One Mistakes That Costs Me My Instagram Growth
And how it almost plummeted my sales
So in a matter of few weeks my new Instagram account will celebrate its 6 months in the making. What’s crazy is that I have never stopped making content, daily, for the last 6 months.
The very first few days, I was in the state of “ Just wanna share my thoughts on social media in Indonesia “, and didn’t know who will read my content and I knew it was a mistake to do, but I recovered quickly after 4 days.
I finally chose my audience, they were language teachers, coaches and trainers.
But then, I quickly realized that they didn’t want to digitalize their business process for many reasons, though pandemic hit their business hard.
Finally, I landed my very first client with followers less than 100. They were a couple of insurance brokers.
After 3 hours of consulting session, I checked on the insurance industry and I pivoted fast from teaching industry into insurance industry.
The First 4 Months
From April to July it was like an explosion of growth, at least for me, I grew from 0 followers to 3,000 followers.
The craziest part was that all of them are not random followers, but almost 2,500 of them are Indonesian insurance agents.
Imagine if I can convert all of them with a 100$ coaching course? I know that’s stupid.
But thank goodness I had like a lot of coaching and consulting clients and filled my lockdown schedule with coaching and consulting day in and day out.
Then I Got Lazy
I am mean it’s not that I was slacking off, but I stopped engaging with my followers and new followers.
Routine that I used to do, suddenly became to heavy to bear because of all the coaching and consulting.
Till, I realized that my growth stopped at 3,5K followers.
I tried to turn my Facebook advertising on and nothing happened, it was just like that.
Then these days, I found out where I got it wrong.
I was being comfortable
“Growth isn’t always comfortable, sometimes it requires you to make changes you never thought of.” — Hopal Green
Yes I know it was wrong to get comfortable, but I unconsciously did it.
I took it easy to grow a following, convert them to sales, just because I closed hundreds of them in 3 months.
By being comfortable I didn’t:
- Engage with my audience
- Check my insights
- A/B test my content
- Welcome my new followers
- Adapt to how the market changes
- Catch my offensive remarks, I thought the audiences were okay with my comments.
I didn’t realize that Indonesian was very quick to change. Once the government lifted up the “lockdown” / “social distancing” policy, all of the suddens everyone just went out to meet with people, went to the mall and other outdoor activities.
Insurance brokers whose business is a face to face interaction engagement, all of a sudden dropped their online endeavour and went back to their offline efforts to sell their service and product.
If I didn’t get comfortable, I would have prepared for the changes, but then I realized it 2 months after the government lifted the policy up.
Finally, I just saw that my Engagement Rate just dropped like paratroopers jumping from the plane.
The second drop was because I openly said through one of my instagram content that I didn’t want to be recruited as one of their downline in their network marketing.
Then, there goes my Engagement Rate after that content went down around 70–80% and obviously on Instagram once the ER dropped, they will take your account and content to another quieter place that nobody is there.
Current Condition
It is getting better as I try many thing to revive the dead ER through engagement on Instagram Story, commenting on other people’s content, and starting to welcome new followers into the list.
The second one is that going back to e-mail marketing, I thought Indonesian do not open our e-mail anymore. Apparently, I was wrong, I got few sales from my e-mail list and telegram channel.
So there is my mistake, my mistake of being comfortable and didn’t check the changes happening in the market.
