Episode 84: Two Audiences are Better Than One: Don’t Sleep on Collaboration Posts on Instagram

Hello and welcome back to another one of my summer shorts. I guess this will kind of be like one of the last summer shorts, but, um, I'm actually liking these little short bite sized episodes. And if you are too, let me know. Just send me a DM on Instagram. I'm at Molly A. Cahill. That's C A H I L L. I was getting, uh, claustrophobic being inside and it's so beautiful outside in Cincinnati today so I'm recording this on my lovely screen import.

It's like 75 degrees and sunny, but it is a little windy so you might hear my wind chimes and stuff in the background. Sorry in advance to my podcast editor. So today we are going to talk all about, uh, how to create and why you should create a collaboration post on Instagram. And this is very different than just tagging somebody.

So I'm going to dive into all of the specifics. So here we go.

Hey, welcome to Holistic Marketing Simplified. This podcast boils down to the fact that we wholeheartedly believe that more humans need to know about holistic health solutions. And you didn't go to school to learn how to be a Full time content creator and show up on Instagram and do all of this marketing stuff all day every day.

So let's come hang out while we chat all things easy in your marketing. And my goal is that you shift your mindset around your marketing from a quote should to a, I get to more dream patients and clients. Hello, my name is Dr. Abby Parish and I'm a chiropractor located in Old Town, Daphne, Alabama. And I listen to the Holistic Marketing Simplified podcast.

All right, I realized when I was outlining this episode that I need to do another episode on schedulers and on batching content. Fun fact, I actually don't batch any of my content at all, but obviously for our Instagram management clients, we do because we wouldn't be able to not because the client has to check it.

So, um, I'll do a whole episode on like finding what works for you based on your own batching style. Um, But the reason I'm starting this episode on collab posts off with that is a lot of people, like, I understand that pre planning and pre scheduling things and almost every type of planning software, even Meta's own native scheduler, Has an auto post feature, right?

Everybody's like, how do I schedule it and auto post it? Well, the thing is, as of the time I'm recording this, I'm recording this on Monday, August 19th. There is no way to add a collaborator ahead of time, meaning, If you're going to do this type of post on Instagram, and I also, y'all know me, I don't really know anything about Facebook.

I'm just being honest. I have no idea if this type of post exists on Facebook, but if you're going to be doing this on Instagram, you have to do this manually, meaning like the post itself and the caption can all be pre scheduled, but when you go to post it on Instagram, it can't be auto posted. This is adding a collaborator as something that has to be done manually.

So, the difference in just tagging somebody in a post and adding someone as a collaborator is mostly this. If you're not driving or if you're not in the middle of something and you want to open up your phone and open up your Instagram page. to your main profile. If you scroll all the way over, not scroll, but if you look all the way over to the far right side of your, top of your grid, you'll see a tagged tab.

That's like never, never land. Like nobody looks there. So that is where if someone like, literally just like tags you in the photo, which is something you've probably heard of in the past. And that's how it used to be. I mean, why they've kept that. And I don't know, it's all kind of confusing. I totally understand.

I'm talking about this. You're gonna be like, what the heck are you talking about? Sometimes you just have to actually like do it to see what I'm talking about for this to make more sense. So that is a tagged picture. Then there's also a difference if you just mention somebody in the caption itself. So, for example, if you are writing the caption and you're like, check out my favorite pediatric dentist for tongue tie revisions at XYZ Kids Dentist.

That is just an at mention that neither tags them nor adds them as a collaborator again. Why is this also confusing? I don't know. I didn't invent the app. I can just teach you what I know about it. So now that I've talked to you about the difference and tagging someone versus at mentioning, here's how you actually add someone as a collaborator.

And this is, again, just the insanity of why Instagram is so confusing. Once you're about to finish the post, you will hit add tag. So you're going to see that and be like, no, Molly said not to tag. So it is really confusing because it says add tag, but you'll actually see the add collaborator option. If the person you want to add as a collaborator is grayed out for some reason, that simply means that whatever audio you use, they likely don't have their account set up.

As an entrepreneur professional account, and they don't have access to this full sound library. So you can try removing the audio and then they shouldn't be grayed out anymore. And then once you do that, then the request will be sent to them. And at the end of the episode, I'll talk about whether or not you need to like ask them ahead of time.

What a collaboration post does and how it's different than simply tagging someone or at mentioning someone is if you add someone as a collaborator and they accept it, now they have to accept it. It doesn't just automatically do this. It will show on their main grid. So rather than living all the way over and never, never land on the tagged tab and then the at mention, which doesn't really do anything, adding someone as a collaborator is a way to get in front of.

someone else's audience. How we use these for our Instagram management clients, and we have a lot of templates that use this inside of Holistic Marketing Hub, is, um, I'm going to stay on the pediatric dentist example because it's easy. Let's say you're a pediatric and prenatal chiropractor. And, um, you do a post educating on chiropractic and tongue ties.

And then you also want to shout out your favorite local dentist. If you add them as collaborator, it now that and they accept it, that same exact post will now live on their Instagram page. So as of today, you can add up to five collaborators on a post. So one of our most popular templates inside Holistic Marketing Hub is we have a, like our recommendation for your child's pediatric.

Well, I can't remember what exactly it says, but it's like, you can tell, or your, our recommendations for your pregnancy or whatever. And it can be, they have like a doula, a lactation, um, consultant, a, maybe like a baby boutique or maybe like a group of midwives, maybe like a holistic pediatrician. And they list all of these people through the carousel.

It's like an Instagram carousel post. And then what we do is we go in and add all of those, I mean, they might not have an Instagram account, right? If they don't, obviously this doesn't work. Go add all of those accounts as collaborators. So you have the potential, let's say all five except now you're living, your content is living on those other people's pages.

So you can do this for static, like regular posts, like I said, like carousels, or you can also do this for reels. Now, if you live, if you're in a smaller town or maybe like you're in a niche where you don't have as many professional referrals, it doesn't have to be just complimentary to your niche. This can also just be local businesses in the area that have nothing to do with what you do.

So it could be coffee shop, restaurant. One we recently did for a more pain based chiropractor was there's like a really big pickle ball. facility in town. So we wrote a caption about like, stay on top of your pickleball game. Then we added the pickleball facility as a collaborator. Guess what? The first time we did it, they didn't accept it.

So we tried it again a month later, the exact same post, literally the exact same. Only thing we changed was we made the image. Look a little more so like if there's like a big name, you're kind of trying to go after and you're like, man, I hope they accept my collaboration request, which we'll talk about asking them in advance in a minute, but only thing we changed was on the graphic.

We made it a little more like brand neutral so that it wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb on the pickleball facilities page so that they would be more likely to accept it. Now, most local businesses like aren't really going to care about their grid aesthetic, but. Just know that this was like something I noticed was that they did kind of have this certain grid aesthetic.

And so I'm like, okay, well, they're not going to accept this if it looks totally different. So I just tweak the image slightly to make it be something that would fit on their page. So if you're an online only health business, I still love having, um, a local presence. If you've been around here for a while, you know, one of my top tips for growing your online health business, like whether it's health coaching, life coaching, whatever, functional medicine, is to actually start locally and treat it as if it were a brick and mortar, uh, was a brick and mortar business.

So I still love doing this type of thing locally. But you can also do like, I have a carousel that I've been working on that if I were to go audit my own account right now, I would be like, Molly, this is the type of content that you are missing is the community and referral type content. And I have a collab post that I'm working on.

With all of the people who I recommend who are like business coaches to chiropractors and health coaches and such, website people, SEO people, um, just people who don't do what I do, but like are people I feel really comfortable referring my clients to. So, like I said, it doesn't have to be brick and mortar and definitely be online and I would highly recommend if you haven't already gotten my content ecosystem.

We'll link it in the show notes and it just, the community and collaboration type of content is something that I almost 100 percent of the time find missing from people's pages when I go audit their Instagram account. While on the concept, on the topic of auditing, one of my hub students recently asked me in the Slack channel, she's like, Hey, we've been doing interviews with local businesses and I'm really bummed that they haven't gotten more traction.

Can you take a look? So I took a look and it turns out that these interview videos they were doing were super long, like I want to say like six to 10 minutes. So just remember that people go to Instagram for short form content. They don't go to watch really long videos. That's somewhere like YouTube, people know that they're going to be sitting down for longer videos, right?

So what I advised her to do instead was we did this for our client, Dr. Fatty, where she did, I think it was like, let's say like a 10 minute interview. She's a chiropractor in Del Mar, California. So if you want to go like check out her Instagram page, you can see this in action. She interviewed a local naturopathic doctor.

And so we just chopped up the interview into parts. I think we did like a part one, part two, I think we did like up to a part four. And then each time we posted a new segment, we added. that ND as a collaborator so that it lives on her page. So in terms of do you need to ask these people ahead of time to add them as a collaborator?

Absolutely not. It's not going to just like go automatically live on their page. It's not like you're violating anything. Sometimes I'll add a lot of my top affiliates as collaborators and like sometimes they accept and sometimes they don't. But you definitely can ask. I'm just saying like if that's what's impeding you from trying it.

Remember my example about the pickleball. They didn't accept it the first time and then they did a month later. Think about, like I know this is still at the time this airs, this will still be like two months out, but like small business Saturday, like it's a great time for people want their small business.

They want the exposure on other people's pages. Now note that if they don't accept it, I still always recommend that you just send them a DM and just say, Hey, I just added you as a collaborator on this post. No pressure to accept, but if you do accept it will live on both of our pages and it just kind of doubles our exposure.

That's all you have to say. Because a lot of people aren't Instagram savvy enough to realize that you, you like asked them to be a collaborator. And from my experience, someone has asked me before, and if I didn't accept it right then, it just comes up in your notifications. You know, as you get more notifications, it just gets buried.

Like you don't keep getting notified like, hey, you never went back and looked at this collab request. So it's like if they don't catch it and they don't see it, then for all you know, it just got buried. So I would say best practices, you don't have to like ask permission ahead of time. Most people want the exposure, right?

But what I would do is send them a DM afterwards and just say, hey, you know what I just said about just didn't want this to get buried. You know, I invited you to collab on this post. Obviously, if there are any type of influencers or something like that, where it's like natural, obviously, I don't know, I get weird about influencer marketing when it comes to certain services.

It's like, if they actually use you and they're actually, you know, patients who are happy to talk about it or clients, um, that's another way that you could use the collaboration feature. But yeah, I would highly encourage you to incorporate this into your content. Like I said, it is something that, For some people can take a little bit more time, or it can be as simple as the next time you're at a locally owned coffee shop, snapping a selfie with your drink and just saying, where's your favorite place to get coffee in Cincinnati, Ohio, mine is blank.

And then put it in the coffee shop and add them as collaborators. So it doesn't have to be Fancy. Okay. All right. I hope this was super helpful and I can't wait to chat with you guys on another episode. Thank you for listening to Holistic Marketing Simplified. And hey, you know how every podcaster at the very end of their episode asks you to rate and review their podcast.

Well, that's because it's super important. These podcasts take a lot of time and heart and effort to produce, to bring you free information. So in order for me to be able to continue doing that, we need more people to find out about the show. So if you could, please just take like two minutes out of your very busy day to leave me a rating and share this on your Instagram stories and tag at Molly A.

Cahill. That's C A H I L L. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your support. I know your time is valuable and I can't wait to see you in the next episode.