Jaime Derringer

Jaime launched Design-Milk.com in 2006. Since then, Design Milk has received over 142 million page views and has over millions of readers worldwide. In 2010, she launched Dog-Milk.com, and in 2015 a modern online jewelry shop, Adorn-Milk.com.

With over 1 million Instagram followers, Design Milk is bringing good design to the mainstream.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Jaime’s success

Hiring the right help, understanding what kinds of images work on Instagram and finding someone who “gets it” as well

Result if you follow the steps in Jaime’s session

Hire the perfect person to manage your Instagram

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So during the interview process, I ask. I had a couple of candidates, I asked them to go out and create Instagram posts, give me three sample posts that you would create for us that you think that’s our brand.

And I do that with my writers too, you know. Go out and find me a product that you would want to write about and why you think it fits into our brand. That’s really important.

Brand is very important to me because it’s so personal.

And one of the things, I didn’t mention it with your previous question, is tone. Because tone is huge for Instagram.

And because we have multiple people popping in and out of our Instagram account, it’s important that it’s kind of consistent.

And I think that I’m not alone in that. I’m not the only company that has multiple people with their hands in the social media all the time.

So just knowing that you know, whether or not your company is going to be cool with you saying something like this chairs off the hook, like you know, you’re going to be very casual and try to be very friendly and have that kind of tone of voice with readers or followers.

It’s pretty important to make sure that that matches with the previous posts that have come out or else it’s just going to feel really out of place. And the same thing goes for the photos.

So just like making sure that the person that you’re bringing on understand.

So doing that test where they send me examples is a great way to just get the feel of whether or not they’re at least close to understanding your brand or have nailed it. And so the reason I hired the person I did was because she kind of nailed it.

Sweet. Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to think. That’s a good idea to test, have that trial period, isn’t it?

Where you get them to, okay, let’s supply, please supply us with some posts, anything that match. And then you could even like run a competition.

If you’ve got two awesome people, you can decide between every post, both the images and see or you know, series on and see, you know, test them and see if they’re good fit, if it’s working. If you know, you’re making that decision.

See that, you know, some people might find that a very hard decision to make, and why not go out there and almost let your audience decide as long as it you know, fits and you know, be careful. That’s interesting because it is such an important position in response.

I mean the wrong photo or the wrong caption could make a huge, could be a huge problem. I mean, we’ve all seen bad PR happen to people who post the wrong things on Twitter or are just not, you know, it’s just totally off brand or doesn’t really make sense.

And when it comes to people who create content like myself for a living, if we create something or we put something out there that feels like totally off brand, like our readers will instantly call us out on it and say, what is this?

So they kind of know us. Sometimes better than we know ourselves.