With its billion users, half of whom log in at least once a day, Instagram is the social media with the strongest growth (an average of 100 million new users per year since 2014). It is therefore natural that most brands and communicators are interested in it. However, this opportunity is not without risk, because the codes of this new El Dorado vary significantly from those of LinkedIn or Facebook.
So who is better placed to advise us than an influencer who is one of the first movers on this new media?
Between climbing competitions and criminal science courses at the University of Lausanne, Sofya Yokoyama has no time to be bored. However, this Swiss Elite bouldering champion still finds time to devote to her third occupation: Instagram. Present on this network since 2013, Sofya now has more than 32,000 subscribers, which makes her one of the biggest sports influencers in French-speaking Switzerland.
Here is his advice for you!
Your academic and sports careers already require a lot of involvement. Why add Instagram to that?
It started when I was starting to progress. I was participating in the European and World Cups with the Swiss team. With this progression came the desire to share, to show others this sport that I liked more and more. It was this progression in my sport that made me want to go public.
How did you gain your first 500 followers? The first 1,000? The first 2,000?
At first it was really slow. It took me I don’t know how long to reach the first 1,000. After reaching that threshold, in one year I had 10,000. I was lucky to meet the right people at the right time. The trigger was a meeting with Swedish YouTubers who had a community of 60,000 people. They had planned to film with a friend in a venue in Paris. I was there by chance and they included me in the video. It worked well and we did more later. That’s what boosted my Instagram account. Networking is really the key to boosting your page. I don’t do it actively because my goal is really the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. That’s really what I focus on. If I wanted more success on Instagram, I would ask other influencers to do featurings.
Then you have to be good. If the videos aren’t impressive or interesting, it’s dead. If you really want to do well, you have to post all the time. Interesting or impressive stuff.
Finally, to break through on social media, you also have to be active offline. The easiest thing is to join a real existing community. Since I became Swiss champion, magazines have also come to me asking for interviews. This presence outside of social media has greatly helped to bring me new followers.
You have a large community and it is particularly engaged. Your followers are very active, real fans. How did you achieve this?
It is true that I sometimes see influencers with 60,000 or 100,000 followers but who have much lower numbers of likes than what one might expect. With my much smaller follower base, I have the same results as them. I think it is mainly due to the impressive side of climbing.
I also use a lot of hashtags linked to the climbing community: trends, associations, sponsors, etc. I put them each time to link my account to this community that already exists. All the people who follow “#climbing” or “#escalade” will see my photos and may go to my page. Or not. But hashtags remain the best way to expand into a community, it must become a habit.
You also publish a lot of stories. Is it the same thought?
My page is focused solely on climbing and in my stories I can show a little more of my life. For example, my holiday photos may not deserve to be on my page, but some are very beautiful or funny and they can make great stories. That’s not why people come to see my page, but they appreciate having a glimpse of my daily life. I really want to create something personal, not an account that could be managed by someone else or a robot.
What would be your three tips for successful Instagram communication?
You have to publish constantly. Maybe not twice a day, but every day is good. Your followers have to see that things are happening. This is especially important at the beginning, to get noticed. Then it’s possible to reduce the frequency, but while remaining consistent.
The time at which you publish is also important. It varies a lot. For some, 8 p.m. in the evening will be the best time, while for others it will be 9 a.m. It depends on the content and the audience. Instagram is about photography, there is no language barrier. So your audience can be made up of Americans, Japanese, etc. They don’t live at the same time as us and you have to take that into account.
What also works very well is to approach other people who have the same tastes. That way you can launch projects between several Instagram accounts. This allows you to create a dialogue and send each other followers: “Go see his account!” and then “The rest on his account”, etc.
You also have to think of things that attract people. Photos of the shopping session or the coffee are very pretty, but it’s banal. Everyone can do them. You have to try to find that different thing that makes you stand out from the crowd.
Any last advice?
Do what makes you happy. Make your account your own. Your posts have to reflect you. There’s no point in posting for others if you don’t like it. I try to make my profiles as similar to me as possible. You have to be spontaneous and stay authentic. What I think, I write directly. It’s just me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/ByLML8RiX0k/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
To remember:
Unlike Facebook and LinkedIn, it is impossible to add friends or professional contacts on Instagram (unless you buy them on obscure online services). You must therefore attract your audience with impactful content, then give them reasons to stay in order to build loyalty.
Sofya has completely understood the ropes. First, she refined her message by defining a solid common thread that she does not deviate from. The authentic and spontaneous nature of her communication allows her to highlight her personality and thus stand out from her competitors. Finally, she does not skimp on offline actions in order to feed the account with exclusive content.
Having quality content is a good first step, but it takes more than that to become an influencer. In Sofya’s terms, you have to do “networking”. The most obvious way to reach new communities is to create associations with other influencers. However, these actions are difficult to set up because they require preparation and the collaboration must make sense to the audience. Another tool she uses to achieve this network effect, less spectacular but easy to implement, is the use of relevant hashtags.
Where Sofya excels is in the way she interacts strongly with her audience. If her community engagement is so high, it is indeed thanks to the multitude of daily contacts that Sofya maintains via her stories, messages and other comments. She can thus have personalized communication and a much better understanding of her subscribers’ expectations.
The recipe for her success in three words: consistency, networking and personalization
