The Lure of Social

Over the last year I’ve been watching my daughter, Sarah, as she embarked on growing her social presence through Instagram. It’s been an up and down journey but since social is vitally important for any online business I thought it would be worthwhile picking the brains of my resident expert.

She now has close to 10,000 followers and this is continuing to expand. She has not spent a penny on any advertising and the growth has been entirely organic. More than that, her engagement with her followers is incredible with it being much higher than corporations that have five to six times her number.

As an example, last night Sarah posted a photo (she’s VERY particular when they are posted btw) and within five minutes she had 20 likes and a couple of comments. Within an hour she had over 100 likes and 20 comments. By the morning these numbers had grown to 295 likes and 38 comments.

I just checked out some other images that she’s posted and one of them received 696 likes and 115 comments so it looks as if it’s early days for last night’s post.

Sarah’s now being approached by sponsors who would like her to promote their company’s products. She’s now earning money, continuing to grow her traffic and more importantly, developing a set of skills in the social arena.

What have I learned from my daughter about social?

1.       Content is king.In the case of Instagram, having great photos with a good one liner is absolutely critical. Sarah will spend a huge amount of time getting just the right photo that better reflects her genre.

2.       Regularly post.She’s fanatical about posting every 1-2 days. If you don’t do this then you will see your followers drop off.

3.       Editing your photos is important.For example, choosing the right colour filter/palette for your photos is a way to brand your Instagram page and promotes higher engagement.

4.       It’s not just about the followers.Instagram regularly culls followers as they deem them as being bots. What’s important is engagement. Are the followers commenting, liking etc or are they behaving ambivalently? The more you focus on engagement the higher the value of your traffic.

5.       Be aware that Instagram is your landlord!Instagram recently mistakenly closed Sarah’s account and it took her about 5 hours to get it reinstated. This is where domains come in….

If Instagram permanently closed her account then she would have lost all her work. By having her own domain, she’s the one that is in the driver’s seat and will be able to get back to her followers independently of any third party. This is her next project to develop as part of her social experience.

What does Sarah have? A growing userbase, traffic, content, high engagement and of course sponsors. Her next challenge is to migrate some of these users into a blog that is associated with a domain that she alone controls.

Why is all of this important to domain owners? A lot of traffic has migrated away from websites and into social streams. By embracing this change domain investors can potentially get some of this traffic back by building a social presence for their development projects.

I will be the first to say that a completely different skill set is required for online social interactions compared to traditional domaining. It’s great having a daughter as a mentor (shoes on the other foot now!) but if you plan on effectively tapping into the social revolution for one of your businesses then understand there’s a pretty steep learning curve.

I’m not sure if she would do it but let me know if you would be interested in Sarah running a webinar on her experiences and what she’s learned. I know that I’ve found our conversations fascinating and really worthwhile.

BTW – here's Sarah’s instagram