Ricky Staub

Ricky is a filmmaker by trade and have come to use Instagram as equal part business equal part friendship building which is why he believes he has found success on the platform.

Expert session

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

Being real and honest

Result if you follow the steps in Ricky’s session

Grow your audience organically

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

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

There’s a few ways, certainly, there’s hashtags that you could use, you know, depending on what. First of all, you have to know who you know who’s buying what you’re selling.

You know, I’ve identified that a creative director or an agency producer or an account executive at an ad agency are going to buy us as a production company, so to speak, or put us for to bid on a job. And so, it’s a few ways I’ll, you know, sometimes you go down a rabbit hole, you know, once I follow enough creative directors or have followed I get, you know, suggested, and I always look at who the people are, that I’m being suggested to follow.

And I’m, inevitably, a lot of times they’re, you know, they work at ad agencies, so I’ll connect with them and, you know, start conversations and some people you know, they don’t engage back and so I just kind of let it go. Other times, you know, if I’m at an event, I’ll you know, go through the program and I’ll look people up and to see if there, they have an Instagram account.

You know, I was just at an event in Colorado a few weeks ago. And there was a guy that spoke that I thought what a lot of what he had to say was awesome. So I want to connect with him. And you know, he had a, he had like the hello at whatever, you know, as his email on there.

So basically, like I don’t really want people to reach out to me is the vibe, you know, when they put that in the program. But I looked him up on Instagram. And you know, he had a decent following. He was engaging, I could tell in all his pictures that a lot of people were leaving comments, and he was answering back so I shot him a note on there and he responded back almost immediately, and we met up, you know.

And so, to me, it’s just like, it’s an additional I don’t know phone book that you look people up on just like people did an Instagram, just the people I’m sure do on Twitter, you know, I just looked them up by their name on their account and most of the time, you know, someone at least in my field, my customer, so to speak, has an Instagram account. You know, how curated and good it is, is another question.

But, you know, I guess that’s somewhat of a tangent I would say is I never really judge anyone’s Instagram based on the quality of the posting either because, again, I always know that there’s a human on the other side of it.

And just because they can’t take a good picture, or they use too many filters, you know, doesn’t make them bad at being a, you know, a creative director or producer it just means they’re not good on Instagram, but you know, they’re still on there, engaging and so I follow all kinds of people that they’re not posting the most artistic shots but I still enjoy talking to them. And so I follow them, you know?

All right. Yeah, I think the Instagram it does a really good job of suggesting people and if you can find people that you know, your, you know, who your target customers is, or even you know, your current customers. Go follow them on Instagram and see who you’re being suggested.

And see if you can reach out to them or if you can get an introduction to them and just build a relationship with them based on on their posts, and I think it works even better with like small accounts, right? Like people with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers celebrity.

So they’re not necessarily going to be able to you’re not going to necessarily be able to build a relationship with them that comment or post necessarily might not matter as much to them as it would to someone who only gets maybe one or two comments on their posts.

So you can really build an authentic real relationship with those people and identify them especially if they’re potential big client for you, as you said, you know, like, not everyone has a has a fantastic might be. Well, not everyone is great Instagram.

Yeah. So in terms of like, quality posts, what does make someone good at Instagram? How do we go about creating quality posts and why do they matter?

Well, I think, and I’ll give a bunch of breakdowns. I think I could walk through this. I think first and foremost, if you can take a really good picture, that is a huge advantage. You know, Instagram is a visual platform first and foremost. So I think strong visuals are important.