"If you want to be successful on Instagram, pull your head out of your ass. IG is an extremely fast and concise network. If you don't relate to visual creation, you'll just waste your time here. Keep trying and be patient. Be consistent. At least six months."
Katka Pavlíčková is an Instagram maven and co-founder of BGRAM, be on Instagram. Originally a passionate photographer, she succumbed to Instagram at a time when it wasn't here yet. Actually, it was a coincidence. The launch of the iPhone 4 and the app offerings. Katka liked the camera icon. She started on IG when it was in its infancy and had a few thousand users.
By the time she threw up some work pics and behind the scenes pearls on IG she found out that friends were contacting her and she was getting contracts. And it went hand in hand. A few years later, she and her partner launched Businessgram, later BGRAM - be on Instagram.
They are one of the first in the Czech Republic to specialise in Instagram and its marketing use. Now they train companies how to get the most out of this fast and visual network for business.
And since we in the business have a somewhat distant relationship with Instagram, I interviewed Katka to change this opinion. Among other things, I ask ...
🔸 How to get started on Instagram?
🔸 How to choose your hashtags?
🔸 What type of content to put on the profile and according to what?
🔸 When and how often to post on Instagram?
🔸 If I don't have time, what should I prioritize?
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is Zahžeh. Today's Zahžeh will be with Katka Pavlíčková, one of the faces of BGRAM and a macher on Instagram. Hello, Katka.
Katka Pavlíčková
Hello, good morning. I'm so glad you invited me.
How did she get into Instagram?
Martin Hurych
I'm glad you're here. The reason is that at least my B2B bubble has been resonating for the last 2 years, approximately the entire Covid, one single network and that is LinkedIn. You guys are doing Instagram. Part of my bubble is on Instagram too, so I conceived the idea of breaking down something else that we might be missing as a sales channel. That's why you're here. How did you get into Instagram in the first place?
Katka Pavlíčková
I remember it very well because when Instagram came to the market, that was around 2010, of course it took a while to come to Europe, give or take about 2011. At that time, Apple was just releasing the iPhone 4 to the market. It just came together perfectly at that time, because I had just got the 4. In the App Store, you see these kind of recommended apps and there was something like Instagram. It had a nice logo with a camera, which I thought was interesting, so I downloaded it. I've been on it ever since.
Martin Hurych
What attracted you to the icon with the camera? Have you taken pictures before?
Katka Pavlíčková
I've been taking pictures since I was a teenager. I had my first digital camera, no display back then, so everything you took you had to stick through a cable into the computer to see what came out. That passion for photography has been with me de facto forever. That was, I think, the trigger for why I liked Instagram.
What is BGRAM?
Martin Hurych
You've fallen for it with your boyfriend enough to start an Instagram brand called BGRAM. What does BGRAM mean? Describe your brand and the journey to it so we know what angle and perspective you'll be giving advice from here, which I'll be asking about in a moment.
Katka Pavlíčková
It's kind of an acronym, Be on Instagram, be on Instagram, I guess that says it all. It might be interesting to mention that my boyfriend and I found each other on Instagram in 2011. We found each other through hashtags and followed each other because we were both taking pictures at the time. When we met, we were each working in some kind of industry and we didn't even know that there was going to be a BGRAM and that we were going to do this for a living. At that time I was in a classic employment relationship and I had already somehow gotten a sniff of social networks, because Facebook was hot at that time. Companies were starting to have Facebook pages. I thought that was great, we had to have that in the company too because we were focused on the B2C segment. That somehow shaped my experience with social media. However, I wasn't happy at work, so I quit. The experience at work gave me the confidence to go freelance. At that time, I started doing photography for a living. I did it for a while and found it wasn't quite the path I wanted to go down, but I enjoy taking photos. I was already on Instagram, I was getting to know him somehow, I found him so interesting and natural, so word got around and I started to explore him. My boyfriend and I thought we'd follow what it was doing abroad. It was already taking off there, the first companies were starting to work with it. I was thinking at the time, this was probably in 2013, 2014, that it's definitely coming to Europe and it's high time to get ready for it. That's when the idea of starting something that would teach people with Instagram started to take shape. To some extent, it came at a good time because there was a hole in the market here in the Czech Republic. Nobody was doing it and that started the whole thing.
Is Instagram suitable for B2B? And what is H2H?
Martin Hurych
Today's assignment, I'll describe my target audience, my possibly prehistoric views, and you'll throw them at me here on the cimpr campr. I have people working with me who basically have several types of companies. What they all have in common is that they have a product that the other side perceives as very expensive, often quite visually unappealing. These are basically manufacturing companies, IT studios, sometimes trading firms, lawyers, usually expensive hourly rates or expensive product. We are all on LinkedIn, where most of us are doing well. But most of us have heard something about the omnichannel approach, so we're looking for a second channel. The first thing is we're focusing on, say, Facebook. My son tells me that Facebook is for old people, which is eye-opening. It's becoming clear to us that part of that target audience isn't exactly on Facebook. On the other hand, there is a belief that Instagram is not quite the right network for what we do. Instagram is more for B2C. Let's debunk that and come convince us that even for a manufacturing or IT company, Instagram is where we should be.
Katka Pavlíčková
I'm glad you mentioned the acronyms B2C and so on, because I think one should approach it in a slightly more modern way. On social media, B2B and B2C doesn't quite exist anymore. Today you have H2H, human to human. People are always doing business with other people. You're not going to do business with a company, you're going to do business with a person in that company. It's clear to me that LinkedIn is more interesting for the industries you mentioned because people from those companies are logically more frequent there, so you have a better chance of reaching them faster. On the other hand, a lot of those people don't work from morning to night and somehow go to relax on Instagram or Facebook. You're just tapping into another network that that person probably goes to anyway, they just expect a different type of content there. On LinkedIn, you usually sign off, link to an article and that's the end of it. But Instagram is a visual platform. That means you have to show everything there. You can't just post about it there. That's a problem for a lot of B2B companies because they don't think their work is visually interesting. But if you look on Instagram today and search for specific keywords in this area, you'll find that there are thousands of videos of companies showing you how they do their work. They're also showing people there who are working behind the machines, trying to humanize their company. That's exactly the idea of Instagram just for B2B, to humanize your business. Then it can work.
How to get started on Instagram?
Martin Hurych
So let's get as practical as possible. In the bonus we agreed together, we will why companies are not successful on Instagram. I would just turn it around slightly now and start from scratch. Let's discuss what the beginner's process should be, since after what we just said, I'm eager to start showcasing the lathe shop on Instagram. How do I even create a profile so that people start looking for me?
Katka Pavlíčková
In order for people to start looking for you, I have to set up a profile first. So step number 1, I'm gonna start an Instagram. I'm going to name it what people know me as, either from other networks or from my website, so they know what to look for. I recommend switching the account to what's called a business account as the very first step. You, when you set up Instagram, you always set it up to the level of a personal account, even if you name it corporate. This means that whatever you do on Instagram after that, you don't have metrics, therefore you don't know,
where people come to you from, what they look at, what they like and don't like. By switching to a corporate account, which is free by the way, you can see what's happening with any content as soon as it's posted. Then the second step. You have to dress up Instagram. A good profile photo that looks pretty presentable in that little circle, a short punchy caption that says who you are, what you do and what people can expect from you is important. This is where a lot of people run into the problem of not being able to write a punchy enough description in 150 characters. Finally, of course, there's the hardest part, the content part, when you need to start publishing something. This is where Instagram is specific in that you have three streams of content where people go. On LinkedIn, you have one main page where everything flows. You're all in one place, and it's similar on Facebook. On Instagram, people look at their home feed, which is similar to LinkedIn and Facebook, but then they have a special Reels tab where they go to watch short dynamic videos. In addition to that, there's a Stories tab where there are short photos, videos that disappear in 24 hours. It's some form of exclusive content. You have to figure out what to create in all those channels. It takes a lot of work and time. You have to know that you either have the time to do it or you have the money to pay someone who has the time to do it. If we're going to talk about what exactly to post, I'd like to give you some universal instructions to post a photo of your colleague drinking coffee in the office. I'm not sure that's what's going to get people's attention, though. Let's face it, someone drinking coffee in the office is a million times over and I don't know if that's what's supposed to shape the company.
Martin Hurych
There is a lot of talk about the fact that on the one hand you have to break free from some clichés and experiment, because you have to find what your target audience appreciates about you. On the other hand, they say that the feed, for example, should be consistent so that you are recognizable. What about in those early days when you're just looking? Delete what didn't work, or let it languish there and hope that after a few months of scrolling, no one will catch on to me?
Katka Pavlíčková
Again, that's individual. Instagram has one cool feature that if you don't like something on your profile, you can click archive to hide it from your profile. It stays in the archive, where the likes and comments stay, so you know what's been going on. If, say, six months from now, you decide you want to put it back in, you just click and it reappears. I think that you should, give or take, some 3 or 4 topics that you want to cover in the content and then you figure out how to shoot them. If you think about it, a person comes to your profile and they always see 3 cubes next to each other. On average, he can fit something like 12 cubes on the first screen. He should always know at a glance what you're doing in those cubes. What a lot of companies do is they put 3, 4 posts in a row that are thematically the same, and that person comes to the profile, sees 4 cubes that he's not interested in, and walks away. The net is extremely fast and you're playing for seconds, so you need to have that thought out so that your profile is colorful at a glance.
What posts to put on feed, reels and stories?
Martin Hurych
We talked about three potential channels, Feed, Story and Reels. What types of content to put in each channel and what content to theoretically recycle, if any?
Katka Pavlíčková
When we talk about the feed, that's where people most often start with photos. Whether it's square, 4:5 portrait, someone still uses the outdated 16:9 format. That's where people start because taking a photo is the easiest thing to do. You take your phone in your hand, turn on the camera, take a picture and you're done in a second.
Then, of course, someone will tell you that you need to do Reels because it's a terrible trend right now. You go headlong into it, without even finding out if the Reels format is right for you. There are some people who have a manufactured video that somebody made for them on YouTube or Facebook that's 3, 4, 5, 10 minutes long because they'll let you upload that. You take it, you upload it, you make it available, and you usually find that it doesn't have a very good viewability because long videos don't really work on Instagram. Then you tell yourself you've got the feed down and go to Stories. One important thing to remember here is that Stories is primarily seen by your followers. Stories don't have the ability to acquire new people to your account because it's technically not possible. In order to entice people to a profile at all, the feed is still a powerful acquisition tool.
How to get people to your Instagram feed?
Katka Pavlíčková
You're probably wondering how to get people to feed. The most common way is to use hashtags or keywords, as these serve to catalog content into different topics in some way. That's what everyone does. Then there's another thing. What most moms on maternity leave and influencers do today is they're out there from morning to night liking and commenting on everything possible. It's not talked about much in public because people don't think it's important, but everyone does it because they're trying to make themselves known. Then there are cases where you pay for advertising, post some crowns and let Instagram bring people who might be interested to you.
How to choose your hashtags?
Martin Hurych
So if I'm starting out, I don't have much courage for paid advertising and I'm also a business owner, so I don't have time to click hearts and liking other people's posts, how do I choose hashtags to make it presentable? So that it's not a hashtag that doesn't say anything. How to combine both the big hashtags with millions of users, but at the same time smaller hashtags that target me?
Katka Pavlíčková
I like how you mentioned that big hashtags have a lot of users. It's not about the users, it's about the amount of photos. A lot of people naively think that if a hashtag has, say, 2,000,000 posts, it's good. Most of the time, all it means is that over a period of time, like 10 years, it has collected 2,000,000 photos. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it's really good. When we talk about what to start with, I always encourage people to write down some root words for their business. I'll give you an example. I know for example BGRAM focuses on training, marketing, consulting, entrepreneurship. Those are the root words that I start with. On Instagram, if you click on the magnifying glass at the bottom to search for anything, you type the root word up in that line and it starts whispering to you different combinations that contain that word. That's how hashtags start working. You're actually doing a hashtag search, which is more time-consuming at first, but you need to do it to see if the keywords even exist, how many posts are under them, and if it's even worth it. Then, of course, you look at what people are posting, how often they're posting it, what types of people are going there, if they're even people who might be interested in what you're doing. You're able to sense that from the photos. As I mentioned at the beginning, by switching your Instagram to your business account, you can see right away in your reports if hashtags have generated leads. If so, you're doing it right. If you're not seeing arrivals from hashtags there, the hashtags are probably bad, or that type of content just didn't engage people under those keywords.
Martin Hurych
I have two questions. Hashtags in Czech or English? And do custom hashtags make sense?
Katka Pavlíčková
Depending on the target market. I am always happy to say that if I offer products in the Czech Republic and I don't have the foreign market sorted out, it is pointless for me to target foreign markets if I can't deliver there. Simple. Custom hashtags make sense if you expect people on Instagram to start using it themselves. I'll give you an example. You're going to be a Popeye LLC type company and you're going to have offices all over the country. Chances are high that people are buying from you all over the place. If you have some visually interesting products, quite often people want to show them off. It's called a brand hashtag. You're giving them the ability to group content under one keyword and for you, it can serve as a content source, a community section where your loyal customers come together to share feedback. To some extent, it also serves as a kind of reference for what you do. There are x number of ways you can use a brand hashtag. Unfortunately, in the Czech Republic I encounter that people make a brand hashtag, but they are the only ones who use it. Then it becomes meaningless.
What type of content to put on the profile and according to what?
Martin Hurych
We have a company profile, we have selected hashtags, we may have taken our first few photos with the iPhone 4. Now we want to step it up a bit more. What do we even want to put on the profile? We definitely want to be creative, original, I think everybody wants that. How would you go about it if you owned an IT studio or a woodturning shop?
Katka Pavlíčková
For IT staff, it depends whether the IT staff themselves are being promoted or the company that employs the team of IT staff. You can think of it in the way that you either want to use Instagram to recruit new people to the company, or you want to show what the results of the work of IT specialists are used for and publish the final products. So at the beginning, I think it's important to say what you want to achieve. Either I'm going to recruit people, then have a completely different type of content, or I want to show people what products you're making. Putting it all together on one profile is not very common. Most of the time, you'll find that it breaks thematically and it's harder to evaluate what's actually working because you're mixing multiple audiences and then measuring is more complicated. The way some people deal with it is that the other type of content that has a different purpose is not as common on that profile and they deal with it by creating a special hashtag for that type of content. It might be just for that recruiting, for example.
When and how often to post on Instagram?
Martin Hurych
I've already got the content. Especially on a foreign site, there are an incredible number of articles about the right time and how often to post on Instagram. What do you think?
Katka Pavlíčková
I don't like these foreign results because they take it globally from the whole market. We've had a few times with clients that they're based here in the Czech Republic and they want to target South America, where there's a logical time lag. Then the thing that happens is that you're used to posting content here at a certain time of day, but the people on the other side are either asleep or just waking up. So you have to adjust the whole thing the market you want to target, which is not so easy. I'm not saying it's not doable, but it has to bea person to approach it that way. The second thing is that today, whether it's within a corporate account, you already have reports on when your audience that you've built up is most active. You can adapt to that. Plus, you have countless paid analytics tools that tell you almost to the hour exactly when to publish a post to have the most success.
Martin Hurych
I know that averages and generalizations are the murder of any consultation. On the other hand, we're at a stage where I don't quite have that data yet, or don't have the broad audience to make it representative. In such cases, when do you go out with novelty?
Katka Pavlíčková
I would think about when you think that target audience is likely to be active on Instagram from some experience. I can say this using our BGRAM example. We're primarily followed by entrepreneurs, freelancers, business owners, and we know that maybe Mondays are totally killed because they have other things to worry about. So it doesn't make sense to give them important topics on Mondays. You gradually notice that from the clients' habits and the analytics start to show you the data quite quickly. You might find that you have the strongest second half of the week and weekend time, and you don't have to stress about burning it in at the beginning of the week. So the early days are more about testing.
Martin Hurych
How often do I come out with something new when I'm starting out? To refresh my profile, feed the algorithm and get in front of my potential customers' eyes continuously.
Katka Pavlíčková
I'm afraid to tell you, so as not to discourage you. There is one part that Instagram asks you to do, which is some 4 posts a week on your profile, 2 Stories every day, 3 Reels a week. When a normal person with common sense sees that, they'll think that's for the Bohnice. Then we'll talk about what is feasible. Today, the standard for corporate accounts is that they put at least 2 or 3 posts a week on the profile. Whether it's a photo, video, Reels, it doesn't matter. As for Stories, companies publish them mostly every day, every other day to continuously keep attention. When you're in the beginning, logically you tend to put more and more stuff on there. There, again, I would be careful about what I mentioned earlier, that a lot of people tend to do a lot of Stories and kind of ditch the profile. Stories can't bring in new people. If you've got 20 hits, you're putting 2, 3 Stories every day and it's costing you a lot of time, you have to wonder if it's even worth it or if you'd rather work on the profile to build an audience first.
How to get people on your profile?
Martin Hurych
I purposely started by building content and posting to the wall like they do on TV because a lot of my people are analytical, introverts, detail-oriented and they don't like to bring people to something that's empty. I would imagine with some of my listeners, we're just now getting into how to get people to profile in the first place. What do we do about that? Because Instagram, for example, is pretty counter intuitive for me. How to find people and how to get them, in quotes, to give a follow.
Katka Pavlíčková
I don't like the word coerce because coercion doesn't work on Instagram, unfortunately. People have free will there. But let's take your podcast as an example. You could approach it in the style that you put tasters of episodes on your profile to entice them to the whole podcast. It could work that way. The question is whether the person who follows you on YouTube, where they always get a bell that you have a new video, needs to see the same thing on Instagram. A lot of people are listening to podcasts on their Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, so they're going to listen to it straight away and why would they need to see it on Instagram when they get a notification the moment you post it. So you have to wonder if that's the way to go. On the other hand, podcasts are, always have been, and probably always will be about people. People usually look a certain way, and people on Instagram may be curious about what those people look like. People on Instagram, meant in photos or in videos, have always worked and will always work great. People like to look at other people. Then, of course, it's also about pulling some highlights from the podcast. Something catches your eye in the podcast, you work it into a profile in the form of some graphic visuals where you have a nice picture, and over that you put a teaser from the podcast that again, entices people to watch the whole episode. It can be a journey.
To recycle or not to recycle?
Martin Hurych
It is often discussed, for example in the Anglo-American world, that today's attention really requires a lot of production. It takes a lot of production to get people's attention. One part of it, which is relatively smaller now, says that it should be recycled. The other part, which is growing quite a bit at the moment, is that every network has to have an original approach, original content in some way. How do you not go crazy, how do you maybe recycle some things and definitely what not to do? I believe that some things can be recycled.
Katka Pavlíčková
I think that recycling is quite common with photos on Instagram. It's easy to work with because our phones or cameras can take high resolution photos nowadays. You post a photo once and you write some thoughts underneath it. You know that you want to talk about that topic again in some time and you know that the photo somehow worked. However, it doesn't really work on Instagram to repost the photo. Rather, once people have taken the photo, they try to maybe crop it, which actually creates a new photo and you can somehow communicate what you want to talk about again underneath. It's done a lot. I've been encountering Instagram recycling more and more lately because when someone has been doing Instagram for a while, they're just exhausted with ideas, especially when they're doing it themselves. When you rotate 4 girls taking care of your Instagram in a year, that's something else. When you're on your own, you logically reach a point where you wonder what to keep putting on there. Then comes something I call an Instagram audit, where I'll give a person a full audit of their content, their stats, and I can figure out what type of content is working and what it's doing to people. With that, we'll recycle those topics and describe them a little bit differently. People are still flowing past you and nobody's going to scroll down 70 photos to read something.
How do you Reels?
Martin Hurych
We've mentioned Reels several times here. Reels is promoted as one of the few channels still working today where you don't have to pay and there is some chance of viewability. They're relatively new to Instagram, so it's argued that they're algorithm-promoted and there's a better chance of being viewed. Is this true and if so, how do I approach it and do I need to create original content here as well? Because in the same way that people are talking about Reels, they're talking about, for example, for the younger age group TikTok, there's talk of YouTube Shorts. Those are actually other very similar formats, and if I had to spawn original content everywhere, it would drive me crazy.
Katka Pavlíčková
I don't think so, it's more likely to be some general bubble around Reels. When I think about the format, it's a de facto, people call it a straight up rip-off of TikTok. Instagram didn't know what to do anymore, so they figured, let's stick short videos in there since it's kind of a trend. I have to say that a lot of people who create Reels, they mostly recycle content from TikTok where they create it. The thing that Instagram has failed to do is the thing that TikTok simply has better tools to create video. People who are already proficient in TikTok can quickly produce it there and then go put it on Instagram anyway because they have an audience there. It just wouldn't be Instagram if it didn't throw sticks at us. Instagram is fighting with TikTok in some way, there's a rivalry there and they've already developed an algorithm that recognizes that you've uploaded a TikTok video to Instagram. They don't ban you, but they don't push videos like that into some trending realms in the algorithm that often. Rather, they restrict it because they want you to use their interface to create Reels.
Martin Hurych
If I compare the same highlight from Ignition, when I process you, where should I put you to make you more visible? I'll process the same highlight in square format in the feed and the same one in portrait format in Reels. Where do I have a better chance of Katka being discovered?
Katka Pavlíčková
In both of those channels. But it's important to mention what we don't yet know about Reels. We don't really know who's watching. I run into this with clients when they tell me they did a Reels that got 10,000 views, but they don't know who saw it. Then, for example, I find out that the person used background music from the Reels library, which has 3,000,000 sequences from all over the world underneath it. So people in America might see it, but that's not my target audience. Instagram still has quite a long way to go on that. People are very blinded by that today, that Reels is the mantra of their organic reach, but they don't think through the thing that they can't control who sees them. On that profile, you're still able to somehow ensure with those hashtags that it's going to reach Czechs, Slovaks and some topic areas that are primary to you.
If I don't have time, what should I prioritize?
Martin Hurych
So if I were to keep Instagram to an absolute minimum, would it still be a feed?
Katka Pavlíčková
I am convinced that at least in the beginning, yes. I can't say what will happen in a month, two months. Maybe already Instagram will open up better stats for Reels and next time we'll laugh at what I'm saying here today. At this point, though, I don't want to tell people not to do Reels, I want to tell people not to pin them. Not to rely on Reels alone, but to keep in mind that the feed is the main thing that generates traffic for them.
Summary
Martin Hurych
We already know what not to do. Let's finish with a few sentences of BGRAM wisdom, a summary of this episode. What to do on Instagram to be successful?
Katka Pavlíčková
I think one should primarily "pull their head out of their ass" if they want to go on Instagram. They have to open their head because the network is extremely fast, you have to be concise, you have to have some sort of relationship with the visuals. If he's not into photography, if he's not talented, if he's not into making videos, he should just not go there because it's a waste of his time. The other thing is that if some content doesn't work for me right now, it doesn't mean it's not the way to go, but it takes time for people to get used to it. We also need to clarify the language of communication, because many people there are schizophrenic, one writing in Czech, one in English, one with Czech hashtags, one with English. It's confusing. The other thing is that one should prepare oneself for the fact that the journey may take half a year before seeing some first results. You have to be prepared for that. The last option is that I definitely wouldn't be afraid of paid ads, because to some extent they are still a cheap way to communicate on Instagram in some cases. However, once you want to sell something specific, you have to dig pretty deep into that pocket. But the opportunities are there and they're quite widespread.
Martin Hurych
If I'm interested in working with BGRAM, in an audit and some kicking, accelerating, igniting my instagram profile, where can we find you?
Katka Pavlíčková
Definitely the web site, bgram.cz. I am quite active on my LinkedIn, so Katka Pavlíčková, where you can follow me. And then of course Instagram, because we regularly tell about the latest Instagram news in Stories, you can see how we do it. We are a B2B segment, so you can see how it can be done in this way as well.
Martin Hurych
Perfect. Thank you for visiting.
Katka Pavlíčková
Thank you for inviting me.
Martin Hurych
That was Katka Pavlíčková from BGRAM. I hope we've shown you other possible ways to reach customers and that it's not just LinkedIn or the old network, Facebook. I'll be glad if you spread this episode among your friends and acquaintances, if you lick, because otherwise the world won't know about us or LinkedIn or Instagram. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast apps or on YouTube so you don't miss out on future episodes. If you're interested in the promised bonus from Katka, check out my website as well, where that bonus will definitely be available in the Ignition section. I just wish you success and keep my fingers crossed, thanks.