In this instructional video, Polly Barnfield, OBE, demonstrates how a homemade food shop’s Instagram post about an afternoon tea leveraged emotional storytelling, detailed product information, and limited‑availability cues to create fear of missing out (FOMO) and boost bookings. She explains how referencing the pandemic’s impact evokes nostalgia, how exhaustive details about the offering and a 24‑hour pre‑booking rule give customers every reason to act, and how the post’s limited‑slot language intensifies urgency. The resulting surge in comments, friend‑tagging, and inquiries illustrates the tactic’s effectiveness. Barnfield then walks through a social‑media dashboard, showing how businesses can schedule content, monitor engagement across platforms, reply to mentions, track hashtag usage, compare performance against competitors, analyze sentiment, and identify influential users. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action inviting viewers to click a help button for further questions.
Chapters
Today, we're looking at how creating a fear of missing out on a post can drive bookings. These homemade food specialists keep customers up to date on Instagram with the latest offerings and all things new, consistently inviting customers to visit the shop for afternoon tea as well as lots of events. However, it's the afternoon tea that we really want to focus on. Now, this post got them a lot more engagement because they've really played on the heartstrings of their customers. At the beginning, you can see that they're introducing their afternoon teas, but they're saying that they were about to launch their afternoon teas on Mother's Day in 2019 when the first lockdown hit. Now, that's naturally going to play on people's heartstrings because it's going to take them back to a time that was difficult for everybody. So by reminding them that this launch was pushed back by the pandemic, it makes people really want to support this independent business. Then by giving little bits of detail at how it's all home baked and that the baking team works so hard. And then they've given lots and lots of detail on where, on how, on timings, on exactly what you can get. It can be just to celebrate a special occasion or just because it's giving them, basically giving you every reason to book. And then the cherry on the cake is the fear of missing out or that fomo, which means it's limited. So as you can see, they've put limited availability every day and said on the actual, on the actual image that Monday to Thursday from 3, and then it says they must be pre booked 24 hours in advance, therefore, really, they're saying, this is how amazing it is. If you want to get booked, you better get booked now because there might not be any availability for when you want to come. So what that's done is it's piqued my interest, it's made me then want to read about it, it's tugged at my heartstrings, which has made me want to read more and support an independent business. And then the cherry on the cake is reminding me again at the bottom that I have to book 24 hours in advance. And as you can see by the comments, people have gotten really excited about it. People are tagging in friends, asking them if they want to go along, asking questions. People are tagging in lots of friends. It's wonderful. So I guess any business can do this by making sure that they, I guess they have all of the information available, but making sure that Even if you don't have limited availability on something, you can create that fear of missing out. You can say first come, first served. Or it might be, you know, that tonight is getting really booked up and if you want to come down, you know there's last few bookings available. Even if that's not the case, it just, it drives more people to make the decision in the end than not. Now, if I was the Herring Kitchen and I wanted to understand a bit more about how maybe this post was performing against maybe some of these posts, then what I would do is I would go into my maybe dashboard and this is the dashboard here. And then what I can do is I can start to really understand what's working for me through for social media. So here is all of my content. So I can schedule in my content here and I can start to look at what content is working, what's not. I can look at people commenting on my posts across all of my social media and I can reply back to to them. I can look at who's mentioning me or talking about me so that I can go in and respond. I can find more conversations. So these are posts created in the last week by people who've previously talked about you. So again, you want to go in and engage with them. And then you can actually build up your ads in here as well. As you can see. You can look at your best post and you can compare it against anyone. So literally in here you can change the insight. So if it was the little shop, then what they might be doing is wanting to look at maybe a local bakery or something like that. You can also see the performance here against the other competitor or someone that you like. Maybe you can see what's working for you, what's working for them. You can see your most viewed hash and your most used hashtags versus theirs. And then you can look at sentiments of how people feel about you as well. And then you can actually click into here. So if there was a big red, you'd want to click in and understand why, because that would be negative. And then you can look at who's got influence in your conversation. So the more times you're mentioned, the bigger the bubble, the more these people are talking about you. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, please click on the little blue button at the bottom of the screen. We love to.
