This Aussie couple turned their passion into a booming business with the aid of Instagram

IMAGINE quitting your day job to do the one thing you ultimately love — and getting paid to do it. Well one Aussie couple has done this with a little help from Instagram.

Fiona and Adam Weir turned their passion into a booming business

IMAGINE quitting your day job to do the one thing you ultimately love — and getting paid to do it.

Well, it is achievable and more and more people are turning their passion into business with a little help from social media.

Australian couple Fiona and Adam Weir have turned their passion into a booming business with the aid of Instagram.

The couple decided to give up urban life and retreat to their family farm in Gerringong, NSW, with the intention of creating a lifestyle based on wholesome organic foods. What started out as a desire to create a sustainable lifestyle has now blossomed into a successful business called Buena Vista Farm, offering cooking workshops based around their passion for creating food from scratch.

“Definitely without a doubt, Instagram has helped our business. It’s an inexpensive and quick platform that allows you to talk to customers and potential customers. It’s particularly helpful for a farm that might otherwise struggle to make a real connection,” Fiona told news.com.au.

With a loyal following of over 10,000 people on Instagram, Buena Vista Farm is continuing to grow as a business. The social platform has “really cut out that middle step of communication” and now “customers can talk to the people they’re buying their pork from”, Fiona said.

“Instagram has that really visual element and has that intimacy that nothing else has. I think that’s why people have made such a connection with farms like ours, by following our day-to-day business,” she added.

Pretty as a pumpkin!

Buena Vista Farm is all about organic produce

Fiona believes the trick to their business’ Instagram success is honesty and sharing “regular photos of their day-to-day activities” on the farm.

“It’s nice for people to hear about the successes and the failures. If you’re honest about the things that work and don’t work, people stay with you because it’s interesting and relatable.”

New research commissioned by Instagram shows that over one third (35 per cent) of Australians surveyed are thinking about starting a business. And 70 per cent of these potential business owners chose social media as the top marketing channel for their business.

One woman who knows all about turning passion into business is Marne Levine, the Chief Operating Officer of Instagram.

Visiting the land Down Under for the first time this month, Levine was here to better understand how Aussie businesses are embracing the platform and using it to grow their business.

“I’ve been experiencing Australia through the Instagram platform so to actually get to see it in person is a pretty great thing,” Levine said.

The platform recently launched Instagram Business Tools in July and Australia was one of the first launch markets. Instagram now has over 500 million users worldwide and recently released figures show there are now over 7 million users in Australia alone.

“I think what Instagram has done for small businesses is opened up a whole opportunity to reach customers locally but also in other countries around the world,” Levine said.

If you’re wondering how Instagram can help grow your business, here are Levine’s top tips:

1. Be authentic — You should know who you are as a business and should present your authentic voice.

2. Tell the whole story — not just the kind of story you want to put out there but also the behind-the-scenes look at whom the business is.

3. Understand who your customers are — What it is that they’re seeking to understand about you? Have a dialogue with your customers and then provide some of the content they’re looking to find through your Instagram presence.

4. Experiment — Instagram has a lot of different tools and you can now receive feedback from your customers. Consumption of video has increased by 150 per cent in the last six months so experimenting with video can definitely help grow your business’s Instagram reach.

“People are coming to Instagram to seek inspiration and discover the world through images,” Levine added.

So if you have a creative and inspirational business idea, put your passion out there!

And for those frustrated users wondering why Instagram changed its timeline algorithm — here’s why:

“People were missing more than 70 per cent of content in their feed. They either just had too much content or they couldn’t get through it,” Levine said.

Now the posts that you most likely will not want to miss come up the top of your feed regardless of when you launch the app. The rest of the content is still there, you’ve just got to keep on scrollin’ down your feed.