In this tutorial, Polly Barnfield, OBE, demonstrates how strategic tagging on Instagram can boost engagement for small‑business accounts, using the example of Little Farm Fridge, a Maidstone‑based meat retailer. She walks through the visual tactics (bold product photography, FOMO captions) and then focuses on tagging staff members—such as the chief butcher with ~1,200 followers—and the founder (@ChiefShepherdess) with ~32k followers, showing how these tags increase reach, encourage resharing, and add a personal, authentic touch. Barnfield also suggests tagging products, partner farms, or equipment to further extend audience exposure. The video then introduces a content‑calendar tool that lets businesses schedule posts and compare their performance against competitors (e.g., Quality Butchers), helping them identify successful content formats, posting frequency, and channel usage. The overall message is that even businesses without high‑profile influencers can leverage internal staff tags and systematic analysis to improve social‑media performance.
Chapters
Hi there. Today we're looking at the importance of tagging on social media if you want to drive more engagement. This is a little farm fridge and they're based in Maidstone and they've got a really different take on how they use Instagram. Their little farm fridge account gets really strong engagement across the majority of their posts. And as you can see, they use big, bold images of their homegrown produce and they create real sort of fear of missing out by telling their followers that this meat has just been cut, ready, ready to go to the website like this. So here we go. The other thing that they do is all about tagging. So man of the moment, the chief butcher, AKA this account here, has just been doing his thing, making it really fun and engaging. They've got the beautiful legs of lamb going into the website tonight. Ready for a Sunday roast, maybe. So this is using the fact that they know. Here we go. They know that this chief butcher here has a really strong following on social media. So they have tagged him in, they've shown, shown the image of him after just cutting his beef and making it look good. They're shown that he's even taken the picture to show that, you know, it's not professionally done, it's just done on a phone, which is, again, shows that kind of independent business side of things. They've done a close up of the actual meet itself, which again, if you are a lamb lover, would make you stop in your tracks and actually scroll through Instagram and click in. But they've also, they've also created that sort of feed of missing out by saying that it's going live on the website tonight, ready for Sunday roast, which say that was on Saturday, you'd think, brilliant, I need to buy that, get it ready for my Sunday roast for tomorrow and I need to think about all the trimmings. And as you can see, people have written things like amazing photos and yes, please, because, well, yeah, it's ultimately giving them that excitement and ready to go. So what's really clever about their social media is that by tagging in the butcher himself, who has a strong Instagram account, shows their personal side. They also like to like to tag in the founder of the business as well, who's @ChiefShepherdess and who's an influencer in her own right with over 32,000 followers. And I guess any business can recreate this by tagging in their staff. They don't have to have 32,000 followers. Here we go. Here's the chief butcher here. He's got 1200 followers and he's just a normal guy. I think what's amazing about it is that they have really shown the independent business. They've tagged in a member of staff and they're shown that tagging actually works because they've got more engagement on this post than what they do in an awful lot of other posts. And by tagging in your staff, it allows your staff to actually reshare your post and it allows your staff to get engaged in your post. And if they do have a strong following to say salon, and they've got a stronger following on social media even than your own, then make sure that you're using it, make sure that you're promoting it, make sure that you know you're asking your staff to engage because tagging is everything. The other thing you could do is you could tag in the actual product, which is obviously different with meats, but it could be that they've gotten this from a specific farm. So they could have tagged in the farm, they might tag in the knives that they use. You can tag in all types of products. And again, it just gives you more reach on social media. Now, these guys are already good on social, but if they wanted to get even better or to look at what the competition are doing, they could go to maybe platform, go to content calendar. And here not only can they schedule in content for say the following week with like new posts, and you can schedule in across all your platforms. What you could do is you could compare your calendar to someone. So I might want to look at another butcher if I was them. So let's go for butcher Bennett's Quality Butchers. Okay, so I have no idea who these guys are, but the likes of the Little Farm Fridge might do. And what this does is this gives me all of my posts on the top, which have been for the last week, and then it would show their posts from the last week and if you don't see enough, all you have to do is change the week. Here we go. And you look at all of their content the last week versus yours, you can start to understand what content's working for them, what's not. Any ideas on how they present? Do they do more video than you are? You actually do better than them, which channels they use and it just gives you a better idea of how you can, I guess you manage your social media even better and use it as inspiration. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, click the little blue button on your maybe platform. We love to help.
