After receiving feedback on my second and third assignment, I was keen to continue with my social media experiment in assignment 4. One of the feedback I received from Fan in my online presentation was that I should try to narrow down my focus and find my own niche group. Along with the ideas discussed in class, I thought it would be helpful to ask for pointers from other online thrift stores who are far more experienced than me.

A couple of days ago, I reached out to an online thrift store I follow based in Indonesia. The account is called @n._.planetb and is currently nearing 5000 followers. I asked the owner a few questions and if she has any advice on how to grow my page for someone who is just starting out. She told me that the key is to post consistently and to reach out to other online thrift stores. Within one week, she said that she was able to gain 1000 followers as she kept doing a ‘shout for shout’ – which is essentially when accounts promote each other on their Instagram page. However, she did mention that she was able to gain such a large following within a short amount of time because the thrifting community in Indonesia is huge. With that said, she also added that although her sales vary, sometimes all her items can sell out the moment she uploads the photos. The last question I asked her was whether she uses other platforms for her thrift store aside from Instagram. She said that she also has an account on Carousell but there are a lot of scams there and the contact options are very inconvenient which is why she focuses more on Instagram.

Following all the advice and information I have received, I started reaching out to accounts similar to mine. I asked if they are interested in doing a ‘shout for shout’ in hopes of reaching my target audience through their consumers. Fortunately, about a third of those accounts responded and said they would be happy to do so. I found that this is probably the most effective way for me to gain a following. From only doing a few of these shout outs, I was able to gain roughly 30 followers overnight. Below are a few of the shout out posts I have uploaded to my Instagram story:

 

As per my last blog post, I intend on making use of the Instagram business tools and also experiment with other types of content. So far, I just kept uploading my usual posts but I also created a TikTok inspired video since I have seen them around my personal Instagram and they seem to be doing particularly well. Furthermore, I wanted to have more content variation on my page so that it appeals to my target audience. To my surprise, the video did not do as well as I thought it would. It reaches a slightly lower number of audience than my previous posts. Thus, I have decided to stick to my usual posts for future uploads.

The video content I made:

Finally, an observation I found was that changing the name section from “Gemini Collects” to “melbourne thrifts” helped me reach potential consumers. This is because when consumers search Melbourne thrifts in the Instagram search bar, my account will pop up in the search results, making it easier for people to find my page.