The youngest entrepreneur in the Middle East, that too a woman, Youmna Khoury has taken the world by storm. Her fashion and lifestyle blog on instagram with nearly 574,000 followers has definitely helped her achieve the success she needed. Other than that she also runs her own business regarding lashes and hair extension, by the name of Youmionlineshop.com, which has only flourished over the years. A large part of where she is now in terms of business, she owes it to instagram.
In this world where social media has become an integral part of everyone’s lives, Youmna understood the importance of using the platform to expand her business. She made good use of Instagram’s business account option where you can add your phone number and address. This played a huge role in directing traffic towards her business website, from where customers could then purchase the products that she had created.
The methodology Youmna has taken to make sure that Instagram adds on to her business is to channel her creativity and produce engaging content. Most of her posts are about her personal life or her business ventures. According to Khoury, it was important for her to make sure that her followers received an unfiltered, uncut take on her life which is why she tries to remain one hundred percent transparent with her followers. For her, the key to it is treating them as your family. This is why a lot of her posts also focus on the ‘behind the scenes’ of the entire ordeal.
Youmna said that she did have to struggle a bit in the beginning, especially when it came to gaining organic followers, but that her persistence, fighting spirit and a lot of hard work later, she did get a hang of the reigns and was able to steer things more smoothly. For young entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their business on Instagram, Youmna suggests that they use the help of Instagram stories and IGTV since people usually tend to watch them.
Moreover, because of Instagram’s new algorithm, posts do not tend to appear on the followers’ timeline. The best way to counter this, according to Khoury, is to share your posts on your stories as well, since the general public usually sees instagram stories more often and sharing your post there will lead them to it.
She also emphasized upon how she had to optimize her hashtags in order to expand her reach and how that really helped her build traffic to her website. Youmna played smartly and analysed her social media growth. For Khoury, asking questions like, “What did I do to get this many likes?”, “What time are my followers Most active”, “When should I post?” “What did I do for this picture to not get many likes and shares?”, assisted her in understanding her progress and showed her how she could improve her business tactics online.
Most of all, Youmns said that the love and support he received from her ‘insta family’ truly showed her that she was not alone in this world and that so many people were rooting for her. It worked as a confidence booster and she worked even harder because she wanted to excel in her business at any cost for these people who had so much faith in her.
