When talking about monetization, it’s all about building relationships with your customers. If you started a coffee shop or a restaurant business, do you ignore them until they give up and leave? No! You find the best waiters and kitchen staff that your budget allows you, and hire them to give your customers the best possible experience in your restaurant. You want to build a relationship with them since you want them to come back. The key to any sustainable business is recurring customers. If your service and food are bad, people wouldn’t want to come back to your restaurant, and so you’d have to find new customers all the time. Plus, there’s Yelp, so if new customers see your review, they wouldn’t want to eat at your restaurant as well. That would be the start of your restaurant’s downfall.

On Instagram, ‘returning customers’ would then be those who frequently check your profile out, DM you with questions, like your posts, and comment on it. These users are most likely the ones to buy your product or service once you start offering it to your followers, and so, it is important that you engage with your audience all the time, and for you not to ignore any of them if they comment or DM you with questions or suggestions.

So, how do you make loyal customers out of your Instagram following? Here’s how:

1. Start with the captions. Make your captions engaging, understandable, and easy to follow. If your Instagram followers cannot understand what your caption means, then you will definitely lose potential followers. If you are running a series of posts wherein 5 to 10 posts are connected to one another, make sure that you explain the initial premise first before yapping your heart out. Not everyone has read your first series post.

You must consider doing some long storytelling so that people will be more engaged in your post, but make sure that your story is real, since people can smell bullsh*t from afar.

2. Reply to DMs. It all boils down to the DMs. When people send you a DM (or a direct message), it means they are generally interested in what you’re offering, or the have a question about your page or your post. Imagine this as a customer walking into your store. Customers who ask questions about the product are most likely to buy from you than those who are just browsing. Asking questions via DM means they are truly interested and would like to know more about it, so, make sure that you reply to all your DMs, and respond in an authentic manner.

3. Showing them what’s behind the scenes. By showing people who you are “off-camera” (though, not technically off since you are still filming), you build rapport and trust. If you have a very pretty set for your Instagram videos, letting them in behind the scenes on how you shoot your videos will make them feel as if they are part of it.