How She Became an Overnight Influencer Using Instagram Reels with Lauren Thom
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Our special influencer guest today is Lauren Thom. She is the stay-at-home mom of two who was looking for a way to supplement their household income. After her youngest was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes on his first birthday, she knew her ability to hold a job outside of the home would not be an option for several years. Like many others, Lauren turned to Instagram. Her story is one of my favorites because she didn’t study marketing, she holds no degree in social media, but she is creating content that is getting shared and seen by millions. Yes, you read that right - millions!
About Lauren
Lauren started with a private Instagram account, where she would post regular updates of her life, simply to stay in touch with family and friends. As a Young Living essential oil user, she decided to become a distributor as a side-hustle to help supplement her household income while being a stay-at-home mom. That’s where things started to shift for Lauren, she decided to change her personal page into a public business account where she could gain more followers and have a broader reach. “Let’s just make this an experiment and see if it takes off for me. I already use the product. I love the product. So why don’t I try to do a mindset shift and see how it goes,” Lauren explains.
From Young Living distributor to lifestyle influencer
When Lauren began to build her platform as a side-hustle, there wasn’t a big push for reels on Instagram. After reels came along, “the rest was all a blur, honestly,” she tells us. Lauren noticed a significantly higher viewer count on the reels that she was creating compared to her daily feed and story posts. She decided to focus on what was moving the needle and started creating regular reels about relatable topics such as home decor, marriage, and motherhood.
As of today, she’s been able to grow her account by 56% in the last 30 days and reached nearly a million accounts because of showing up and using reels on her account.
How to get over nerves when it comes to reels
Lauren’s number one advice that helped her when she first started making reels was to practice. She explained to us that you can save your reels into the drafts folder or to your phone when you’re creating them . She advises you to do both because Instagram has been known to delete drafts randomly.
Being able to practice the reels a few times and watch them back helped Lauren become more comfortable in front of her camera. “I also try to stay true to myself and my values,” Lauren explains. “Just because a song is ‘trending’ doesn’t mean I’m going to use it if the lyrics don’t align with my values.”
Another tip Lauren shares is to not take yourself so seriously. Have fun with it and share the content that you think is relatable and see how it goes. Scroll through the reels page and save ones that inspire you and ones where you like the audio, to go back and recreate your own version of it.
Video is driving the future of Instagram
If you’re trying to grow your business using Instagram, you have to start getting comfortable with reels and video. Instagram, via the algorithm, is rewarding those that use reels. Lauren tells us there’s no other way she would have grown her account the way she has, and as quickly without doing reels.
She had under 500 followers when she first changed her account from private to public, and in just 6 months, she has grown to more than 14.5k friends and followers, picking up nearly 3,000 new followers every month. “That just shows how much you can organically grow with reels,” said Lauren.
More from Lauren Thom
Lauren shares so much more about creating and sharing reels on Instagram. This episode is really full of amazing tips and ideas that will get your creativity going. You can find Lauren on Instagram @lethom09. I hope you’ll hit play on this episode to hear Lauren’s full story on The BrandWell Podcast.
KEEP BRANDING WELL,
Victoria
