Recently, Shopify and Instagram partnered to host a webinar: Holiday tips and tricks from Instagram and Shopify, featuring Eva Chen. The presenters shared tons of helpful information about marketing businesses on Instagram that will be useful even after the holiday season is over. The original broadcast was over an hour long, so to save you some time, we’ve summarized the top takeaways;

You know your brand best

Instagram’s Vice President of Fashion Partnerships, Eva Chen, frequently works with brands who want to improve their Instagram presence. She said she often gets asked for advice about how to build an Instagram following, and that “there won’t be one answer that fits every business”. 

Eva pointed out that “you know your brand best”, so you are the best person to make decisions about how to grow your account with your business’ voice.  During the webinar, she and her colleague, Aditi Banga from Instagram’s Shopping Partnerships team, provided examples of brands with great accounts that have a strongly defined voice, like Glossier. Glossier is often cited as a good example, but there are plenty of brands out there that have similarly strong branding that comes through on their accounts. 

Build a connection with your audience

Both Eva and Aditi stressed that building a connection with your audience, or followers, is important on Instagram. They placed a lot of emphasis on using Instagram to provide transparency and tell a story about your business, so your audience can really connect with your brand and “feel like they know you”. This connection was stressed as a huge influence on customers’ buying decisions. 

Three examples they cited were:

• Jen Atkin, celebrity hairstylist and founder of Ouai, who used polls on Instagram Stories to get her followers involved in the creation of her collaboration with luggage brand CALPAK. Eva shared that since Jen had asked for opinions on colors and styles for her product, when it was finally released months later, as a follower, she felt that she had a hand in the product development and therefore was more interested in buying it. 
• Milk and Clay, a small ceramics brand, shares Stories and Feed posts that show the process involved in making their products. Their posts were likened to ASMR, and described as “soothing and hypnotic”. Eva shared that behind-the-scenes content like this really helps followers build a relationship with your business, and encourages them to buy from you since they’ve seen the entire product’s journey or creation. 
• Tanya Taylor, a New York-based fashion designer, was also mentioned for doing Reels with her mom. These casual posts were cited as a way to provide an inside look at Tanya’s entrepreneurial journey, so her followers really feel a deep connection and affinity for her brand. 
  

Not only did they recommend getting followers involved and sharing content from behind-the-scenes, the Instagram team also recommended transparently sharing the not-so-good stuff, like challenges or backstories behind certain decisions. They also recommended retelling your story every so often, so that new followers feel better acquainted with your brand. 

Since this was a webinar hosted by Shopify, there was also a lot of emphasis on promoting ecommerce products hosted on Shopify through Instagram. The overall recommendation was to integrate these posts into your content schedule in a way that still made it easy for you to connect with your audience, with their advice being, “The best shopping content is seamlessly shoppable.” 

Shopping posts should have a clear call-to-action, but “not be done in a pushy way.” Aditi also pointed out that engagement on your Instagram posts (aka, the actions followers take, including liking, commenting, saving and sharing) will also change when you tag products in a post, or if you make a post that deviates too much from your other content. The main takeaway here is that the best shopping content is authentic and will connect with your audience, instead of being overly sales-y. 

Feed the beast 

Throughout the broadcast, the Instagram team also brought up a ton of tips related to growing an Instagram following and keeping up with growth. Their top tip was to make sure that you are constantly “feeding the beast”, or posting regularly. It might seem obvious, but they shared that infrequent posts can get lost in the noise since so much content is shared on Instagram daily. Eva cited one Italian fashion brand that posted once a week on Fridays, and was struggling to grow because their post frequency was so low. 

A few ways they suggested to feed the beast included:

• Trying new “surfaces”, or posting in different formats. If you’re used to posting in the Feed, try Stories, Reels, IGTV or Lives. These additional surfaces will help you get in front of your audience more. They shared that even though it might seem scary to try a new format, oftentimes it’s better to try and learn a new format early than to wait and perfect a piece of content.
• Using hashtags in the captions or comments of your Feed posts, so your content is more easily discoverable. Eva made a point to say that it doesn’t matter where the hashtag goes, and if you go back and add a hashtag to an older post, it won’t resurface the post to the top of the “Recent” tab since the “Recent” tab is sorted by the original post date. (More on what’s going on with the “Recent” tab in our previous blog post.)
• Using hashtags in your Stories can make sure others find them and find your account. Eva shared that a “mega influencer” at Paris Fashion Week taught her to shrink hashtags and “hide” them in Stories, so that they wouldn’t be hugely visible in the Story, but would come up for the hashtag. Alternatively, you can make your hashtags “loud and proud.”
• Telling stories in your Stories and really getting followers involved, so they stay engaged with your content. 
• Adding a location to your posts, since many people follow locations, this can help surface your posts to new followers.
• Tag teaming with other accounts and collaborating to engage across your audiences. 
• Not overthinking posts or content! The team stressed that Instagram posts did not have to be overly produced or edited, and that many accounts that share an authentic story have the best engagement. 
  

One example that was cited along with these tips was Tina Craig, better known as BagSnob, who hosts live shopping demos on her account and recently launched her brand UBeauty through Instagram Checkout. Tina talks about her packaging, reposts her friends’ Posts, does Stories takeovers and conversations on Live, and “it just feels like she’s passionate about her product.”

Make sure to experiment

It can be easier for small brands to experiment on Instagram than larger brands, and Eva shared, “There’s a reticence to try new things because they want to get it perfect, but actually logistically it’s more challenging to try new things when you’re big.” Some examples cited were major luxury fashion brands: Dior, Louis Vuitton and Gucci. As you can imagine, “using IGTV and Reels requires so much approval” at larger companies like these.

She encouraged smaller businesses to try new formats and posts, since they can “be more nimble.” The team encouraged entrepreneurs to become early adopters of new features because that way “you have more time to practice and get it right.” Obviously, Instagram wants businesses to use their new features, but there is some truth to experimentation being beneficial and easier to do when you’re small and growing. 

What to expect from Instagram in the future

At the end of the webinar, the team was asked what businesses can expect from Instagram in the next 6-12 months. It was clear that they really want consumers to shop on the platform. Their big announcements were that shopping in Reels will be coming in the next few weeks, and they are making it easy to integrate the shopping experience between Instagram, Shopify and other platforms.