Andrew: You guys are in for a real treat and today Emile runs great his company called unforgettable hotels and he’s a master hacker, a growth hacker, he basically has mastered, he’s got a really interesting background hails from the Netherlands right, lives in Indonesia, likes to travel the world stays at all sorts of crazy hotels, from that his path applies he helped coach students within a starter in startups right doing that he was the director of pillows Xai, which was helping Chinese middle-class travel, which is interesting well to talk about that.
He works with businesses helping them grow their followers cuz, he’s a master at this doing this stuff and he uses social media paid building sales funnels done all that kind of stuff and he like I said before he’s the founder unforgettable hotels, does in restaurants does and does interesting thing, where he offers advertising services the hotels and then rebrands for the travel agencies industry and it was really an interesting dude and I came via our jumper group and it was really interesting at a great conversation with him and I think I’m just gonna let you know go through if things I missed or wasn’t quite clear on or didn’t do everything and I share your story on that
The guys if you have questions or comments on this, just leave him in the side here we’ll do live comments after we go through the stories of a Emile walking through how he’s grown and done his methods and then he’s also got a special thing, that he’s doing where he’s gonna do a course yes and he’s got people interested in that so you might be able to hop on this limited time offer that he’s got with this thing so it’s, to learn from a master so you know welcome, thanks for joining fill in the blanks that I didn’t get exactly correct and well and we’ll dive into things.
Emile: Yeah, well I think it was uh there was a very complete brief overview, we had we had nice chat last week, and I’m looking forward to doing this it’s my first live chat so, I don’t immediately write me down when I make a mistake but I look very much forward through this and thank you for giving me this statute was to tell a bit more about what I said
Andrew: Cool so yeah let’s go into kind of your background like so a little bit about how you came about doing Instagram? what you did prior to this? you know, I don’t have to go too deep, but prior to this and then how you kind of found this interesting idea of creating content generator got people and, working about 2 hours and growing this stuff and take us through that whole journey
Emile: Yeah um so well it gives us a very brief summary of what I did before that, you really touch it too, I come from the Netherlands, I worked in Amsterdam at the startup studio where, as an entrepreneur and joined different multinational corporates like booking.com, for example, that’s where I started developing my passion for traveling.
After that I had my own company also in social media but this was only Chinese social media, and then in 2017 I moved to Singapore, I joined a tech startup and I worked as growth hacker and that’s where I really learned to approach things like Instagram from a different angle and with different more experimental approach and that is also when the real growth on my own account started to happen.
So I started unforgettable hotels and now almost exactly one year ago I think it was beginning of November 2017, and actually the main purpose of the account initially was to see how I could grow an account as fast as possible, because there are a couple of options or a couple of ways the Instagram platform is structured like the explore page, for example, and there is no other social media platform in my opinion where it is as easy to grow fast and like really reach large audiences for free completely, and yeah that so I was very interested in seeing how I could have could get more audiences
That has taken a lot of experiments but yeah I enjoy doing the experiment and now it’s the results are quite good, I still hope that in 2019 I can double it–and I can double again but, now this month we are on schedule to grow with a bit over 50,000 a month we’re a bit over 500 covers a day,
Yeah so that is that’s the story behind it and then, what you said yeah the current so the creator’s networker, you wanted to know?
Andrew: Well I mean, you know here’s the thing I mean, I just I wanted just to see how fast things are growing, okay so I looked at your site on I think was Monday, like 84,000 today I think was in the weekend is it today it’s almost at 87,000, I mean that amazing like the growth on that like you were telling me where you’re growing like 12 thousand followers on a week is quite amazing, on them and you know the way that you were doing it was quite interesting.
So in a sense before we could get into like the whole growth and how that was kind of doing what was the whole purpose behind you know you’re doing you know, the hotel I mean it was it you had a passion right I mean is it telling me right now
Emile: Definitely, the best way to start or to do anything is of course if you like them if you like what you’re doing, and I am very interested in these very high-end hotels and resorts and I just like it I have worked through my use a lot and different kind of hotels.
So I was fairly interested in travel and hotels and that is why I picked this niche to start with and the yeah and what comes on top of it is that, a lot of people when they start on Instagram, for example, them pick a niche and I would say okay I’m going to do travel, and what I find is that when you go into like a sub-niche so because travel so big and if you post a photo of winter sports one day and a big next day then your niche is it’s about travel clearly but it’s not really going anywhere. A lot of people would like winter sports maybe not that interest in the beach and vice versa
So I decided okay I’m going to pick I and luxury hotels and resorts in mainly Southeast Asia sometimes, I go outside of Southeast idea well but mainly Southeast Asia because I am looking at it here as well. Yeah that’s that is how it how I decided to come up with this niche
Andrew: Right yeah and what was interesting before so we were talking, last week or something is that you actually worked for booking.com right, and that was a very interesting way on how they grew their site, so can you give a little insight into like just a you know sort of brief window of like how booking.com actually worked as a site?
Emile: Yeah so what we did at Google.com I was hired by booking.com as a party that they outsource for their innovation project, so well they said okay at booking.com, we have only one objective and that is to optimize the number of bookings on our website and everything else is distraction so, we don’t do it inside our own brick and mortar but can we have to outsource it to another company.
That is where I was in the team with a former founder of booking with whom actually, I am Landsman up till today I still regularly speak, and yeah there they said okay we see that Airbnb, this is in 2004-2015.
Today where yeah looking at what was going on around Airbnb and they said okay we want to do something like this as well so they hired me and a couple of others as lean startup experienced lease time entrepreneurs, to do a lot of these kinds of experiments come up with a with three concepts I think of which one was pitched and then yeah brought to the next level, is that what you were what you were looking for?
Andrew: Oh yeah because, I mean it kind of leads into how you came in I think with sort of you know the unforgettable hotel, you know in that sense where you know you think of it being booking.com type of sights as you know a great and it was very small where they outsource most of the stuff which was kind of quite an amazing on that story.
So you know in this so as you travel through this journey of creating this, I mean was it the motivation that you didn’t want to work a lot of hours but you wanted to get high growth, I mean is it more on the side of now that you have all this growth you know was it selling leads, I’m like how were you what were you thinking about in terms of the monetization.
Emile: Well to be completely honest when I was starting it, I still left it open for how I would like to monetize it and there are, probably if you are for example like the Shopify Seller and you already have products and then you’re going to build your brand around that product and your audience then you have a clear objective in okay I want to build a big audience and then send perfect from here to my Shopify shop and or immediately lease out through the Instagram page
I didn’t really have something like that so my first idea was to send traffic from my Instagram page to a landing page which I had filled up with a lot of blog kind of content for so people could spend more stuff about hotels and then there were this booking and hotels.com affiliate links so that would be the first option for me to try to monetize
And yeah that’s that did not work very well because what happens is, when you offer holidays or overnights recommendations then you are offering product that’s not there’s not always a demand for this so, when people land at my site 99.9% of people did not have the need for a hotel at that times, I’d be like site and they kick around a bit but the next time when they were actually going to book a hotel, I was a bit probably not on top of their minds or they just prefer to go to booking directly or to a different kind of side, so there is always this gap between Instagram page and then they’re like a black box and then they book their hotel and not through me
So I did not really monetize audience beside a few bookings so yeah then we start looking at different other kinds, of monetization possibilities from there yeah again we have we have tried a lot of different kind of things and still are, yeah experimenting with different kind of things so
Andrew: Right cool, all right so, now as you were doing this you sort of came into this this way of this mindset like fun or you sort of sort of to do trial and error and just tracking ideas you came up with this content network, kind of thing so why don’t you explain to the audience kind of like what that is and how you came up with this and how this whole thing works?
Emile: Yeah you know, okay well to get the first since I would explain one thing about the content, so the important thing to grow is of course three or is the most important thing is the quality of the content, and additionally the quantity and consistency is very important as well and then besides that there is a lot like growth hacks that you can use to increase the reach and stuff like that but if the quality is not good and if you’re not consistent then you won’t break any numbers any way you’re not going anywhere.
One’s going on and in travel industry, there is like a couple of very good content creators and a lot of people like to report their content and it’s great and a lot of people like it but, what happens is that you see that there is a lot of the same content on the same kind of profiles, and I wanted to differentiate more so, that was one thing and I had a very large need for yeah for quality content all the time and then I yeah started more looking around and thinking harder could be a better way to do this and to differentiate more from all the other travel accounts that are out there.
One of the first content creators was a guy from Spain, and I just came across his profile and he had he had filled with beautiful pictures and I thought this would all work so well on my page and I look at his text by that time he barely got a detector or anything so it was like undiscovered but very good photographer still and he so I had a chat with him I reached out through the end and he told me that he was also very much in traveling and that he’d like to go he had to do mainly the South European but also two Asian countries so I asked him to share some of his content with me and so that I could post it on my page.
By that time my page had about it was not as big back the next thing 10,000 followers maybe 12,000, and he himself he was below 2000 so I think 1,400 sense about that and he was very excited that I reached out to him because he said he wanted to grow this Instagram account as well, but he’s a photographer and he wants to take nice photos and post it on Instagram and all the other things that are required in order to really grow, he didn’t want to do that he didn’t feel like doing that so he was very happy that I reached out to him because his content much more exposure
When I posted it’s got really good man’s a lot of engagement and also what was interesting for me and for this content creator is that afterward a lot of other travel pages started republish reposting his content, so that sense of to be great for him because he got a lot of a lot of extra engagement on his post and more growth and he’s growing faster now as well and at the same time it was also interesting for me because a lot of these travel pages started following my page because, I was the first one to show more on face content in this, yeah in this group of people that are trying to grow their travel pages
When did a little yeah but interesting success I thought they’re distantly something I can do more with because it was nice to work with the photographer like that because it’s just a professional, who takes brilliant photos but does not have a big Instagram page, and for me it felt as if my page became a little bit more meaningful when I could help out small content creators as well because before that I was literally really just reposting somebody else’s confidence and then doing my tactic to make it feel faster than they are growing themselves.
Then I thought okay what can what else can I do with this to make it grow faster and to do this with more people at the same time my own patrons grow faster so and well in there and to grow faster so that you get more attention from hotels, and and look at in media now but ever for example hotels in Italy or in France or in South America as well actually reaching out and asking if it was possible to do collaboration so that was another yeah another thing because of course, you want to do every kind of collaboration because it’s just it’s the jury in right direction and it’s nice but I’m not going Indonesia to Italy obviously for to stay two nights at the hotel
Yeah then there was another thing going on and there was then I came up with one solution that solved all these problems and that was the creative network, so what I did is I started reaching out to content creators which the content, I believe would work well on my page and start reaching out to them or search for the first and then reach out if I found somebody that was like really interesting and from there see if they would be interested in, yeah become content creator
I don’t forget what else because this way, I could post their content as if it is part unforgettable, we produce our own content because they are now in a way part of the part of the team, so I had quality content I had more original content and on top of that I have concentrators in different parts of the room
I get a request for collaboration in Italy, now I have a person who will actually go to this hotel and stay there and feature the hotel so we do collaboration the photo photographer, or content creator or in some cases it’s like a mobile an influencer type of page, they’re very happy because they are going on my behalf to any hotel for free and they create content in return for me which I can share it, as if it’s ours.
Andrew: All right so on the content that you were doing and when you were creating that for those hotels right or for the content, so you to find these kinds of the people you would search say hotels and then you would you know look for those hashtags for those hotels and then you would find those people who might have taken photographer photos of those things and then you would bring them and ask them they can I share those photographs for that hotel?
Emile: Yeah but I gotta say that is the most time-consuming part though, because how Instagram works for example is, if you are searching for hashtags then the hashtags that you find first are the hashtags that are placed on underneath the most popular posts at that moment and that automatically means that it has to be a bigger page with more followers and more likes and more comments and everything so you have to scroll down quite far to or dig deep to really find this rough diamonds I would I would say when it comes to Instagram and yeah that’s really time-consuming part and you go
I don’t know there’s not really a specific strategy that has proven to always work so what I do is it’s it starts with a nice hotel if I have seen a nice hotel that I want to post and I go to their page and see their text photos and then I start scrolling down there and yeah, that is sometimes successful, but at our the other hand there are so many different people staying at nice hotels and like hundreds of different people and if it’s a nice hotel all these people like to share their posts and none of them is like photographer so you’re endlessly scrolling through a lot of low-quality content
Andrew: So you’re trying to find a diamond in the rough kind of like photographers these hotels pretty much
Emile: Yeah you have to look and I think it today’s is where nobody else is looking yes, okay for everybody I was looking it’s like the latest, where you find as popular photographers already and yeah so that is the most time-consuming part, but well if you find a person then they’re very open and flexible to work with and that is very offensive and to just because if you want to try to work with like a big photographer who has a million followers or a thousand or whatever then such person is, yeah he is just not really interested in working with anybody else except for like yeah bigger brands who are going to point.
Andrew: Right yes so and then so as you’re going through this which is a lot of legwork right so that’s where the that happens, I guess that’s kind of I guess the point of like when you’re small you gotta kind of search and find right as you grew, right as you grew then what happened as more people as you people start to reach out to you is that correct?
Emile: Yeah definitely so, when you grow then and that’s but still happens that happens a lot now actually is that people are finding you, and then I don’t know why but maybe,e they just send out their requests to be featured through a lot of pages or maybe they’ve seen that I have featured small pages in the past but there are tons of requests every single day from yeah 99%, is its content that does not match with the criteria of what we like to share but yeah it’s first you have to find and now you will be found, so that just comes with growth.
Also, if you look for the easy way to find pages that are relevant for your posts to feature now, I’m one of the big pages that people easily find so if you type in a hotel in Instagram search then one of the first pages that you find, and so that is yeah
Andrew: Did you come up with my hashtags you come up with like I think so when you’re doing this and you’re creating this you probably have your unforgettable hotels as a hashtag but you know do you come up with 30 hashtag different things, like when you’re doing this and then they start to get popular and you develop like one yeah branded hashtag?
Emile: Well they’re the hash Texas is I have a couple of ideas on that that is, yeah which are my learnings so, first thing is that where everybody starts off with the hashtags including me is that you think okay, I just need to take big hashtags because big hashtags a lot of people use them so a lot of people see them and that’s what I want so you start using travel and photography and these kinds of hashtags that have like millions of posts already
What happened then is that I did not reach anybody through my hashtag because, place that you’d need to reach in order to be seen by people in the hashtag section it’s the top section of the of the top posts and you only reach that if you are competitive with other top ones that are there based on engagement, so if I want to go to the top of the photographer or the travel hashtag which has hundreds of millions of parts then you will only be visible there, we have like tens of thousands of likes and comments and saves and shares
And I didn’t have that so I thought is not working and then started to go lower and lower until you reach the top of hashtags which at least you can reach the top section but then you get more specific hashtags like hotel photos in the south of Italy and that is very specific and that is also something that not many people are actually looking for, but at least some discovery some people reached it reached some people in the theater so after that okay, these hashtags what’s what now what is really going on there
If you look to it from a user point of view you see that you have the hashtags it’s like keywords what you use in Google, so what relevant searches do people make in Google that is able to be relevant for the nature that I want to be found within Instagram, and from there I started to only use but not immediately but slowly it’s moved in the direction that I only started using locations and destination names because it seems that that was what people are really looking for, so yeah that works very well and it’s not I have to make it more specific to constantly reached top section all the time so I made for every country, where I post about a set of about 30 hashtags.
Andrew: Are you there?
Emile: yeah
Andrew: We were talking about the content and the creators right and finding that stuff so let’s pick up whatever we kind of left off I think and yeah
Emile: I think it was um well I don’t know which part you missed have to say because I was talking about hashtags but
Andrew: Yeah, we left off the hashtag is where we left off they were talking about millions for I mean I remember you were talking about millions of hashtags for like travel or things like that
Emile: Yeah gently so that is that’s what normally the everybody who has left tried out different things is just going into these hashtags and, that’s pretty much useless because you will never reach the sexiest of the of where the hashtags are shown in Instagram, if you are not a significant account so then I thought that what could, I use what kind of hashtags could I use better to be to read more people and to be seen by more people.
I have purchased it from a keywords point of view how you use keywords in Google and yeah that using native destinations and now if you look to my hashtags, I have from every destination that I share Hotel about they have a destination set of hashtags.
Paris 25 to 30, and for example if the hotels in Bali then would have and I would have Bali it’s off but, Bali daily Bali live in Bali life those kinds of things.
Andrew: Let me ask you something how do you know how those hashtags are doing do you do you do use a tool for that?
Emile: I just look at Instagram itself, so what I do is, I, first of all, I would use Bali because they tell is invalid then from Bali, edit okay this post has or this hashtag has but 60 million posts, how many engagements or what kind of engagement do posts in the top protection get then? I see okay the average layer is about 3000 likes hundred comments and yeah that that is about average and then the highest has maybe 10,000 and the lowest maybe 1000.
Then I will be as honest as possible to myself and say okay am I competitive for dish top section with the normal amount of engagement effort, engagement that I get on my posts? and well if the answer is yes then I would edits to the ad set if it’s known they’re not and then from there, you can Instagram gives you suggestions of related hashtags so from there I would just tap on all these things and do the same repeat the same thing that I have done.
If I then have enough about Bali because yeah, but there are not anymore or because I think well I also want to use other kinds of hashtags for smaller places in Bali itself and, I just applied the same approach to do the next topic, which I want to create a little bundle of hashtags and then these bundles all together is my hashtag set for this destination.
In the beginning, I changed it more often but now when I yeah when you started to reach the top section of bigger hash then, yeah, it’s less urgent to constantly update it, I think because yeah like really big ones like travel or photography, data will still not reach the top anyway so
I also feel like that people are not really searching for photography or travel but more for something that is more relevant to themselves so if you are planning to go to Bali then you will look for Bali and you will look for Seminyak, it’s a place in Bali and Ubud is another place in Bali, so you will probably rather look at those kinds of things then that you would look for photography, because it’s just a fact
Andrew: So, yeah so, the training hatches or the hashtags that people are looking for is destinations of those and they want to see images of the place?
Emile: That thing really worked well for me yeah, since I when I started focusing on only times of the destinations then it yeah, that started really good.
Andrew: Yeah because there’s a self-need I guess for those for those people.
Emile: Exactly to me it also makes sense because, for myself if I go to a new place I might look at Instagram, to find some concept about the place to see if actually how does it look like what kind of photos do other people think this place and this is not appealing to me or not really
Yeah, I don’t do this for a lot of other things to be understood I don’t use Instagram search that much to find content or information so, but for locations, I do so that’s why I’d made yeah sense to me and yeah it worked.
Andrew: Right so that’s been working for you and so, you’re so like if you were to break this down into like, I mean how many problems well how many steps do you have in terms of like okay let’s break this down in a process for somebody, if they want to start and try and do this themselves how would you what would what would you tell them to do in a sort of a step process order?
Emile: Yeah for the whole Instagram thing right?
Andrew: yeah
Emile: Okay well, I have to quite clear mind because I recently noted key things which step to take so, first you start off with your page setup, and there’s a couple of things that that are important so you want your profile picture to be a logo, if you are not if you want to grow your account but you are not celebrity or some kind of famous person and you also don’t want to become like a personal branded something, like a blogger then you just use a logo it looks more professional and it also shows people immediately that they are not just following a random person that this is actually a business that’s not something.
Then you have your username, and your username just should be clear and to the point and not some kind of abbreviations and numbers inside it that makes it look like it’s some kind of spammy codes or robots or whatever so just the name of what it is, and then there’s an important part that is the bio, especially the title of the bio because this part can you can see it like the metadata of your page and Instagram uses the information with you right there just how Google uses method a form to crawl through or information on internet. Instagram uses this mega to crawl through Instagram profiles when they are going to give you search results.
I have hotels and motels, villas and restaurants now as the as the title of my bio, because when somebody looks for hotels that is what Instagram is going to run through first so you really want to have your in products or your main thing in there, because there are people that’s what you want to be found for so it has to be there
Then below that, I have written, I have just one line so, I say they’re in Dutch and these steaks, I forgot else because from those my own hashtag and. then people immediately know what it’s all about that’s it, then and I recommend because it looks clean, so that’s one reason and second reason is the time that people will spend when they land on your profile is going to be very short so, when you have like a very, yeah bio that takes a lot of space then it will turn on people immediately, it’s my feeling.
It’s not only based on assumption I also have seen it and that’s experienced it so, just a clean one line about what you are doing if you have a promo or something and know if you use the link in your bio then you write, one call to action pointing down or whatever to the link and that’s it just to keep the clean, let’s for the set up then, but also yeah apart well I told about the niche and picking a certain niche, so you’ve got more reference then when you really go into the post there
I will say are the three main most important things one is the first thing is the quality of the content, and this is also another thing that I have experiment with a lot and what you have to keep in mind here is that taste is very subjective so close that you like a lot is normally the post that you would share on your page, because you think this is so nice beautiful and I have had more than once that I post something and I thought this is going through the roof, this is the most beautiful post I’ve ever shared and that it was quite a disappointing results actually and so that made me realize that if you want to have more stable growth then you should base your decision-making nuts on subjective things like what you personally feel about a photo or a video but about a lot more yeah more,
So you can look at big pages that are comparable or in the same image as you are in and then you will scroll through their post and you see okay this one gets 5,000 likes this one against five times like this gets 4,000 this gets 12,000 and then the rest four or five four so okay this bus apparently doing much better than any other post, that means that this one has proven in the past based on the numbers that it actually works there’s a lot of people like this.
Even though I might not like it myself I will prioritize that post and nine out of ten times that works very well so it’s like it comes into researching which you are more yeah in a way more data-driven actually been then emotional about from and data have driven is a bit heavy to say because your analyze things like comments and likes but at least it’s it’s data so yeah so that is the first thing very important.
Then the second thing is the, engagement so in order to have your posts reaching more people and ultimately to reach the Explorer page of other people you want your post to get as much as possible engagement and there are a couple of things that significantly help you to get more engaged, so the first thing is to write a call to action in your caption, and there are two things to keep in mind you want to make it easy as possible so if you ask somebody you show photo and you ask somebody what do you think about this? then somebody would probably not reply, and if you say double tap or like if you like this then you will get definitely more likes.
If you can add a caption that goes would I also explained with the hashtag strategy in which you are really going to look at how does this benefit the person who is seeing it on his timeline then you can come up with something that’s more meaningful again
A post a little while ago, I post it on Friday afternoon and it was about a restaurant and I did the caption and I wrote tag a friend you want to take out for dinner this weekend and that got so many comments and hashtags from different people because I guess it’s yeah you suggest somebody to ask somebody out and it’s very easy almost like an excuse to make a person, you haven’t seen in a while or I don’t know your wife or your girlfriend or anybody that you like to have dinner with it is urgent because it’s about the common weekend so people actually do it because if they don’t do it now that we can go by and they might another week, so yeah you give people really good reason to comment on your post.
So that is the that is one thing for to increase engagement and additionally there are engagement groups and engagement groups work as far as you have, different accounts in the same niche they are in engagement group often on Instagram or telegram and when they posted something they shared post in the group and everybody in group likes and comments on the post and this helps you get a lot of engagements immediately after posting and the more engagement you get soon after you post the more relevant, Instagram thinks your content is and that way more people will get to see it on the Explorer page
Yeah so that’s a very important thing and I do it now, I’m scaling down because I need it on less than I used before but in the beginning I used I was in like 30 or 40 engagement groups with 20 cars in every group and that does not equal six hundred safe increments on the post but close to 80, 200 yeah that’s really boost your engagement and that helps you to reach the explore page and especially when you cannot rank the big hashtags you know you really want to use this to grow.
There’s a lot of people who have problems with it and there’s always a lot of myths and everybody has a lot of opinions about it but one thing is for sure it works so
Andrew: On that Explorer thing I mean do you need to have I mean if you have a large following like you probably get up there a lot more if you’re just starting out a page it’s going to probably not happen that quickly, I would assume right?
Emile: Well the Explorer page is different for everybody so, you reach the explorer page oh okay, you have your account, and then you have your followers and engagement group and if a lot of these people so your followers engage with it then Instagram say okay a lot of people find this content interesting, and they show it to the friends of the ones that engage with your content so, if that is small accounts that do not follow a lot of people they can still on quite okay still reach people.
Andrew: Interested okay yeah, what about stories you do anything with stories? do you find those engaging? or what’s your take on it?
Emile: Stories are I’m using them more and more now the problem is with the stories that you need to have this like portrait mode content yeah I can also use the smaller pics, but I don’t like how it looks and I want everything to look really good, so yeah I start to use it more and more Only because I now have a lot of content creators, just a couple more joint so it’s easier to get like nice background photos or videos.
Stories actually are really good, as well so what I just told you before we started, yeah not last night Tuesday night I posted like a question who wants to learn more about Instagram? submit your username, and then the question box and that brought me yeah in 24 hours hundred people submitted the username, they want and then sent them like three tips how to grow on Instagram with the link to my messenger bot
Yeah that’s that just in 24 hours I got hundred subscribers who are interested travel industry really interested, in drawing or Instagram so they just lead and yeah in Instagram you don’t sell, yet but it is like for traffic it’s great and especially to send people from Instagram to messenger that does so easily because it’s all Facebook and just a link in the DM and it opens in the app completely so you don’t have like this perfect greens but it just opens the app there so that works very well and then what, I do with stories.
Andrew: So when those people contacted you then just DM them with the messenger link that correct?
Emile: Yeah so I made like the image with three tips, in it on how to grow your Instagram accounts faster and then I had like a small thanks a hi fi, thank you for reaching out these are our three tips, I hope you like it if you’re interested in more follow this link and do that our free cheat sheet, something like that, and so yeah that’s how you get them into their into the messenger bot.
Yeah that’s one thing for the stories and what I’m starting if this coming weekend is to do live stories and to put my own face a bit more behind brand so, yeah the thing that that now my page is lacking is that you have this know like trust is by principles and people know my page I sends about 15 messages to random people every week to see how they are feeling about the page and I really like it and everybody is very interesting like to talk plus it lacks a bit of trustability,
I believe I don’t think people who would say that you know in the direct chat but there’s no face or no person behind to brand so it still it can be anybody and yeah I want to make it make it like a person make it more human so that is something and yeah, to be honest, I tried not to do that for the longest time because I just didn’t really like the idea of having myself there and reaching out to thousands of people but it’s definitely it’s definitely glad to go because people like to see people and it’s very engaging. It’s just another way to get the attention of people so to get the state of mind to show to bring your message across yeah
Andrew: Yep right cool so those would be the steps to go to sort of grow your account
Emile: No, that is the that are the three most important things to grow your to engagement then besides that there’s a lot of other different things, which are definitely important.
Andrew: What about like so if you are doing that because those are pretty awesome tips I mean I think that’s the key, I think for most people I think these three things or what they got to start with and then they can learn to do the next steps right wouldn’t you say?
Emile: The one other thing that I wanted to add here because I know that’s very hard, big challenge or big step it seems to be and it was for me as well, but how Instagram works is the more reach you get the more followers you get, that’s just a fact yes tomorrow if we reach the more potential followers and among them as potential followers a couple people actually follow so for me about 1% two people that I reached converts into a follower.
yeah it’s getting a bit less now but it’s my guess and generalizing a bit more to it which gets details about 1%, yeah so that’s one thing and if you post once a day you might reach 5,000 or 10,000 people and if you push twice a day you reach 10,000 to 20,000 people it just builds your growth and it a lot of people think or feel like people will get annoyed by it in their page all the time or it will be too much stuff like that but a friend of mine who has a has a very large bet as well told he said just try it for a week and you will see that already after a week it works
It for me started working the next day already it just doubles my growth literally so before that I was around 5000 followers a month and then, I fasted twice a day and the growth doubled and on top of that it’s not because people like my page so much that they are willing to like two plus day it’s because you reach so many people and you reach people in the US but also in Asia, and when my first post is coming up people in the US are asleep and that targets a different area throughout it’s more Europe actually in the Middle East and Asia and then when the second post comes up that is like prime time US.
I could even at the third post because now my met my second post is prime time for US, East Coast and I also had a lot of followers West Coast, so I could even at the third one and still not bother people too much so yeah, I think automatically Instagram manages.
Andrew: Yes so you’re saying that like people, who just post once a day you get some reach but if you’re doing two or three posts a day it really helps any algorithm
Emile: Yeah, yeah that’s okay
Andrew: okay okay well that’s interesting because yeah I know it’s I mean that’s obviously the time commitment, but you know when you’re getting content like you are from lots of people it makes it a little easier right I mean I guess once you start getting to that to that level.
Emile: True but if you use the data-driven approach that you just discussed then you yours will still be able to get more content and even if you sometimes have like first it does not work well, this very easy and Instagram to forget that you are talking about real people because sometimes I have post and it only reaches twenty thousand people that outside of my followers, and I’m a little bit disappointed because compared to the numbers in Instagram’s it’s very low its way below my average, but you mentioned that twenty thousand people is it’s like stadium full of people so it’s so many people that you still reach.
And if you don’t if you don’t do that post 420 which takes maybe 20 minutes including groups then you wouldn’t have had that
Andrew: Right yeah I mean I guess you think about 20 thousand people going to a stadium and you’re filling it with people watching it, that’s pretty big, so it works out on a national kind of base level right like so if you are a local merchant right and you wanted to kind of grow your followers you know in a local thing so you’re a restaurant or something like that what would be would your approach be the same way that you’re doing this taking pictures?
Emile: Um yeah well the thing is that if no my approach would be different, because the engagement groups do not make a lot of sense for local businesses because then you are it’s a bit uncontrolled growth, so you can of course see which post you are going to engage with and then you know okay his followers are going to be my next followers, so you can choose it a little bit but that’s completely and you will easily yeah, you cannot control what’s going to happen if you users engagement groups.
For example a couple of months ago I overnight get 2,000 followers from Kuwait and they all have Arabic written and names so when I woke up and I looked at it and I was scrolling down, what hell is going on, and not a problem but it was also strange because I did not have to do anything but via the large account there had found me and shared it and a lot of people liked it so they started to follow and yeah that could happen anytime when you’re using engagement groups this kind of things will definitely happen more easily
Yeah then you are not focusing or when you’re reaching the audience that’s not relevant to your business, so yeah I would go a different direction, I would use Instagram story ads targeting because they are underused moments very cheap.
Andrew: So you would do Instagram story ads in a case in Facebook ads manager and run story ads so would you be doing things where you’re promoting whatever a discount to a place? or come in and have a happy hour a night with us? or whatever kind of things would be more on the pictures that you’re posting of like here’s you know, whatever food?
Emile: I would now I would always try to capture the people so if you are just offering a promotion then they say okay I think you my taking it and go there and then after next and we’re done. So I would now my favorites strategy at moment is to lead people to a messenger to software
For example by well if you have restaurants for example in, let’s say you are in Los Angeles right so you have restaurants in Los Angeles, maybe you want to target tourists then I would say a couple of miles around the restaurants say okay three nice third for the top eight things to do in 8 things to do in Santa Monica, swipe up and give you the overview what you can what’s on today, so that I really have this urgency to do it and then yeah you give them free company they into your messenger then maybe on the sixth or the fifth or the fourth or whatever page you have in mind you would promote okay this is a restaurant that people really like and have unforgettable experiences here anyway we have a coupon code if you go it’s making reservations before tea or something like that
Andrew: Yeah so with it so if you were the restaurant will you it would it be just some page that’s not connected to your restaurant or it would be and you would run an Instagram story your Instagram story is eight things to do in Santa Monica and in there it’s like find those eight things and but, before you get those eight things you’re asking them to join Facebook Messenger is that kind of how that would work?
Emile: Uh well it would be that would lead them to messenger directly so that would be just an immediate opt-in.
Andrew: Right okay so you would run an ad to a Facebook messenger and then from there
Emile: yeah we optin, also definitely also run a lot of campaigns similarly to that on Instagram but to grow your Instagram locally is yeah it’s much harder, because you are limiting yourself very much so there’s only a select group that’s target and I managed to Instagram account for company now and they only want to grow in a few specific cities in the Netherlands so yeah then it goes very slow and then the approach would be completely different because there you really want to the people that you cut, you they want to make to engage them so much that I we are going to talk about you on facebook
Andrew: Right so that what’s a local contest and bring our friend and you know all
Emile: That hope really staying close to the to the people yeah
Andrew: mmm-hmm right! and when I guess you would if you have your restaurant or your thing you would obviously promote that with a tabletop or a car join our Facebook, join our Instagram and you could win whatever kinds of things like that I guess what your customers you coming in right?
Emile: Yeah
Andrew: All right, yeah awesome well this is uh this is awesome stuff so now you I know you talked about that you’re gonna start doing a course, I mean you were like put that thing out there so if people want to get in touch with you and maybe sign up for your course and teaching them and taking them through this training how’s the best way to go about doing that?
Emile: The best way is well I can share a link, I have a cheat sheet online so that got a little bit more, in detail like really the exact steps for everything that I just discussed before and it also gives more examples, I actually used the example of the camping with dogs baked that you got back
Andrew: Did you break that down and figure out how they were doing it?
Emile: Yeah well but those kind of things it’s also for advertising in general if you have one niche then you are interesting for a lot of people but if you have two niches combined then that then you barely have any competition in most cases and you hit people with two of their passions and that’s just irresistible it seems yeah so that works really well so I use it as an example and so how to determine your niche and submissions.
Andrew: Oh Cool! I have to get that off to take a look at what just what you created, yeah I think I think with the traveling the hotels and the restaurants in that same area I think that’s like a two niches there that are like you know I everybody likes to stay at a nice place and they also like to eat?
Emile: Yeah definitely and I think in Facebook posts, I can share the link to the page where you can just out what this is like
Andrew: Perfect yeah awesome well dude I know it’s I know it’s getting there and during your daytime and so I know that I know that you’ve got things to do and get busy getting more hotel living but coming are sharing this incredible knowledge even though we had some technical difficulties with that and unfortunately we just we picked up it was fine as awesome sharing some great knowledge people will put this into the Facebook group as well of where people can contact you and get ahold of you and stuff like that but yeah I appreciate it and we’ll have to do this again.
Emile: Definitely if yeah it was definitely a very nice experience for me as well so, thanks again a lot and I hope it’s valuable to all of you and yeah please reach out if you have any more questions or need further explanation on any kind of topic.
Andrew: Awesome, Great, alright bud we’ll talk to you later thanks.
Emile: All right speak to you.
Andrew: All right.
Emile: Bye Bye.