I know Instagram is a pretty big topic and a lot of you guys use it. A lot of creative artist maker-type folks use Instagram because it’s such a visual platform and it just kind of just makes sense for us. It’s easy to use and it’s easy for us to understand.

More specifically, I want to address the question I get pretty frequently and I actually just got this in an email a few hours ago from Tim Tindall.

So the question is “How do I translate Instagram followers into sales?”

If you’re asking this question, where you’re probably at right now is you’re seeing some small Instagram growth with you followers. You’re gaining a few followers here and there and you’re optimistic, but now you’re thinking how to translate the momentum you’re getting on Instagram into sales on your Etsy shop or stand-alone website.

First, some background information.

I believe this is important stuff for you to understand so you can have managed expectations on this entire process of what it means to translate Instagram followers into sales.

When it comes to Instagram or social media in general, but Instagram in particular, there are two very important numbers that you should know. The first is followers – how many followers you have and the second is the engagement.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a metric that counts how much engagement you’re getting, but the way I normally calculate it is I would take an average of my 10 most recent posts and see how many people left likes and how many people left comments.

You can have a million followers, but if your engagement is 0% it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. Engagement is a very important metric because that is the true number or metric that helps you know how many eyeballs are actually seeing your post.

Even if you have a small following but your engagement is really high that’s great! You don’t need a huge following in order to make consistent sales on Instagram.

But here’s the thing. You can’t have a lot of engagement without a lot of followers. You can never have more engagement than you have followers. You can if people who are not following you are engaging, but I don’t really count those people because if they’re not following you they’re not people you can reach again and continue to communicate with them.

If you want to increase your engagement, you need to increase your followers.

Instagram or really any other social media out there is a numbers game.

Let me share a really clear example.

Let’s say, for example, you have a thousand followers on Instagram. What’s the percentage of people that click the link in your bio? If you know anything about Instagram you know that you only have that one link in your bio for people to click on.

Let’s make the assumption that you have a 1% click through rate. Out of one thousand followers you have 10 people click your link per day.

When it comes to e-commerce standards and bench marks, I always say that you want at least 100 visitors on your website per day in order to make one sale.

That is on assumption that you have a 1% conversion rate. If you have 100 people visit your website on a 1% conversion rate, you will make one sale out of those 100 people visiting your site.

How do you get from 10 visits per day to 100 visits per day to your website?

That just means you need to increase your numbers by 10 times. You can do this in a variety of ways. You could:

• Increase your conversion rate in terms of your click through rate.
  If your current click through rate is 1% and 1% of a thousand followers you’re getting 10 visits per day, increase your click through rate to 10% and you will get 100 of your followers to click through to your website.

You can do this by writing more calls to action and make sure they’re being seen. In your description for every post you want to include “Click the link in my bio for more information.” Very few people actually say it, but if you want someone to do something you have to say it straight to their face and be direct about it.

The problem with just writing more calls to actions is that if you write them for every single post on Instagram you run the risk of looking very spammy.

That’s not necessarily the best answer here.

• Increase your followers by tenfold.

Instead of having a thousand followers, what if you could grow your following to ten thousand followers?

If you increased your click through rate to 2%, then you would for sure get one to two hundred visits per day to your website.

I personally think it’s easier to grow your followers because I have systems to do that and I know how to do it well. I’ve done it for both Creative Hive and Tiny Hands Instagram accounts and they now both have over 33 thousand followers. You just need to give it time.

Social media at its core is really slow and steady form of marketing for your business. It’s not really the sort of thing you do where if you have 500 followers you expect sales from that. So few people are clicking to your website in the first place, so you really need to increase how many followers you have.

In all honesty, with my Tiny Hands jewelry business, I’ve been running it since 2006. I didn’t hit my first tipping point for Tiny Hands with social media. In fact, the few things I was doing in the very early days was participating in a few forums and online message boards.

I don’t know if that is still a thing, but an equivalent to today are Facebook groups. I hung out with a lot of people in different message boards and it was kind of like Reddit and how it has different subreddits.

The beauty of message boards is that you get to put a signature at the bottom of your message. If I said something really cool they checked out my signature which included a link to my website, so I made some sales here and there.

What my tipping point was and how I started getting a lot of traffic and sales was when I got featured by a few very niche blogs that attracted my ideal customers. That sent traffic to my website, and not just any traffic it was people that were my ideal customers.

If social media is a slow and steady way to market your business and you can’t expect instant sales, why do people do it?

• It’s a very low barrier form of marketing. Everyone’s already on Facebook, so it’s pretty easy for someone to start a Facebook page. Most of us have smartphones and it’s relatively easy to download the Instagram app and start using it.
• Everyone’s already doing it. If you spend any time in Facebook groups or reading blogs you will know that everyone is on social media. Your customers expect you to be on social media. I don’t believe you don’t need a social media presence, but it certainly helps.
• There’s a lot of educational support on how to use social media. If you wanted to learn how to use Twitter or Facebook, you just type in your question and all the bloggers and gurus will have something to say about it. It’s easy to get into the world of social media.

If you’re looking for bursts of growth with your business in terms of traffic which leads into sales, then I highly recommend that you do PR instead. PR or publicity is the way you would get your products featured on someone else’s blog who already has a huge following or on someone’s social media.

You could also use PR in conjunction with social media.

That means getting your product featured on someone else’s social media. A lot of people out there have millions of Instagram followers and if you could get your product on their social media feed you get to be seen by so many people.

If you are in a position where you’re looking for your social media followers to translate into sales, I highly recommend that you join thousands of other makes in the free 30-day sale a day challenge. It’s a free email course, you get one step every day for the next 30 days and you can join it at https://my.creativehiveco.com/challenge/