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[MUSIC PLAYING] Throughout this course, you'll see me sitting down with real entrepreneurs discussing the challenges they face on Instagram. I meet with Adam, the co-founder of a NA Stock Company. He sells high-quality, localized travel tags. Briar is the founder of Muizee. She sells handcrafted, fine jewelry. Bili is the founder of Tribe Beauty Box. She sells bi-monthly subscription beauty boxes. I hope these meetings demonstrate all the different ways you can apply these lessons.
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And hopefully, you'll get some inspiration for your own Instagram strategy. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'm Adam. I'm the co-founder of NA Stock Company, and we sell localized luggage tags. In terms of getting started, I did take a look at your account on Instagram. I think we can focus more on, yeah, what you're content segments are.
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And that's something I call content segmentation. That it's basically-- rather than it just being products, it's finding about three to five categories that you can constantly draw on and repost in. It's doesn't have to be equal quantities. You can still post your product something like every second post if that's what your audience has got to know and like. But it's just testing out some different things to see what works with your audience.
1:21
And it's more than fine. If something doesn't work, you'll see it. And you can just delete it. And if it works really well, then you're like, OK, well, the audience identified really well with like more of a snow landscape than a beach landscape, for example. [MUSIC PLAYING] OK, so Bili, do you want to tell me a bit about your business? Yeah, so I'm the founder of Tribe Beauty Box.
1:47
It's a bi-monthly-- so every two months-- subscription box. It's beauty focused so makeup. What has your experience been so far with Instagram? Well, Instagram has been great in terms of just putting things in picture and to visual. It looks great. People see what's in the box. People love looking at spoilers from our Instagram. They love our stories.
2:10
It's really interactive. So one thing I have noticed as well is that for my stories, I would get maybe like 700, 800 views. But then in terms of picture likes, I would be hitting just 100 or just over 100. Yeah, but that might just be in terms of engagement. If you go into your account analytics, you're probably getting around the same amount of views or impressions as the stories.
2:35
So it might seem that you're getting less engagement in the post. But also, yeah, stories are often like a higher engaged with feature at the moment. Also because they're a relatively newer feature. Instagram, their algorithm often favors newer features over older features because it wants to promote that mass adoption.
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Correct, yes. So yeah, I think that's completely normal that you're noticing that, which means just keep taking advantage of that, and keep posting stories while that is still a higher converting. [MUSIC PLAYING] So do you want to tell me a bit about your business? Sure, so my name is Briar, and I am the founder and designer of a fine-jewelry company called Muizee.
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I started the company in August of 2013. And so what so far has been your kind of experience with Instagram in particular? So I've been using Instagram since the beginning. So it's been a five-year journey, I guess I would call it. And Instagram has really changed since the time that I started using it to today. Of course.
3:45
In the past five years, just like the level of photography, the level of the influencers, it's so next level. The news feed was still chronological when you first started, for example. There wasn't like this fight to get my client's attention. I feel now almost like anxious to make sure my clients can see me because I don't know like how far I'm getting lost because it's no longer chronological.
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Yeah, so one way that I think could be really, really useful for you guys would be teaming up with some other accounts within your niche. So smaller, kind of appreciation sort of accounts. Or just accounts that your followers would actively follow as well. Like basically, that's creating things called engagement groups.
4:36
So what you can do is you can target like 5 to 10 different accounts that are around a kind of similar size, so probably between 1,000 and 5,000 followers, and within a niche or with a target audience that you are looking to target. So the way that this works is that if your post receives more engagement quite soon after it's posted, this signals to Instagram or to the Instagram algorithm that post is more popular.
5:05
And they will accordingly boost it within the algorithm. So a boost in post means kind of when you go to your explore page, you see posts from like accounts you follow or similar content that even interacted with. It helps put it into that content for those account's followers to see as well of your account. So like if someone I follow liked this photo, for example, it's more likely to come up in my explore feed.
5:36
So that's one way that that kind of works. So now your news feed isn't just based on time. So a chronological news feed. It's now based on different factors. And a couple of those factors are relevancy and relationships. So relevancy in terms of interacting with accounts from a similar niche to you. And then relationships in terms of the direct relationships that your account has to other accounts in your niche.
6:02
So even finding maybe some of your more influential followers, like your people that have like 1,000 plus followers or 2000 or 3,000 plus followers, and adding them into one engagement group. Having more like a customer engagement group and incentivizing them with like a good store discount or something like that to engage to content over time. And they can all engage with each other's content too.
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So it's good to encourage everybody in the group to mutually engage with each other's content. [MUSIC PLAYING]