Growing A Loyal Instagram Following with Tyler J McCall

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTIt's okay to be the person that has all the ideas, but who struggles to put them into fruition. It’s okay to be good at carrying out ideas, but awful at coming up with them. It’s okay to stop doing things you don’t want to do.Instagram is the most engaging social media platform as the app makes it easy for people to interact and engage with you easily. The swipe up feature on Instagram stories isn’t as people think it is it is not a traffic driving platform. This means it’s better to focus all your interaction, content and engagement within the app itself.Growing your following on Instagram takes completely clarity other who you want to follow you. Once you know who you want as a follower, you’ll know what content you need to post.It’s important to engage more than you post. This includes engaging with people in the discover tag and engaging with them – almost like a virtual tap to say, ‘I’m here!’.When using Instagram Stories, it’s important that your stories have a beginning, middle and end.Often the pictures that generate the most engagement are the pictures that feature you and although it may seem scary to share yourself on your feed, it gets easier the more you do it.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Above all else, it’s better to have 500 followers that engage with you and care about what you post, rather than 10,000 followers that don’t want to follow you at all.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSIntroducing Tyler and his story – 03:40Don’t overwork yourself – 15:05Tyler’s start on Instagram – 19:20Growing your Instagram following - 22:30Success with Instagram Stories – 28:00Creating amazing Instagram content – 31:30LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODETyler J McCall’s InstagramTyler J McCalls’s MembershipTranscript below Hello, and a super warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. As always, I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you've had a great week, and it's been super productive. After my last week's episode, it was all about driving forward and trying to take action. I'm really interested to hear from some of you who have mentioned the sorts of things that you have done to drive your business forward. Super excited about that. If you haven't yet let me know, then please come and find me. I'm mostly around Instagram a lot, but on all the platforms. Come and connect, and tell me how you're getting on, and what your big amazing plans are for the rest of the year.Today's episode I am interviewing the super lovely, Tyler J. McCall. If you've not heard of him, he is an Instagram and Social Media Marketing Strategist Coach for creatives and online business owners. He teaches students how to use Instagram with intention, to grow their community online, and grow their business. Tyler focuses on using Instagram and social media to tell stories, build relationships, and convert followers to fans. Drawing from his 10 years experience in non-profit marketing, and management of a community organisation, he's taught thousands of entrepreneurs and managed dozens of Instagram accounts since getting into the online marketing game back in 2015. Tyler is based over in Chicago, and lives with his partner Eric.Today's episode is a really good one. We had such a great chat. He has a great story to tell. Some really big things happened in his life, and quite sad things that made him reassess where he was with his business. Overnight, he fired all his clients. As I have a business or part of the business that has clients, boy could I understand how terrifying that would be. But anyway, his story is so good he fired his clients, and he started the online membership that he now has today. How his business has grown has been phenomenal.He also then shared with us some great tips about Instagram. He walked us through why he thinks businesses should look at it. If you're not on it, or you're not using it for business, then definitely take a listen to this one 'cause I think he'll change your mind. He then talked about how he uses his Instagram, how he gets more followers. That was a really good conversation because followers is something that people always struggle with, so he gave us some great tips about how to get more followers. Then he talked about how he uses Instagram Stories, which again, has been some different conversations to the ones I've had in the past. Some really, really good advice and story from such a nice guy today.I'm really hoping you're gonna enjoy this one. What I want you to do is once you've listened to it, I want you to do an Insta Story, 'cause I want to see that you're putting this stuff into practise, and make sure that you tag both myself and Tyler J. McCall in, and basically tell us what you thought, and tell us what you liked about it. We'd love to hear. Anyway, I'm not gonna go on any longer. I'm gonna jump straight in. Here's the interview with Tyler J. McCall. Introducing Tyler and his story I am so excited and have the absolute pleasure of introducing Tyler to this week's episode of the podcast. Welcome, Tyler.Oh my gosh, Teresa. Thank you for having me.No, thank you so much for joining me. This is a really apt time to have you on because we've just been chatting before we came on, saying that I've just been out to the states to do Business By Design, and you were a Business By Design student. That's how I found out about you. It's really exciting, that all this has happened at this point. It's great.I love it.Tyler, I've been following you on Instagram. I love watching your Insta Stories. They're very entertaining. I have recently had the pleasure of listening to your story, and how you got to where you are today, which is a phenomenal story. For the likes of us who are maybe not right at the start of our journey, but working towards trying to get somewhere amazing, you are a great example of what's to come. I'd love it if you could share with my audience just a bit about how you got started, and then how you got to where you are today.Yeah, of course. I got my start after college, in the non-profit world. That was the thing that I studied in school, that's the thing that I wanted to do. I went to work in the YMCA right after college. The YMCA's different all over the world. Here in the states, the YMCA is typically gym, and swim, a child care, those types of organisations. That's what I did right after college, I went to work for the YMCA, managing an office, ordering toner for the copier, making sure we had enough staples and stuff.The important ...The important things. Yes.But over time in the YMCA, I was able to work my way up, and working in the membership world, and started doing more marketing, and running the Facebook page for this thing, or helping out with Twitter here. Eventually I spent about six years in the YMCA, and the membership, and marketing, and operations world. All my time there was really about relationships with people, relationships with members, and donors, and volunteers, and communicating the Y's mission to other people.Toward the end of my time at the YMCA, I started getting antsy, because my personality, I'm the type of person that loves to start things. I have huge ideas. I'm a visionary and thinking about the next big thing, but the follow-through is not where I'm skilled.I love your honestly.Right? It's cool being in my business now where I can say, "You could just hire people to do the follow-through." That's a really great thing to think about, accomplishing business.I started getting antsy toward the end of my time at the YMCA, and I started a business making a handmade product. I made a room and linen spray using essential oils. I was just selling it at trunk fairs, selling it to my friends, my dad loved it. Every day he was like, "Do you some more of that spray? Can I get some more of that spray?" He was my favourite customer. But spoiler alert, you can't really build a business as your dad as your best customer. But he loved it.I started sharing about it on Instagram. I had built these relationships with influencers, and bloggers, and home décor folks on the platform. Oh gosh, this was like four years ago, before really any of the idea of an influencer was really a thing on Instagram. I had all these relationships with incredible people on the platform, tens and hundreds of thousands of followers. I introduced my handmade product, and I just started messaging them and saying, "Hey, I made this thing. I'd love to send you some for you to try it out. Just let me know what you think." The all said, "Yes." I was like, "Oh, okay. I'm onto something here. Real relationships with real people." They all tried it, they all loved it, thankfully. Or at least they told me. Who's knows if they really did.They could have hated it.I know, right? Then so many of them bought it, and then so many of them shared, promoted it on their platform. I was like, "There's something here. There's something to this, having real conversations with real people."Toward the end of my time in the YMCA, I started freelancing, and managing other peoples' Instagram accounts, working with local businesses, creating content for them, managing their accounts, growing their followings, doing all of that. Eventually I was able to leave my full-time job and do that full-time, so doing social media management. That's what I did for about a year...