Is everyone else like me where you go back and forth about how much you want to share about your life on Instagram (if you run a small business, I'd guess yes)? I go through phases of storying on my personal account with a combo mix of these:
- Home life ft. Jeff
- When I go out and its fun w friends & fam
- Random thoughts like remember when John Mayer dated Katy Perry bc I legit forgot, also did you know he wrote a song about Taylor how did I never know, and also I'm sad I'll be gone for his concert this fall
On my Pickles account, I usually try and only story about Pickles-specific things, unless I'm traveling and it's exciting. But during Renegade (I have said that SO many times this past month; another proof why you shouldn't only measure by sales for craft fair success) 3 separate people mentioned something very random I posted about on stories from the past couple of months, and I was like, what.... I got curious and asked a couple people about what they thought about small businesses storying in general. There was a small gaggle of great girls (gen z??) that told me I should insta-story more often and also include my face.
(Here was my attempt last week, lol)
So I've been trying it for about a week now, insta-storying a lot: a handful of frames every couple hours (what feels like incessantly for me, but inspo from Eva, ofc). I've shared about how productive I was at a coffeshop, my random decision to clean our whole kitchen and sell our floating wood shelves, and many snippets of my work life.
Results have been decently surprising:
- I think I lost a handful of followers in the beginning days, but not after that
- The number of story views is very consistent; even more curious, the view # is going up.
- I have gotten a lot of story replies, both from friends and follower requests... what!
(Maybe it's bc I don't know a lot of things and people can't help responding to life pro tips everyone should know, like what a splatter screen for oil is and NO YOU SHOULD REALLY NOT LEAVE YOUR LAPTOP IN YOUR CAR, ever.)
- The most surprising: I am being asked questions like an influencer. It's both unprecedented and tbh kind of flattering. Who wants to sponsor me???? (kidding) (kind of, I'll take some free stuff sure)
- Some actual numbers (a lot of it came from The Handemade Seller interview on Monday, but I am sure it's not 100% of it) because broken down day by day, my #'s are still higher compared to most weeks. Here are #'s compared to last week:
Profile visits: +70%
Website clicks: +40%
Reach: +75%
Impressions: +190%
I don't have consistent data to make a correlation for a potential increase in sales, but it's still interesting to look at!
It's been fun hearing how people respond to my very normal (+ kind of over-productive I think + sometimes boring) life. My only fear is that the endorphins from THE ENGAGEMENT will then make me feel like I need to post (or, heaven forbid, do..) specific things that would get THE ENGAGEMENT.
There's an ugly text graphic. I will continue to story as long as it's fun, but here's a reminder to myself.
PS I know last week I said I was going to blog about how it takes me an hour to pack up/set up etc for craft fairs but I'm over it, and was anyone really looking fwd to it? Doubtful ;)
