What You Need to Be Posting on Instagram: Choose Your Top 5

It’s time to choose the main topics that you want to share with your customers! This could anything from your products to photos of your shop to customer photos. Ask yourself, what do you want your customers to know about you?

Choosing 5 categories to put these things into will make it SO MUCH EASIER when you go to schedule your Instagram posts (you’ll learn more about that next!) and keeps your brand voice consistent.

What are five different things in your business that you can circulate through? 

When I look up a local business up on Instagram I want to know what to expect before I walk in the door. Seeing an overview of what the shop/restaurant looks like, their products/food, members of the team, the owner of the business is really helpful.

Example:

1. Photo of Business
2. Intros (Photo of Owner/Employee)
3. Products/Food
4. Upcoming event/sale
5. Repost Customer Photo and/or review

Our Five Categories

1. Food & Drink
2. Local Business
3. Giveaway
4. Poll
5. Scenic/Pretty Photo

Here’s some ideas of what you can post

• Wide shot of what the entire business looks like (Mix it up with different angles)
• Close ups of products/food (include story of why you carry that product or why you like that dish)
• Giveaways (Try partnering up with other local businesses too!)
• Photo of the owner and intro (SUPER IMPORTANT- I want to see this on your feed every few months at least!)
• Photo of employee and about them, how long they’ve worked there
• Repost customer photos
• Showcase some of your regular customers and why they love your business
• Share an image of last month’s top seller
• Share your WHY. Bring your customer into your story and share your favorite part of running a small business
• Call out an employee’s favorites in the shop – yes, even if it’s just you 😉 
• Re-post a customer photo or share an amazing review you received
• Get a little personal or vulnerable, bring them in on a big crazy goal you have for your business 
• Ask customers for their opinion on what they’d like to see in the shop or restaurant

All of these ideas fall into these categories so you can continue to mix up while still continuing to stay consistent with what you’d like your customer to know about you!

Now, write down your categories and reference back to this list whenever you need ideas!

Why Intros Are So Important

When was the last time a photo of YOU was in your feed? Sharing images of you is so important in connecting with your customers (and potential customers.) In order for them to be able to trust you, they must know you and like you first.

Today I want you to find a photo of yourself. I don’t care when it was taken, I don’t care what you’re doing, but I want to see your face, and also to hear your story. Pick out a photo of you and post it. It doesn’t have to be professional, it can totally be a selfie taken in your business or ask one of your employees to take a photo of you.

In the caption I want you to answer a few of these questions: Hi, I’m __________. Share your WHY. Bring your customer into your story and share your favorite part of running a small business.

Get out of your comfort zone, share a little bit about you, you’ll be SO surprised to see that people LOVE connecting with YOU! Then when they visit your business and see you they can make the connection in person!

Make sure you hashtag: #bestofthebull so I can check in on you and get to know you better!

User Generated Content is AWESOME

As a local business, you also have a unique opportunity to ask for and get great user-generated content to share back on your own account.

Even something as simple as creating a hashtag for your business and posting it for people to see can encourage UGC. It’s the power of suggestion. Also be sure to check your location to see what photos customers have shared and tagged on there.

Then you can repost those photos and your business is being highlighted to all of their followers as well!

Our hashtag #bestofthebull has over 20,000 tags on Instagram now! I try to comment or at least like ALL of those photos so those users feel rewarded for using the hashtag and will continue to do so. And you better believe I repost a lot of those photos- it means less photos I have to take myself!

Giveaways

We LOVE doing giveaways and highly suggest you do them as well. Check out this giveaway we did with Namu. Almost 3,000 entries and 37,000 total impressions. They gained 1,400 followers in a matter of days. And they only gave away two $50 gift cards. That’s $100!

Where else can advertise and see that much direct interaction with so many customers?

You can start small with a $25 gift card and just ask them to follow your account and tag a couple of friends. Check out our caption below for some guidance.

It’s helpful to partner up with other businesses but keep in mind the more accounts people have to follow, the lower amount of entries you’ll receive.

We usually run our giveaways for at least 4 days because everyone doesn’t get onto Instagram every day so it allows time for people who are tagged to see it and tag others!

Stories & Geo-Tags

Ok, gut check time. If you aren’t using Stories yet, it’s TIME! Stories offer a unique way to show behind the scenes of your business and really relate to your followers on a different level.

Some ideas including showcasing your team, video walk throughs of your business, behind the scenes of your day-to-day. Did something funny happen today? Share it on your stories!

One thing you MUST do as a local business using Stories is to use a geo-tag on every few posts. You can check-in to your own location, but you’ll bring in even more followers if you use the Durham, North Carolina tag. (This is usually what we do for a majority of our posts!)

Inside the Stories wizard, you can select the geo-tag sticker from your stickers menu.

Instagram curates stories for specific locations, so now there is a great chance that segment of your Story will get seen by people around you that are flipping through the story for Durham.