Hello and welcome to another Whiteboard Sessions with me Andrew Maff. I am the CEO and founder of BlueTuskr, a full-service digital marketing company for e-commerce sellers. And today I'm going to go through the perfect process for growing your Instagram account for E-commerce sellers.
So I'm going to go into the process and how we kind of go through reviewing things and going over Reporting Analytics and all that fun stuff, I'm not going to get into creative, I'm not going to get into what to post and why to post it, that's going to really come down to your specific product line, a lot of different information where you have to do another video.
So today, what I'm gonna go through is I'm just going to go through the exact process that we do here at BlueTuskr, which has worked for me for years on how to grow an E-commerce Instagram account, specifically just due process.
Post Frequency
So first thing I'm going to dive into is how often to post. So posting is a little bit interesting. So this kind of all depends on three to five times a week is what I usually say. And this kind of all depends on where you're at with your business. If you've cleared 40 50,000 followers, then that's gonna be a little bit different, you might want to post more often depending on what it is you're posting, or you might even want to post less often.
But if you're simply focused on advertising, and you that's really all you care about right now, for whatever reason, then you still need to be doing this because you need to have some kind of appearance on your Instagram profile, there's a lot of people that will see an ad on Instagram will click over the profile to do their own due diligence and then find out that you haven't posted in months, or that maybe you haven't posted at all, and they're going to think that it's a scam, they won't want to work with you.
So by not having posts on your own profile, you'll actually end up having an issue where you might have really poorly performing ads. But a bare minimum, we usually suggest posting three to five times a week. This can be anything from regular images to video to carousels, wherever you want. Now, this is also something where we'll say like, you're gonna want to space it out, it's gonna be, you know, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday or something like that. But this is really going to be the key to making sure that your profile is staying active.
How to Post or Write Stories
And of course, outside of that. The other thing you have to think about is how you're posting stories or writing stories. Again, even though you're just doing ads, or even if you actually are trying to grow your profile here, you're going to want to do stories daily. So the reason we say daily is that you notice when you go on our Instagram profile, or you go onto Instagram itself, you'll actually see the stories are up at the top, and then you have the feet underneath it.
And because the stories are all highlighted, and things like that, usually the first place that people go, and the reason that that's been proven are obviously because of things like Tic tock and how they trade reels because that's obviously what people are catering to. So by posting in stories daily, you'll actually be able to make sure that you're always being seen by your customer base.
So we're already looking at three to five posts, regular posts a week, you're looking at posting stories daily. And this is really just to make sure that you have some kind of content going out on the platform. Now we're gonna talk about how to scale this and how to actually start to grow followers. This is really just showcasing your brand and how awesome you are right?
Hashtags
There's nothing about how to get people to come to see this. So the very first thing we're gonna talk about is hashtags. So hashtags are interesting because we usually say to try to use one in a story. But in posts, that's where they get used a lot more. And honestly, this can kind of come down to what works for your profile, how big your follower base is, already, there's a lot of different things that kind of come into there.
But we always say anywhere from five to 15 hashtags per post. Now, as I said, there's a caveat to this, it all depends, if you have a really large following will get to a point where we're even telling you that don't use hashtags, you don't need them. Or we'll get to a point where even if you're really new, overusing hashtags can actually cause your profile to not reach as much. So there's a lot of stuff in hashtags.
We're gonna do hashtag research on another video where we kind of go through how we figure out which hashtags to use. But the easiest thing that I can tell you that's overarching for everything is always have some kind of branded hashtag or a hashtag that is relevant to your product line. So probably still theoretically branded, just not your actual brand name.
But then, start low and slowly work your way up, and then test and see what works. Start with five, maybe next to six and seven and eight, and just see what's working best for you. But the other thing to think about if you overuse hashtags, so you've used the same ones over and over for every post, so let's say you decide to use eight hashtags to start with, and you post, you know, three to five times a week, but all you do is copy and paste those eight hashtags over to those posts, Instagram will actually start to show you less than less because they're gonna see that as spammy, and it's not original enough, they want clear, new, free, fresh stuff.
So what we always suggest is using those top branded hashtags, and then making sure the other hashtags, while you still want them to be relevant to whatever your product line is, you also want them to be relevant to whatever your content is. So whether it's a picture or a video, you're gonna want to use some hashtags that are relevant to what you posted. So think about hashtags as tagging your post, into a certain category, right?
Categorize your Brand
So you're obviously gonna want it to categorize your brand, you're gonna want to categorize it as whatever your product line is, maybe a couple of other things that are relevant to the community, but that's okay, there's a dog in this, Hey, there's a cat in this and then cats have Instagramers needed something along those lines, don't use that high one, you want to find some that have some that a couple that has really high search volume.
A good amount that has like a medium amount of search volume, and then a really good amount of ones that have like a lower search amount of volume. Because if you do like hashtag love, hashtag friends, hashtag cats, you won't show it all, because Instagrams gonna know that you're spamming it. So you really have the placement of hashtags is really important. But we're gonna be on another video.
Showcasing your Brand
So the other thing is, this is all showcasing your brand, right? This is kind of getting people to find the stuff that you're showcasing, right? So then the other stuff we're gonna want to do is how else can we promote our own stuff, right? So on stories, what we always suggest is to do the New Post story. So essentially, as soon as you post something that day, reshare it as a story and use like one of those new post gifts or something like that.
So essentially, what you're doing is you're taking your story, and you're driving a bit more traffic to the post itself. And the reason that can help is that you're actually doubling up on engagement, you're going to get someone who clicks on a story. So now they've engaged with it, and then hopefully, they'll comment or something on your posts, and then they've engaged with that too. And the more you can get people to engage with your stories, the better your posts will do.
Create Engaging Content
So if you actually start to have stories that are very engaging, so you have ones that have the ranking on it, or you have the voting one where you can say yes or no, or however you want to do voting, or if you have one more that it just automatically DMS you or something along those lines, those are all engaging. So if I'm continuously engaging with your story, you're actually going to start to see the company's posts more often.
So let's say I engage with your story more often, I'll start to see your posts more often. The reason is that Instagram now believes that I'm really interested in your content. So it's going to show me more and more of your content. So making sure that you have engaging stories, and engaging posts can really start to move you up the algorithm. So outside of that, this is all now come see me come talk to me, come Come to me, right. That's not how Instagram works. This is where everyone goes wrong.
I know so many sellers, who will do this for months and months on end and end up with a couple 100 followers and they'll be like, Instagram doesn't work for me, and they'll give up, throw their hands down there get all cranky, that's because you're doing it wrong. This is like if you went to a party, and you are your nicest stuff, you put out the best content look really nice. And then you stood in the corner, and you look kind of scary because no one's really gone up to you. And you're kind of pissed because no one's come up to you.
Focus on Outreach
No one's going to come up to you what has to happen, you have to focus on outreach. So this is taking the time to use the platform, just posting isn't using the platform is being social, it's a social media network, do you have to go out and engage with other profiles.
So one of the things that we do is on a daily basis, for one hour a day, we have what we refer to as community managers who go out and we'll actually comment on other people's posts or they'll like their pictures or both. And what will happen is we'll do our hashtag research on what hashtags do we want to engage with, or we'll find competitors' profiles, and then we'll go and go over to the profile, the people that have commented on our competitor's profiles.
Basically what's happening is we're engaging with people that we know might be interested in our product line. Now, we're not going out there and saying, like, hey, really cool picture of a cat, you should consider buying our beef jerky-like that's not what we're doing. What we're doing is we're just engaging with, Hey, we love this picture of your cat. It's adorable. I don't sell anything for cats. That's not what I'm talking about.
The point is, I know that you're a potential member of our community, and I know that you're interested in what we have to sell. All I need you to do is know that we exist. What I'm doing is I'm going to their page. I'm just commenting Amin is super nice. I'm just engaging with them. And what's gonna happen is they're gonna, obviously your notification, they're going to be wondering who you are, they're going to click over to your profile. And that's where as long as this stuff looks good, then they're going to start to talk to you.
So let's go back to the party analogy, right? Now, I'm going over to other people, I'm introducing myself, and I'm not talking about myself, I'm not walking up to them and going, Hey, I work in Marketing, we should work together, and they're just sitting there like screw on a party, I'm trying to get drunk. So totally not the case.
What we're doing is we're going out and we're talking to people, we're going, Hey, what do you do? That's really cool. Oh, you'd like to drink? What are you drinking? So you're asking people questions about themselves, people love to talk about themselves. Social media is the exact same way, by going out and engaging with them, they'll engage with you back, and they'll come back to you.
So lots of thought This is basically the line for the most part of where we have our community managers versus our social media managers. And the other thing our community manager is going to do is make sure that we're responding to everything, right. So we're gonna respond to that we'll do it. That's not an infinity sign. They respond to everything, right.
Respond to Any Engagement
So any DMS that we get any comments that we or any of our posts, any anything at all, we always want to make sure that we're responding to everything. Because basically what's happening is they're engaging with us, we want to thank them for engaging with us. People want to know that they're being heard. Let's go back to that party analogy.
You walk up to someone, you talk to them, you go, Hey, what do you do? And then they start to tell you, that's where you start to say, Oh, that's really interesting. Tell me more about that. Right. So now they're like, Wow, this guy's really interested in me. So you're continuously talking to him. It's the same concept on Instagram.
So if we had a comment on one of our posts or someone DM does, we want to respond, not only do we want to spawn thanking them for commenting or anything along those lines, we want to respond and try to continue the conversation. Because the other thing that's going to happen is as people come by your post on your feed, as it starts to get further and further up the algorithm, they're going to see all of your comments that you've made to other people, and all the comments that they've made, get combined.
So it ends up looking like you have hundreds or 1000s of comments when in reality, you've just responded to 15 or 20 people, and that's about it. So by doing that you're continuously growing engagement, you're continuously growing the numbers per post, and it's making the post look better, which is getting you even more engagement that way.
The next thing that we always do, and especially e-commerce side, right, so so many agencies will go out there, and they'll tell you, Instagrams not really about sales, it's about brand awareness, accurate, but not Instagrams got some great bells and whistles on getting some actual sales.
Go Back and Tag your Products
So the other thing you got to think about is to make sure to always go back and tag your products. Now, this actually might not be necessary for everyone, the reason we have to do it do as an agency. So we use Sprout Social internally. And you know, they're not paying me to say that you can use any of them. For an agency, I think it's great for the house, I think it's a little overkill, and they don't really have a great way of tagging products on Instagram.
So we always have the community manager check daily, that the most recent post has your product tagged in it, right. If you're able to do it through creator studio, you're able to do it through any other platform, just always make sure that you're tagging your products because that's how if you can get one of these posts to do really well, they can click and they can go and they can actually make a purchase.
So it's a great way to actually get some conversion and focus on conversion as opposed to just focusing on brand awareness. The other thing is, even when you're responding to your own comments, respond to your own DMS, that's all within your own profile, make sure to also go out and thank people who may have tagged you, right.
Give Thanks
So let's say thank back. So sometimes people will post a picture of your product, or they'll share a story of your product or something along those lines, in which case, you're gonna want to go and thank them for doing that. So by acknowledging that you appreciate them tagging it in, they're much, much more likely to actually go and tag it again and consistently post you especially if you end up sharing some kind of UGC over here, sharing his story and saying, like, Hey, big thanks to Cheryl for sharing our picture.
In which case, Cheryl's now going to post all the time and tag as much as possible because everyone likes the cloud. So now, this is all like, overarching, what can we do day today, but how do we improve, right? How do we optimize on a monthly basis? What we always suggest doing is I don't know why I write the stuff we always suggest doing is to review everything that we've said here, right.
So we're going to review several things. We're going to review the content that was posted. We're going to review in the daytime. Oh, yeah. No. Fight. So Here's we're gonna review these four things. The outreach is going to be, how many comments on a daily basis did you make? How many likes did you make on a daily basis? Okay, great.
When you did a 70/30 split, we seem to do well. So going forward for the next month, I want you to do 70% comments. 30% likes, right? Time, what time of day did we post we tested noon, four o'clock, six o'clock, some of the platforms will tell you what they think. Okay, which one works best? Great. Let's do that one. All right. What days do we post Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday worked the best for us great for the next month post during those times. Post on those days.
Okay, we did still images, we did the video, we did carousels. We did all this different stuff. Which one worked the best? Okay, video and carousel work the best. Fantastic. Don't just do video and carousel, you know, those are the top two for you. But favor them. So okay, in the next month when we schedule stuff. Let's do more video, more carousels, and then just sprinkle in a couple of single images.
So that's how we kind of start to look into okay, how can we adjust for the next month. And the reason we always do like a month at a time is that you have holidays that show up you have content, you kind of want to test you have some holidays where you had to like do a discount kind of thing that you're doing a sale or promotion and kind of campaign that you had to shove in there.
So there are all kinds of a one-off thing, we try to get enough data to really make a sound decision. It makes it easier and easier and easier as time goes on. Because your follower base starts to grow. And the data that you're getting is really good every time you post something because you're getting a lot more numbers as opposed to if you're starting off and you're just trying to grow here.
So this entire process is the exact perfect process that we've had that really starts to develop that snowball effect, it takes time. This isn't something that's going to just all of a sudden start working. It's something that you have to commit to and you have to continuously do and do for months before you can start to grow unless you get lucky and you get some kind of viral posts which can sometimes happen. But this is the exact e-commerce process that we use to grow e-commerce, an Instagram account and we've seen it work basically time and time again.
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