🔒How Central Mass. biz owners are taking over Instagram

Seed to Stem’s shop decor is so embedded into Worcester-area Instagram feeds it would be easy to forget the terrariums, pottery and plants crowding its shelves are for sale – if seemingly every shopper didn’t diligently tag the store in a photo after visiting.

Boasting more than 45,000 Instagram followers to date, Seed to Stem’s Instagram account (@seedtostem), and posts shared by people who shop there, have made the Crompton Place plant-and-lifestyle boutique a fixture among local social feeds, and beyond. With all of those Instagram-able neutrals and carefully positioned crystals, there’s no denying owners Virginia Orlando and Candace Atchue are selling, for lack of a better word, a vibe. And that vibe, it seems, is good for business.

“What we post 100% directly impacts what we sell,” Orlando said in an email. “When we post an item, people call or come in right away to grab that special plant or make sure they get that certain crystal. On a daily basis, people enter the store and exclaim that they found us on Instagram.”

Savvy Central Mass. social media managers all seem to report the same phenomenon, a business owner’s dream: post a product online and see it fly off the shelves. But anyone who has managed – or even worse, founded – a professional social media account knows accruing a following is not as simple as putting yourself out there. Allocating time for caption writing, picture-taking and comment-managing is a serious commitment. And even then, growth can be dishearteningly slow, making it feel like those with massive, engaged followings have tapped into a magic formula remaining indecipherable and just out of reach for everyone else.

But six Greater Worcester business owners and social media managers interviewed for this story pointed to straightforward best practices they’ve picked up along the way, as well as lessons learned, suggesting cracking

the code is not impossible. It just takes work and experimentation.

Picking the right platform

While many business owners opening social media accounts start with Facebook before later turning to Instagram and other mediums, platforms are not one size fits all. Each social media channel has its own demographic and culture, and using each often yields different results.

While Facebook followers are typically considered easier to accrue, Central Mass. business owners cast the audience there as older, with more conventional market interests. Instagram, they said, tends to attract a younger audience and provides an opportunity to focus more closely on how a product looks and feels. Think: textures, colors, staging.

Ricky Nelson, who runs the social media accounts for Worcester Wares (@worcesterwares), said while the company’s Facebook following is significantly larger than on Instagram, the store prioritizes Instagram first, with Facebook posts designed in conjunction with what goes on its sister app.

“The Instagram Story has been so valuable for us,” Nelson said. “Facebook Stories aren’t as valuable, at least for the way we do things.”

Instagram Stories, fleeting images and videos living on top of the app’s home feed and disappearing after 24 hours, provide an opportunity to post multiple times a day without clogging followers’ feeds. This, Nelson said, allows Worcester Wares to share more dynamic posts with greater frequency, and makes them less likely to annoy its 8,700 followers with over-posting. He’s particularly fond of using Stories as a way to show, perhaps, a video of someone wearing a clothing item already featured in a static image on Worcester Wares’ grid.

Take your time with content production

But in an age where everyone has cameras in their pockets, growing an engaged Instagram following requires more than snapping a photo, applying a filter and throwing a few hashtags in the caption. The platform is massive – company figures in 2018 reported one billion active users a month and 500 million active users per day – and its users are accustomed to businesses large and small using the app as a marketing tool. In order to turn posts into tangible business returns, it’s important to share content as appealing as possible for a business’s target audience.

“Make sure that whatever you’re putting out there looks incredible,” said BirchTree Bread Co. Co-Owner Avra Hoffman, whose Worcester restaurant’s Instagram account (@birchtreebreadcompany) has roughly 18,200 followers. “I see some photos that aren’t always the most appealing, so just make sure you’re selling yourself with that vision because you have that one swipe to catch someone’s eye and you really want it to be special.” 

Alec Lopez, who co-owns Armsby Abbey (@armsbyabbey), the popular gastropub in downtown Worcester, said after he drafts out social media posts, he lets the caption simmer for a while in his drafts before he sends them out to the restaurant’s 14,100 followers. He almost always edits the original, and stressed the importance of practicing restraint when sharing posts.

That same intentionality and precision applies to the images he shares, too. (Like the others, Lopez said he typically prioritizes Instagram.)

“There’s an aesthetic for sure,” Lopez said, explaining he prioritizes contrast, dimension, color and texture when sharing to the Armsby Abbey feed.

“In my mind, it’s always composed,” Lopez said. “It’s never random or quick.”

Show your customers who you are

The most common piece of advice business owners had for their peers in Central Mass. was possibly the most challenging: Be yourself.

“Just do what feels right for you and your brand,” said Amy Lynn Chase, who owns retailer Crompton Collective in Worcester, as well as the Haberdash, which has locations in Worcester and Hudson. “Be yourself. Social media will be easy and more enjoyable if you are being yourself.”

In that vein, she said posting to Crompton Collective’s Instagram page (@shopcrompton), which has 27,400 followers, means prioritizing the kind of merchandise the shop is inclined to sell.

“In general, our goal is to sell pretty things, so that is kinda our only guideline,” Chase said.

In the chase for online authenticity, where appearances are paramount, this may seem like a catch-22. But Renee Diaz, owner of The Queen’s Cups (@thequeenscups) bakery in Worcester’s Canal District, suggested the key is to not overthink things. Just share what you do, whatever that may be.

This is the rule for The Queen’s Cups, Diaz said, even though she has an employee handle a lot of the posting.

“When she started working for me, I told her the only thing that matters to me is to keep it real,” Diaz said. “I don’t ever want to be the brand that posts just to have content. I want our content to have depth.”

This, she said, means taking stock of what is actually happening in the bakery on any given day, and determining which of those accomplishments the company wants to share with its followers.

“Show what you are actually doing and what you actually believe in,” Diaz said. “Don’t post content just to have it. Make it mean something.”