Sam Bearfoot of Making Visibility Effortless On How to Use Instagram To Dramatically Improve Your Business

An Interview With Candice Georgiadis

…Always utilize any new feature that Instagram releases. This is generally because algorithms will push that feature more heavily than any of their older features, which means it’s a really good opportunity for growth and leverage for you on your account.

As a part of our series about How To Leverage Instagram To Grow Your Business, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Bearfoot.

Sam Bearfoot is a Creativity Mentor to Online Business Owners who struggle with content creation and confidence online. She’s created over 60 million views and more than 150 thousand followers with her no fluff, simplistic yet creative approach to showing up online. This paired with her decade long business experience in the online space, she’s the ultimate wing woman you want on your creative team.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

Back in 2006 I started my own health business in a bid to cure myself of IBS. The doctor had told me that there wasn’t anything they could do medically, so I took my health into my own hands. I found a product that worked wonders and became a distributor of that product. I was a massage therapist at the time so the product also aligned with my therapy work and the clients I was helping. I started my own podcast, which grew so popular that I was given my own radio show on UK Health Radio. In 2016, when I was pregnant with my son I knew I couldn’t keep commuting into London to see my massage clients and to present the radio show, so I gave it all up. It was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, but I couldn’t maintain the pace of the business with raising my child.

Once I’d got the hang of motherhood and was in a routine I decided to start a business to help those within the health industry with social media, because no-one in the industry actually teaches you how to promote yourself. You go through so much physical training, but no one ever talks about marketing and social media. I’d been really successful growing my own business on social media, so focused on teaching what I’d learnt.

At the time, I really didn’t like Instagram. I didn’t understand how it worked and it was completely different to Twitter, which was very much in my wheelhouse. However, I made it my mission to fall in love with it and understand what does and doesn’t work from a content perspective. Within one month of learning and experimenting I’d grown my followers from 114 to 3,604. That’s when I started to establish myself as an Instagram expert, specifically helping people in the health industry.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started this career?

This is going to sound really weird, so bear with me……when I first started out on Instagram I’d masquerade as a man to learn about some of the Instagram hacks that existed, because as a woman, I wasn’t being shown the same information. There are coaches out there who are teaching business owners about Instagram, but it’s all very surface level. I couldn’t ever find a female coach that could go deeper into the intricacies of the platform.

The more I researched the platform the more I knew that growth hacks existed. Things that would enable better, faster and more aligned growth, but I couldn’t find them in the courses that were available to buy from Instagram experts.

So what I did was, and I still do this, I open various different Instagram accounts and I test theories, in different niches to see how different things respond. I’m always constantly testing so I opened one that was for male entrepreneurs and not female entrepreneurs. The contacts and conversations that I had in the DMS were very, very different from what I would have with female business owners.

As Sam can be a male name as well as a female name I decided not to correct those who were messaging me, to see what the conversations would reveal. This one particular person opened the doors to what I refer to as the ‘Instagram underground’. It was back when Telegram was under the radar and nobody really knew about it. But it’s where all the really great and really big networking groups were. You had DM groups, you had engagement groups, you had people teaching various hacks, it’s where the big giveaway campaigns were happening.

It’s where I learned all the big marketing agency strategy stuff that you wouldn’t have access to ordinarily. It blew my mind, and still blows my mind to this day that female business owners don’t have access to the same learning platforms and growth hacks. learn and I wasn’t learning from that surface level stuff that makes sense.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’m not sure how funny it is, but one thing that always sticks out to me is the impression that people have on you, based on how you show up online. Sam Bearfoot the therapist and Sam Bearfoot the Radio Presenter was (and still is) very different to the Sam Bearfoot that people see offline. I can be quite bolshie and blunt and my vocabulary often includes expletives. This wasn’t a part of me that was acceptable within my therapy room or on the radio, but once I launched the social media business people started to get a glimpse into the real me.

When I launched that business I made a promise to myself that I was going to show up unapologetically as me, potty mouth included. So it was a complete change from what my audience had previously known. The very first product that I sold was purchased by someone in my health business audience. She took one look at the content and messaged me to ask me to transcribe the content and remove all the swear words so that she could consume the information without the swearing. She also reminded me that my radio presenter job would be on the line if I swore that way over the airwaves. You can probably guess how I replied! I told her where to go and gave her a refund. I think it caught her off-guard as she wasn’t expecting me to remove her access to the course, she was expecting me to bow down to her demands because she’d paid me for something.

Ok. Let’s now move to the main focus of our discussion. For the benefit of our readers, can you explain why you are an authority about Social Media Marketing?

I’ve been using social media since 2006 and have had access to growth hacks that other business owners will never have access to, which I now teach to other entrepreneurs. I’ve built massive accounts with over half a million followers and sold them to brands to continue to grow them and nurture the audience. I’ve had a global follower network at one point of three quarters of a million people and my social media content recently hit over 60 million views across key platforms.

In the past few months I’ve even been able to launch a side hustle business and sell products to an audience that I didn’t have six months ago. This was made possible by diving into my social media insights to see who was reacting to my content pillars, then asking them questions and getting them involved in product design and creation. My content pillars had created a whole new audience to the one I’ve spent so long building and nurturing. As well as teaching entrepreneurs and business owners how to create awesome content, I was also attracting Mums and Dads who were never going to buy from me, but who related to my personality and sense of humour. And so Slightly Offensive Stickers & Stuff was born. Within the first week of trading I’d recouped the start-up costs and within a month had sold out of everything.

Which social media platform have you found to be most effective to use to increase business revenues? Can you share a story from your experience?

Okay, so my answer actually isn’t which platform is the most effective, but which platform is most effective right now as it changes all the time. For me, it’s not necessarily about the platform, it’s about the platform that’s going to deliver the best ROI for my time, energy and attention. That can change based upon where the platform’s at, what new features are out and whether that fits into your style of communication. For years, Instagram has been the most effective as I could articulate myself in a better way. But now that things have changed and it’s all about short form videos, TikTok is proving to be the most effective platform for me. It’s become the leader and the innovator and it suits my content style.

All the other platforms are trying to mimic and follow TikTok, so every creator who has been on the platform for a while will experience growth at a faster rate than new content creators, because they’re ahead of the curve.

I’ve been in the industry for so long now that I can predict new trends and changes on the platforms before they’re announced. At the moment, TikTok sits at the top of the tree, then I repurpose my TikTok content across all other platforms, including YouTube, which has resulted in phenomenal audience growth and the launch of a whole new business.

Let’s talk about Instagram specifically, now. Can you share five ways to leverage Instagram to dramatically improve your business? Please share a story or example for each.

The first one would be to always utilize any new feature that Instagram releases. This is generally because algorithms will push that feature more heavily than any of their older features, which means it’s a really good opportunity for growth and leverage for you on your account.

The second one would be to have a really nice balance between nurture content and high visibility content. Instagram is turning into a really good nurture place for your audience. So create content that will nurture that ‘know like trust’ process, don’t just focus on content that’s going to be high volume or has the potential to go viral.

Instagram is turning more into an SEO driven algorithm, so my third tip is to switch your hashtags and the keywords in your captions to things that your audience will be searching for. Which is a really, really good idea now, as opposed to just tagging popular hashtags.

Outbound engagement is probably more important than just engagement on your content. So my fourth tip is to spend time in the community. Liking, sharing and commenting on other people’s content has always been and will always be one of the most valuable things you can do on Instagram.

Having a pretty aesthetic isn’t the way forward now. We’re not in 2018. We’re in 2022. Instagram is lining up with more real and realistic content rather than that overly perfect aesthetic that we’ve been used to over the past five or six years. So tip number five would be to create original content that hasn’t been highly polished.

If your brand really stands for imperfect and real then show that in your content. There is still a place on Instagram for highly polished content, depending on what that brand is. Wedding planners, very high-end products, such as furniture or fashion will need to create high aesthetic content because that’s what their customer avatar requires. But for a really large percentage of personal brands on Instagram, it’s not required. It’s not what most people want. Hence why the imperfect short form video has boomed over the last couple of years because they really just want to portray what’s real.

Because of the position that you are in, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

It would be for brands and personal brands to embrace who they are and show up unapologetically, because it will attract the right audience and repel the wrong one. Too many entrepreneurs and business owners are nervous of showing the real them, because they think it will put people off, but in reality, it puts off the wrong people, the people who are never going to buy from you anyway.

I’d also encourage business owners to spend more time on their analytics, to see what their audience loves, then focus on producing more of that content. We’ve been taught to focus on growth, but don’t focus on the growth that’s sitting under our noses.

Some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

It’d be Gary Vee.I think he’s amazing. He would be the yin to my yang. I’d say hi. His mannerisms are similar to mine and I think we’d have a really easy conversation that wouldn’t feel out of place or uncomfortable. I love his ability to foresee what is going on and keep it real. He says what he says and doesn’t apologize for it.

Thank you so much for these great insights. This was very enlightening!