Influencer Marketing: Instagram

How do you look at the platforms. Clearly, Instagram has grown massively over the last decade. Could you explain a bit more about how you engage with Instagram versus YouTube? Do you see the software and the services that they offer as materially different?

I see some differences. The engagement side is fairly similar. Following people, engaging with people, replying to comments. Those kinds of things are fairly similar across all platforms. You might do it slightly differently, but the idea is the same. In terms of the actual content on platforms, again, it’s really dependent on layouts and formats and what works best, in terms of the actual media that goes on them.

What’s your favorite layout for Instagram, in posting? Clearly, you have a certain tone, but is there a certain way that you’d suggest people should start engaging with that?

A lot of it is what works well for you. I’ve seen accounts that do exactly the opposite of what I do and they are just as successful as I am. I usually tell people, it really isn’t about, you have to do what everybody else is doing or you have to do exactly what I’m doing. It’s that you have to figure out what works for you and what the people who you are targeting, in terms of your demographic, want from you and then do that. That might something that’s completely different from what I’m doing, but if works just as well, if not better, because your audience is really interested in it. One of the examples I usually give is photos of me. On Instagram, a lot of people say, you have to be in all your photos, because otherwise they do badly. I always laugh at that, because whenever I’m in my photos, they always do worse than when I’m not. It’s partly because people don’t expect to see me in my photos, necessarily, because I’m not in a lot of my photos. So when I am in my photos, it’s something that they don’t expect from me. Whereas people who are always in their photos, have the opposite effect. If they suddenly put up a photo that they’re not in, it’s something people aren’t expecting and it doesn’t do well. So it really is about looking at the data. It’s about seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s about what people like and then going with that.