Day: December 26, 2018

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Have a secret side account” With David Kovalevski and Candice Georgiadis

Have a secret side account: As part of your ongoing research, you always need to know what competitors, related brands, and influencers in your industry are doing. But you don’t always want these accounts to know you are following them. We use our secret account to research new hashtags, picture ideas, and trends, and to gain insights about the industry. We apply some of what we learn from our research to our own account. Knowing current trends will help you generate ideas and keywords, but don’t simply copy others’ ideas. Use your research to inspire your own creativity and innovation.

I had the pleasure of interviewing David Kovalevski. David Kovalevski is the Founder and CEO of Waka Coffee (wakacoffee.com), a quality instant coffee startup that is on a mission to reinvent the instant coffee category. It tastes like a slow drip coffee minus all the hassle of making it. It is made of 100% Arabica beans, freeze dried to preserve the original beans’ taste and aroma. They even donate a portion of their sales to support clean drinking water initiatives around the world through their “Add Water, Give Water” program.

Before starting his venture, David worked as a Marketing Program Manager in New York City, helping some of the largest technology brands in the world to generate more engagement with their marketing initiatives. He also has a military background and experience in government procurement and project management.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I wanted to be an entrepreneur from a very young age. My dream was to open a coffee shop. When I was about 15 years old, I began collecting menus from local coffee shops to generate ideas for my future business. I eventually obtained a BBA in Digital Marketing from Baruch College in New York. While working in the marketing industry and formulating my business plan for a coffee shop, I realized the potential in the instant coffee industry. After working and studying full-time, I knew many other busy people would benefit from a simple-to-make coffee solution that is as tasty as it is convenient.

Can you explain to our readers why you are an authority about Social Media Marketing?

I have a degree in Digital Marketing and worked in the marketing industry, which helped me understand the fundamentals of creating engaging content, acquiring customers, performing analytics, developing paid and owned marketing strategies. I see social media marketing from both perspectives — as a brand and as an “influencer” that promote other brands’ products. Most of my hands-on knowledge comes from working on the Waka Coffee account. We acquire many customers from social media, specifically Instagram. About 64% of all social referrals to our website come from Instagram, mostly from organic reach. It requires a lot of work and persistence. I also have an account dedicated to food and lifestyle content, which I use to promote both Waka Coffee and other brands. Like a true millennial, the third Instagram account I operate is for my cat. Between these accounts, I have a total of 44K followers. I create new content almost everyday on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

I started Waka Coffee without prior experience in the food and beverage industry. I listened to so many industry-specific podcasts and read professional blogs, which have taught me a lot about the CPG industry. I took bits of pieces of information from various success stories and tried to apply other entrepreneurs’ tips to my own business. The interesting part is that it works! I acted on some of their suggestions, such as reaching out to bloggers and journalists and sending them samples of our coffee. I had no experience in PR and had no money to pay for it, so I just sent different versions of my pitch to as many outlets as possible. I continued with the versions that worked and started getting coverage in influential coffee blogs, which boosted sales and brought new followers on social media.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I started investing time in my non-company accounts long before I launched Waka Coffee with the intention that they will help me generate more awareness to the business. I researched some of the most popular accounts and realized that cats do really well on Instagram! Who wouldn’t like a cute cat’s picture? Well, my wife and I happen to own a cute cat, so I opened an Instagram account for our cat, Boris. I worked non-stop on Boris’s account to generate as many followers as possible. One time, I wanted to check the account while at work, and opened Instagram on my desktop computer. Right when Boris’s entire feed loaded on my screen, my boss walked up to my desk. I had to quickly come up with an excuse as to why I was looking at kitten pictures at work… I learned that you should work hard on your accounts, but you also need to limit the time you spend on social media. It can be addicting to monitor your performance all the time, but it’s not a healthy habit.

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

I have different goals for each of our social media accounts. By far our most revenue-generating platforms are Instagram and Facebook. Twitter and Pinterest help us with SEO, while LinkedIn helps us to gain exposure from potential investors, buyers, and leaders in the industry. We have recently also started generating more content by collaborating with YouTube bloggers. I can’t quantify the effectiveness of these platforms yet, but Instagram and Facebook allow you to clearly understand revenue stream attached to these channels. A good story I have is about one way we generated revenue through Instagram. A small local store found us on Instagram and emailed us through the email in our bio. They ended up placing a bulk order through our wholesale channel. In that case, Instagram helped us with awareness and with building the buyer’s confidence in our product, even though the sale didn’t come directly through Instagram.

Let’s talk about Instagram specifically, now. Can you share 6 ways to leverage Instagram to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Think like an influencer: I have three Instagram accounts that I manage. @eatfoodsipcoffee focuses on food, @wakacoffee is our business account, and @yesitsboris is for our cat. My food and cat accounts help me promote the business, but they also give me the opportunity to work with other brands by promoting their products. I get to see how other brands contact me, which helps me understand how to write an effective, feasible ask. I try to approach other influencers how I would want to be approached.

2. Don’t DM — email influencers: Many businesses direct message influencers or other brands they want to partner with. First, Instagram categorizes some messages as spam and delivers them to separate inbox, which nobody really checks. Second, I rarely read DMs because 90% of them are automated messages or solicitations. Influencers do read their emails, and a brand that sends a professional email looks more appealing to partner with. I have seen about 80% more responses by emailing instead of direct messaging.

3. Become an Instagram authorized seller: This is relevant if you have an ecommerce business. Apply to become a seller on Instagram so you can tag your products in your images. This eliminates the need to write “link in bio” in every caption, because it allows customers to click on the picture and get redirected to your product page. We have seen an uptick in traffic since applying the tag product function.

4. Be consistent with your theme: Make sure your business is aligned with the type of pictures you post on your account. Otherwise, you might see engagement from people who are not really interested in your product or services, which will not help you make sales. Make sure to also use relevant hashtags that align with the same theme. Waka Coffee is focused on the convenience of using instant coffee with a marketing approach geared towards millenials, so we post a lot of lifestyle and food pictures. Our pictures show how easy it is to carry our product around and how fast it is to make quality coffee.

5. Know your calendar: Posting on a regular basis is very time consuming. We have a calendar of when we post, and we prepare the posts in advance. Although I did suggest to post pictures related to your theme, I recommend mixing it up sometimes for holidays and other special events. It will help your brand to remain relevant and appear on holiday-specific hashtags, which can bring in new potential customers. We still feature our product in these types of posts, but they were not necessary aligned with our overall theme.

6. Have a secret side account: As part of your ongoing research, you always need to know what competitors, related brands, and influencers in your industry are doing. But you don’t always want these accounts to know you are following them. We use our secret account to research new hashtags, picture ideas, and trends, and to gain insights about the industry. We apply some of what we learn from our research to our own account. Knowing current trends will help you generate ideas and keywords, but don’t simply copy others’ ideas. Use your research to inspire your own creativity and innovation.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

While I was developing Waka Coffee, I realized the huge amount of water waste that the coffee-making process generates. It was really important for me to tackle this problem with our brand. This is why we donate 4% from our sale price of each instant coffee box to support clean drinking water initiatives around the world. Access to clean drinking water affects every aspect of life, such as health, wealth, education, equality, and much more. Currently, about 633 million people in the world live without clean water. For reference, that’s twice the population of the United States! There are many great organizations that support this very important cause, and I believe there should be more awareness around this issue, especially in the business community. There has been a lot of attention to other social issues in the coffee industry, such as fair trade, but little attention has been paid to the water waste problem. I would like to start a movement in the coffee industry that puts more emphasis on giving back to clean water initiatives. If we can bring more awareness to this problem, I’m positive there can be a change.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

I would be honored to meet Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani. I view him as an example of the success that is possible when you have a goal and are determined to achieve it. Like Hamdi, I also immigrated to the US from the Middle East (he is from Turkey and I am from Israel). I read a ton about Hamdi and his business before starting Waka Coffee, and his story embodies what I want to become one day. He is well-known as a strong supporter of innovative food startups through Chobani’s incubator, and he recently invested in the coffee industry. Hamdi’s advice would be invaluable!

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!

Thank you so much for this opportunity, and the special mission and cause you support in your articles.

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Have a secret side account” With… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Instagram simplifies the process of brand building” With Dautov Bahtiyar & Candice Georgiadis

Nowadays, every business has a website. A website is a base of modern companies and incorporations. Businessmen and entrepreneurs use websites as business cards. However, there is a big problem most of us are unconscious about — it is extremely difficult to get your website discovered. If your website is your only base on the Internet, then, your road to success will be paved with loads of struggling. On the opposite side, Instagram simplifies the process of brand building to a very large extent. Nowadays, not everyone browses the Web. However, almost everyone spends at least 5–10 minutes a day surfing on Instagram. This fact makes IF extremely attractive for brand building.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Dautov Bahtiyar, who is a successful and businessman, online entrepreneur, affiliate marketer, SEO specialist, SMM professional, blogger, writer, perpetual traveler, fitness enthusiast, bodybuilder, and the founder of Bahtiyar World a popular blogs on online business, and personal development. Bahtiyar has a track record of leading successful online enterprises. He is a truly global businessman, who is fluent in 7 languages: English, Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Uyghur, Kyrghyz, and Spanish languages. This truly wide knowledge of foreign languages lets him make business on a global scale.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I am a person who is naturally inclined to reading, thinking, contemplating, and analyzing different things. I have a lot of knowledge in different spheres such as medicine, genetics, online business, healthcare, politics, sexuality, psychology, and etc. From my early childhood, reading was my favorite activity. Throughout my whole life, I accumulated a lot of information and knowledge. It is not strange that I decided to start blogging. First, I have a lot and even too much knowledge to share with the world. Blogging gives me this opportunity. Second, I feel very comfortable in loneliness. Someone said that writing is the world’s loneliest work. This is absolutely correct. However, if you enjoy loneliness, then, blogging and writing those things that you will definitely love.

Can you explain to our readers why you are an authority about Social Media Marketing?

Any type of online business is about two parts:

1) Create content, product, or a service to sell

2) Do everything in order to attract as many visitors (web traffic) to your Web platform as possible

Now, we will be talking about the second part. To succeed in what I am doing, you will need to get tons of web traffic to your Web resource. Without it, your blog, a website, your online platform, or anything else will be lost in the huge Internet.

I have already made my blog Bahtiyar World successful. It means that I created a lot of high-quality content. Second, I attract huge web traffic to my web resource. Without being a great SMM (Social Media Marketer), you will spend years hardworking to get some traffic from search engines. SMM is the easiest and free way to make your brand famous and popular. In both theory and practice, I know how to choose and implement the right strategies in order to succeed in Social Media Marketing.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

Well, SMM is all about interesting stories and adventures. You already know that I use SMM to promote my blog Bahtiyar World. Thus, SMM is connected with my blogging career.

I think the most interesting is that I stay at 5-star hotels for free. While traveling around the world, hotel owners invite me to stay at their hotels for a kind review on my popular blog. I got free hotel accommodations in New York, India, Egypt, Spain, and many other countries.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

My funniest mistake was to create a lot of superbly high-quality content without promoting it. It is funny because by doing this I was simply wasting my time. Even if you have some brilliant content, products, or services to offer, but you don’t promote it, nobody will discover your brand. Purely emphasizing my efforts at the quality of my work was a funny mistake.

I learned that any online business is about creating something, and then, promoting it in order to generate leads and sales.

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

Nowadays, Instagram is definitely the most effective media platform to use in order to increase business revenues. Today, if you have an Instagram account, you can make online business even if you don’t have a website. I am a tech-savvy man who knows programming, coding, and other technical stuff that lets me manage my complicated online project. However, the majority of Internet users don’t have these skills. Nonetheless, even a technically unsavvy people can start an online business on Instagram now.

In my personal experience, Instagram opened me a door to a whole audience of the world. Since almost everyone uses Instagram today, I am able to reach out to anyone on this planet. Visual content has no language. Everyone understands visual signs and information.

Let’s talk about Instagram specifically, now. Can you share 6 ways to leverage Instagram to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTAGRAM

I have been in the online business market for several years. I have been dealing with almost every type of online entrepreneurship you can ever imagine. Blogging, SMM, SEO, e-commerce, dealing with cryptocurrencies, and many other things. Just to let you know, I am not a kind of a person who loves taking selfies and however. However, we need to be more adaptive in order to survive in today’s’ busy global business market. Social networks is a reality of our days. No matter what type of business you run, you will never survive without SMM. Instagram is the most crucial social network that can take your brand to new heights.

First, you need to realize that today’s online business is almost impossible without Instagram marketing. There are other ways to market your business online. However, most of them either too expensive or demand a lot of patience and hard work. Understand the popularity of Instagram to fully use its advantages for the benefit of your business.

PLAN YOUR MARKETING STRATEGY

Before you start marketing your business on Instagram, you should carefully plan your marketing strategy. IG is all about visual content. Prepare high-quality visuals such as photos, logos, videos, and graphics. Identify how often and when you are going to use paid Instagram ads. Are you going to promote your business on other popular IG accounts? These are the issues you should clarify even before you start your Instagram marketing campaign.

MAKE YOUR CONTENT GO VIRAL

Nowadays, going viral is the easiest way to get your brand noticed. If you create really catchy content, your brand can go viral if you are lucky enough. Creating high-quality content requires some investments, and of course, a lot of dedication.

USE INSTAGRAM FOR BRAND BUILDING

Nowadays, every business has a website. A website is a base of modern companies and incorporations. Businessmen and entrepreneurs use websites as business cards. However, there is a big problem most of us are unconscious about — it is extremely difficult to get your website discovered. If your website is your only base on the Internet, then, your road to success will be paved with loads of struggling. On the opposite side, Instagram simplifies the process of brand building to a very large extent. Nowadays, not everyone browses the Web. However, almost everyone spends at least 5–10 minutes a day surfing on Instagram. This fact makes IF extremely attractive for brand building.

USE ADVANTAGES OF VISUAL CONTENT

In today’s busy world of social networks, people are extremely busy. We have no time to read long articles and blog posts. Nowadays, everyone thrives to save some free time. This is why we see a big prevalence of visual content on the global business market. Visual content always catches our attention. What is more, visual content is more prone to going viral. Since Instagram is both video and photos oriented, you can use this feature to promote your business through both photo and video materials. High-quality content will be always quoted, commented, shared, and re-shared. If you are lucky enough, a single viral Instagram post will supercharge your brand in a matter of a few hours or days.

RUN PAID INSTAGRAM ADS

Running paid Instagram ad campaigns is very effective. Even if your IG account has very few followers, you can still achieve great results while promoting your business through paid ads on Instagram.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I would encourage all wealthy people to share their financial assets with poor people. I really love what Bill Gates is doing. He has already donated several billions of dollars to some of the world’s poorest countries.

If every wealthy person would share his wealth with those who are in need, then, we would definitely defeat poverty in the world.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

I would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with Neil Patel. He is a very smart person and leader. I call him a leader because he has already educated a whole generation of successful online marketers. Also, we are making business in the same niches. Therefore, I would have a lot of topics to discuss with him.

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Instagram simplifies the process of… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Create a personality for your brand” With Melissa Tavss and Candice Georgiadis

Create a personality for your brand. Instagram is an opportunity for people to get to know your brand and what you are all about. Beyond just your company’s offerings and products, you can use Instagram to give your customers a sense of your brand’s essence- what is your brand’s aesthetic, voice, etc. For example, as an ice cream company, most of our photos are of ice cream, but our captions to these photos are about: throwing a party, unwinding after a long week of work, ideas for entertaining etc.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Melissa Tavss. Melissa Tavss started Tipsy Scoop in 2014. She previously earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Richmond, and later went on to complete her master’s degree in Integrated Marketing from NYU. Melissa’s background is in marketing and public relations, specializing in the wine and spirits industry. She was responsible for marketing on behalf of various wine and spirits clients for five years at The Baddish Group. Melissa has been quoted in various publications such as Forbes, CNBC, NY Business Journal, and Food & Wine. She has appeared on several TV shows such as Fox Business, ABC New York, Fox NY, and NBC New York. Melissa has been honored by The James Beard Foundation and the Specialty Food Association for her unique offerings as The Founder and CEO of Tipsy Scoop.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My Italian ancestors brought ice cream to Scotland in the 1800s. First up — my great, great, great grandfather, Achille, who moved from his small mountaintop town of Picinisco, Italy to Glasgow, Scotland. He made ice cream at home and sold it from a pushcart as he walked the city streets. Eventually he opened his own ice cream shop and brought his sons into the business. The family business continued with my great, great grandfather, Giovanni, who opened several of his own shops around Glasgow in the 1900s. My great grandfather, Federico, continued the family ice cream tradition and opened shops throughout Scotland and England and eventually became the President of the Ice Cream Alliance of Great Britain.

Following in the ice cream tradition, I started to experiment with putting a modern boozy twist on ice cream. I wanted to combine the best of both worlds! I started working on my first own homemade ice cream recipe and found it nearly impossible to get it right in our small Cuisinart ice cream maker. I was struggling and decided to add a tablespoon of alcohol to soften the ice cream. It was icy on the side of the bowl and I couldn’t get it to hold a creamy consistency. The alcohol seemed to help, but my recipe was far from complete. At the same time, I was working at a PR agency, which represented wine and spirits clients. I was lucky enough to bring home lots of samples to experiment with. I began to think — I need more than a tablespoon of alcohol to this ice cream! Why was there no actually boozy ice cream? We know- rum raisin and cherries jubilee but come on — that little amount of rum or brandy will not do the trick!

Can you explain to our readers why you are an authority about Social Media Marketing?

Tipsy Scoop started from an idea, not a traditional business plan at all. An idea that was first tested by family and friends as I served them different variations of recipes in tubberware containers. I tested out recipes on friends and family and tested out the idea and brand concept on social media, specifically on Instagram. I used Instagram to see if the idea had legs and how people (beyond those I knew) responded to it. I was able to gage how viable the brand and idea was through Social media and grow the company that way. I was able to grow my concept for Tipsy Scoop from an idea to a business using our strong social media following and cultivating that following. For that reason, I consider myself an authority on using Social media marketing to drive sales and awareness.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

in 2016, I was happy to slowly grow the business as we grew our wholesale and catering accounts, and our online and shipping business. At this point, we did not have a storefront and did not plan on having one. However, our social media page followings had been growing rapidly as our online orders increased and people learned about our business. Because of the rapid growth, we were approached by food content companies that were interested in creating videos about Tipsy Scoop and what we were all about.

In the fall of 2016, these videos started launching on Facebook and Instagram. The response was tremendous and caused a real domino effect. The videos started airing one after the other, each going viral: over 7 million views in just a few days! Our email inquiries, order forms, wholesale, and catering sales were completely flooded. People started showing up at our production facility in East Harlem looking for the boozy ice cream “shop” they had seen on their newsfeeds! We are not sure how they found us as the location was in a big warehouse right under the train in the middle of the block in Harlem (not an easy find!)- but they showed up in large groups and when we couldn’t sell them boozy scoops, they bought our boozy pints from us — right there and then! The crowds did not stop showing up and we ultimately had to hire someone just to ring them up. From there, we knew we had to open a storefront where people could go to buy boozy scoops and a shop that lived up to their expectations that were set on Facebook and Instagram!

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I first started, I really thought I could do everything all by myself- or with limited help- from making the boozy ice cream, to selling and distributing it, and so forth. My partner Lyz and I literally hauled boozy pints in our car from grocery store to grocery store delivering orders in coolers in dry ice. We pretended our “truck” was parked around the block and we weren’t just hand delivering on our own! I once dropped Three 3 gallon ice cream tubs on my leg while carting them around- I still have a Hematoma!!! I quickly learned that we needed to build a capable team in order to scale up. You cannot do everything all on your own if you want to grow into a viable business. That is a hard lesson when you are funding your business as well. But investing in people, and good people, is certainly worthwhile and imperative to growth!

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

We have definitely found video content on both Facebook and Instagram to be the most effective way to increase business revenues. In addition to Facebook and Instagram videos which initially drove traffic to our production facility in East Harlem, these same sorts of videos were extremely effective in generating awareness about our store opening in May 2017.

When our store opened, I was not sure what to expect. We spent the week before the store opening having different content companies in to shoot video of our store offerings. The videos started to be shared right before the opening date which created amazing awareness and excitement about our opening. I arrived at the store at 9am the day of the opening (we were opening at noon), thinking I had plenty of time to set up and get ready. Boy was I wrong! There were already people camped outside our store, around 10 people at 9am, waiting for the store to open at noon! By noon, the line was around the block. We continue to shoot videos about our seasonal offerings and these are a great way to bring new and old customers in and showcase our products.

Let’s talk about Instagram specifically, now. Can you share 6 ways to leverage Instagram to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

6 ways to use Instagram to leverage your business:

1. Create a personality for your brand. Instagram is an opportunity for people to get to know your brand and what you are all about. Beyond just your company’s offerings and products, you can use Instagram to give your customers a sense of your brand’s essence- what is your brand’s aesthetic, voice, etc. For example, as an ice cream company, most of our photos are of ice cream, but our captions to these photos are about: throwing a party, unwinding after a long week of work, ideas for entertaining etc. Providing some added value to your customers and giving them a sense of what you are all about makes Instagram a more interesting tool that goes beyond what an e-commerce website could provide someone with.

2. Motivate customers to experience your brand. And SHARE their experience. For a brick and mortar location, use Instagram to show your products and offerings in their natural environment i.e. in your retail location. This seems obvious but showing a physical location online encourages people to go there. They want to go there to see the space in real life! Also if the pictures are enticing enough — to go there, try your stuff, and get their own shot and share that with their following. We sometimes joke that at our Barlour, it seems like customers come in to just take a photo of their ice cream, and we are not even sure if they are going to eat it! (they do eat it, we promise it’s delicious)- but definitely getting that Instagrammable photo is important to them too!

3. Have a conversation with your customers on Instagram. Use Instagram to interact with your customers. You can listen to your customers on the channel and really get some interesting feedback that you can use to better your business! You not only get invaluable insight into your customers’ needs and wants but also get the opportunity to respond to them and start a conversation! Don’t talk at your customers by posting content and then never responding, but rather think of responding to comments as just as important as creating an Instagram posts schedule. You can also source imagery from your customers and repost their content- making it a collaborative effort and including them so they feel special and appreciated- as they should!

4. Show “Behind the scenes” views of your company on Instagram stories. Offer sneak peeks of your company, how your products are made, and provide insider information. This is something small businesses often do better than larger corporations as they are more willing to have a flexible social media schedule and strategy that allows them to post in real time and more spontaneously. Showing your customers what happens behind the scenes is a cool way to let them in and get them more engaged in your brand’s story. For example, we post sneak peeks of the making of new seasonal flavors at our test kitchen and the R and D that goes along with that!

5. Collaborate. Work with different companies and influencers to create new content and product offerings and in doing so, allow your brand to be introduced to their audiences. For example, we collaborated with a lingerie brand for Valentines day to host a giveaway on both their Instagram page and ours. We were then able to leverage the following of a fashion company and introduce our brand to a different audience, beyond foodies and spirits enthusiasts!

6. Be authentic. I am sure there will be lots of people who will disagree with me, but you don’t need to only use professional photos on your Instagram. You also don’t need to plan out your content in an Instagram calendar and schedule your posts so that they sound very rehearsed. Instead, have your employees take photos, use your customers photos and repost them. And create content on the fly sometimes- if it is still 80 degrees in October, don’t post about how it feels like Fall even though that was on the schedule! Your audience will see right through you if you aren’t being authentic and likely lose interest quickly. Keep them interested and keep them scrolling through your feed, then coming to your store, then sharing that experience!

How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business: “Create a personality for your brand” W was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.