Did you sell a house? Tell people. It's not only a success, but also confirmation for others that you're an expert and can sell their properties.

Live stream house tours

You probably organize home tours. With a mobile phone, you can simply make a live stream through Instagram, in which you walk through the house, describe its advantages in your own words and show it to potential or current clients. The live stream, unlike a regular tour, reaches a larger number of people. Don't get me wrong, it is certainly not a substitute for real house tours. But it can help you reach people, who don't come, instead.

Live stream from the neighborhood

You will probably agree that the neighborhood of the house is one of the most important things to consider when buying a house. There is nothing easier than walking around with a phone in hand to show customers where the house is and what is nearby. Livestream that is done well can give them a real sense of the area.

Make quizzes and polls

It is a very simple and engaging thing you can do. Making quizzes and polls in Stories, or even as part of regular posts is a great way to increase engagement with people. 

Chat in Stories

Now you can add the Chat feature to your stories. It means that everyone can join a group and chat with you or other participants. You can use it as a weekly FAQ and for a limited time to answer your followers' questions. It's personal and engaging.

Share existing content

There is plenty of interesting content on Instagram. And this is an advantage for you, because you can easily share the posts you like and show your followers interesting content that they enjoy. Sharing others content and mentioning their accounts alo increases awareness of your account.

Interior tips

Give people tips and ideas for interior design. People like this type of content. Take advantage of existing Instagram content and just share it on your network.

You, as an SMB owner, have a bunch of daily sales and marketing tasks you are probably facing every day, right? With these tips we will help you save some time.

I know, I have been there too… You are about to create a piece of content — a nicely done cappuccino in your café or a beautifully pictured house that you want to sell. But how the heck do you begin? With no professional equipment or experience — you want to produce the best content for your social media profiles, business website or email campaign, right?

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Well, how do you go about it? The key is you don’t have to be perfect, in fact, that’s part of the magic of this medium! Be natural, be spontaneous, and be active. Your new audience will expect funny, educational, engaging and UNPROFESSIONAL content. In a world where marketing aims for the ideal, your audience wants someone or something that they can relate to. A picturesque cappuccino is nice to look at, but what about a customer savouring their morning drink, only to burst out laughing because they have foam on their upper lip? Capture it and share it! Sometimes less is more. And something is always better than nothing…

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In this article, I will show you how you to use a (relatively new) medium that not only allows you to share your unprofessional and spontaneous content, but REQUIRES IT! This medium is called Instagram Stories aka Instastories. As the name says, it can be used on your Instagram profile (both personal and professional). Below see an example of what an Instastory looks like:

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Let us first clarify what Instastories are. They are vertically shared pictures, videos, animations that were originally used by Snapchat. After some period of time, Instagram and Facebook implemented them and extended their platforms. Instastories disappear after 24 hours which makes them an instant, spontaneous and engaging piece of content.

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But why should you actually care about them? How are they relevant to your business? As we regularly discuss in other articles, webinars and private Facebook groups, ask yourself a question before you get started: Can I reach my audience on this channel? Instagram is used daily by one billion users and Instastories by more than 500 million people. That truly means 500.000.000 people. Every. Single. Day.

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Going back to where we began. You are probably asking yourself: “Do I need professional equipment, a best-of-breed creative studio with the best of the best?” Not at all. Be natural, be spontaneous, and certainly, go ahead, and be unprofessional! This platform requires it. Your audience expects you to be natural. They expect to see what’s going on behind the scenes and what your daily updates are — share with them the best moments that can describe you or your business. Tell STORIES! Because that is what this platform is about.

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Let’s break the stereotype: You do NOT need to be a professional to create great, engaging content for Instastories.

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Let’s get practical. How do you really begin?

1. The premise is: You already have your business/ personal Instagram account (if not, get one).
2. Visit the Instagram app and tap your icon (with the + sign) on the top panel/ or simply swipe right.
3. The interface where you create Instastories will open up. Choose either to make a picture, create a video or choose any of your pictures/ videos in your gallery. The options you have when it comes to content creation are hundreds (check out all the features like Boomerang, Live Stream, polls or uploading Gifs to your story).
4. After you are done, click “Send to” and choose either your Instastory platform (yes, this is the one) or send it to some of your friends/ followers.
5. Done. Your Instastory will now be public. Make sure to check the results afterwards. You can see who watched your story (within the first 24 hours of posting it) and how they reacted.

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You know how to get started. Get inspired before you jump into the content creation. See a series that shows some examples of really nice — BUT STILL UNPROFESSIONAL — Instastories which you can do within a few seconds.

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There are plenty of cool features that you can use to make your content visually more appealing. Amongst them, there are live streams (even shared streams with other coworkers, partners, and followers), galleries of Gifs, options such as slow motion or boomerang effects, coloured backgrounds, many text fonts, polls, quizzes and questionnaires (ways to engage with your audience), chat windows and tons of emojis. Again, choose what correlates with your business image (branding). I may be repeating myself, but less is sometimes more…

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Key takeways:

• Instastories offer an opportunity to reach out to your audience — potential customers/ followers.
• Be yourself! Be natural and spontaneous, when creating Instastories.
• Do not insist on the best-of-breed equipment — less is sometimes more.
• Follow the 5 steps stated above to get started with Instastories.
• Inspire yourself with our Series of great examples of Instastories.

Do you run your Instagram account, but see it is not as successful as other businesses' profiles? 

Building up a community on Instagram is really difficult and it takes a long time to gain followers who are engaging with your content. To find your followers, it is crucial to maintain content that is relevant, entertaining, consistent and frequent. Once you master this, you can start to build a larger following of Instagram users for your profile.

So what can you do to get more followers?

Is all your revenue coming from one source? That's a huge risk! Using a single sales and/ or marketing channel to market your business might be a fatal mistake for you. Single-source dependency means over-reliance on one thing and that could ruin your business. It's like having no backup. As much as you diversify your effort into various marketing channels and revenue sources, it’s unavoidable that you find a disparity in results. But that’s not to say you should stop doing it. You never know when a small revenue driver can become your main income and vice versa. 

Some businesses are dependent on one revenue source so they make themselves unduly exposed to forces outside their control. What if that source is over?

For lots of businesses this source is Google, when sales are primarily driven through Google Ads. And they take huge hits when a new competitor outbids them. 

Facebook gathers more than 2,4 billion monthly active users. That being said, it is obvious that the possibility to reach your potential customers is high. On the other hand, getting to know the platform takes time or costs tons of money (for agency fees). For small business owners who decide to leverage this platform, time and money are the core assets.

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So how can you get the most out of the biggest social network? First of all, know the basics. Facebook (and any other advertising platform) can be overwhelming, which makes it easy to get lost. Don’t try to understand everything. Choose to learn what matters to your business the most!

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We have prepared content that will help you get to know the very basic idea behind advertising on Facebook. We call it the Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Advertising and within it we cover the following topics:

• Setting up the right strategy.
• Get to know the Facebook interface.
• What is Facebook optimisation and how does it work?
• How can you effectively target your audience?
• Where does Facebook show your ads?
• How do you pay for your ads?
• What are the types of ads you can run?
• Petr’s case study- a story of a man who successfully sold his company after a few months by growing his business on Facebook.

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Dig into the Facebook advertising by downloading the e-book below and let us know how it helped you boost your business!