Our objective was to increase our followers, create an account loaded with serviceable advice and a community of support for men working on living a happy, healthy, fit life.
Fitness Director BJ Gaddour overhauled our Instagram account in early May 2015 by consistently uploading quality content and fitness advice videos. We began using 7-8 hashtags on every post to increase visibility, including the #MHFit tag to aggregate content.
Nearly every video that went up on our website was recut and condensed to 15 seconds and put on Instagram. All of our "variations" videos (videos with multiple ways to do the same kind of exercise) went up on Instagram. We launched our Cook & Chisel program on the website, and recut food and fitness videos from the program to post on Instagram and encourage followers to try it on our site. These two genres of videos were our most successful online.
We launched weekly campaigns on Instagram for various forms of workouts, including #CoreWeek, #CircuitWeek, #PullupWeek, and more. These weeks had some of the highest engagement in Men's Health Instagram history, with followers coming to expect daily fitness variations from BJ Gaddour.
We learned to promote our products in Instagram with great success--by teasing the kinds of workouts found in our DVDs and then point to the buying link, we were able to significantly drive up pre-order sales.
By combining the knowledge of print, digital, video, and social media editors, we were able to cultivate a well-rounded and interesting Instagram feed that provides fitness, health, sex, and nutrition advice every day in one place.
We overhauled our Instagram in early May, and immediately saw a jump in numbers, with an average weekly growth of 3%. Since May, we have grown from 180,000 to nearly 600,000 followers. We have had more than 5,000 posts added in to our variety of tags, including #MHFit, #MHFitResolutions, and #MetaShred.
Our biggest success was our ability to sell through Instagram. By posting 15-second videos of our new DVD workouts and testimonials, we drove nearly 400 pre-orders--a profit of around $40,000--in just three weeks.
Our weight plate variations video (linked below) and our "Chisel" videos from the Cook & Chisel program were our most-liked Instagram videos of all time.
