It is very rare for a company CEO to actively manage an Instagram account. This job is usually delegated to the company intern. After all, it is just posting pretty pictures, right? Well…not really.

We started our business in July 2017 and by August 2017, we were already posting about our product prototypes. As a company that repurposes used goods into innovative and eco-friendly products, it was important for us for people to follow our journey from early on. But I’ll be honest, before setting up our urbanizedbeauty Instagram business account, I used my personal Instagram only on occasion to post about museum visits, hikes, or holiday celebrations. To say the least, I was a newbie for the business level. But after a Udemy class on Instagram and a few terrible posts, our Instagram started to take a more polished look which was our initial goal.

We started our business at farmers markets, and our goal was to learn exactly what they liked and didn’t like about our products, branding, and pitch. It was a truly valuable experience, and we were ready to take it a step further. Instagram gave us that opportunity. With Instagram, we were able to learn which customer segments followed us and how they responded to our message on a larger scale. On top of that, we were able to improve our products at a much faster pace because we send our products directly to them through giveaways and promotions to kindly ask for feedback. What they liked, didn’t like, are our products helping as intended? Are they reasonably priced? With Instagram, we have been able to iterate on our products with the people that are aligned with our company’s mission and core values. With this process, we use Instagram as our tool to perform User Experience and this entails much more than just posting pretty pictures. It involves making inferences based on feedback, and engaging with and getting to know our customers at a deeper level.

We rely on and listen to customer feedback because we want to make sure that our products are customer focused and eco-friendly. With this process, we’ll be able to release future products at a faster pace, and we owe it all to the feedback that is part of our Instagram community.

Written by Matias Arnal, Co-founder & CEO of Urbanized