In Crystal Media’s Insider Facebook group, we scour the retailer questions for the most talked-about topics to share the answers that we know all store owners can benefit from.
Here’s a question from last month that retailers were buzzing about:
Retailer Question:
We post regularly, do 12 stories a day, 2-4 Reels a week, and regular posts daily. Our engagement is up on Instagram, but we can’t grow our following. Any tips or tricks? It’s so frustrating that we don’t gain any new followers.
Crystal Media’s Answer:
Advertising is a GREAT way (and one of the fastest) to grow your followers. We recommend using Facebook Ads Manager to get specific with your results. The CM team created an Ads Masterclass that teaches everything you need to know about settling up and creating ads, and it’s free to our Insider members.
In general, I would try the following strategies:
- Add a QR code to your Instagram in-store signage and ask customers to follow you.
- People follow for quality and entertaining content. In the 2-4 Reels per week, are you entertaining or educating your audience? Make sure to give lots of tips, expert advice, and also expert opinions in the Reels!
- Make a monthly “top of funnel” Reel introducing your business to those who might not know you yet. Talk about your PCG (Perfect Customer Group) more than your business in this sort of video. For example, “If you live in [your area], we are [your business name], dedicated to the community of [your community] to help [insert PCG like moms, students, new home owners, etc.) find [your product category].” Use a trending audio in the background of these videos!
- Are you engaging with your community? Make sure you’re commenting on, following, and liking your community’s content too.
- Check your insights to see what has performed well. From there, you can see which has gained you followers and replicate that.
I also want to add that there are a few tools on accessing other people’s communities to introduce yourself. Have you tried the following features?
- Do a collab post on Instagram. You can use the collaboration feature for 1 post to show up on 2 different accounts’ profiles. We’ve seen retailers have success with this by encouraging followers to shop local with other businesses and announcing a restock of a local vendor you carry in your store. To do this
- Select “Tag” before posting
- Select “Collaborate”
- Choose the account you’d like to collab with
- Use Live Rooms. You can go Live with up to 4 people on Instagram, and each of their communities will see your Live at the top of their feeds. You can choose other local business owners, stores in your category, local makers, celebrities in your category, or employees to go Live with, and chat about industry news or what’s happening in your store!
Crystal Media’s Insider membership provides you with everything you need to know to successfully build more sales and traffic through social media—including the private Facebook group where you can get fast-acting guidance on your questions from our team of experts, as well as a supportive community of dedicated and passionate store owners.
Learn more about Insider here.
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