, but you’ve probably got a handful of customers coming into your shop daily, right?

You could return to the food court and hand out some flyers – “Hey, visit us downtown!”

But… you’ve got a business to run. You’ve got customers!

So, to get away from the restaurant analogy – you’ve got an email list. You might have 25 people on your list. You might have 250, 1000, or 5000.

Sure, many people clicked FOLLOW on Instagram, but how much effort are you willing to invest to get them to your website?

People downloaded Instagram to be on Instagram.

Yes, we discover people, brands, art, and music from Instagram, but many of us haven’t bookmarked every website or subscribed to every email list (most folks on Instagram don’t even have email lists).

If you genuinely want to escape social media, the best course of action is to make some “WE MOVED” signs and schedule them for your various social media platforms.

Or, you could do what I did this past week and post twice on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Let’s see how that worked out.

I got 320 views total on LinkedIn (two posts), and 222 views on Instagram.

As you can see above, from my 542 views I got 14 people (users) to visit Social Media Escape Club, which is a 2.5% conversion rate.

But I fought for those clicks – I DM’d almost everyone who LIKED the IG stories, and gave them a link to the post I was promoting.

The result: two new subscribers (and one upgraded to a paid subscription).

It’s like I say, the vault is still open.

We can go back to the food court as often as we want, but we can only snag people a few people each time to visit.

Your results will vary, since I write about newsletters, and you probably do something a lot cooler than what I’m doing.

So maybe you get 4-6 new subscribers a week doing all that?

Do that for three months, and you might have 60 new subscribers.

Mind you, this is just one of the many ways to get the attention of your followers on a social media platform.

You can make dance videos and point at words and use trending audio…

Or you can make the best damn content for your existing subscribers.

Update your website. Send a weekly newsletter.

And avoid the mall this weekend if you can.

Happy Holidays, friends.