Envious of the ‘super-influencers’ making a fortune posting pictures of their glamorous lives, William Cash and his wife Lady Laura aimed to up their Insta-game – uncut version of article appearing in Sunday Telegraph, 29th October 2023.
A new unclassified howling noise has been introduced to the marital bedroom of our Shropshire home. I am long used to the matins hour shriek of peacocks, owls, bats and the 5.30 am dawn chorus led by our head cockerel, Mr Spotty. But the latest noise is, alas, pillow-close and has no Darwinian precedent.
I refer to the under-the-duvet guttural octaves of my wife Laura as she checks on our house Instagram account @uptoncressetthall (‘At Home with the Cash’s ) early on a weekend morning when we don’t have to get up at 6 am to get the children on the school bus.
‘How does she do it ?’ she will say (expletives excluded) when yet another friend or acquaintance advances to 30,000, 50,000 or more Insta followers, whilst we remain stuck on a few thousand. Or they announce that they have become a ‘brand ambassador’ for some boutique ‘luxury lifestyle’ brand so they are now going to be wearing free designer clothes, £650 shoes and fly the family business class to promote a new organic Umbrian estate with bio-vineyard or new Maldives hotel. All ‘work, work’, of course.
Many of this new A list online tribe of Bright Young Digital Things – whose lifestyle we ogle under the duvet with a mixture of admiration and rage – can be referred to as ‘chatelaine influencers’. That’s because 95% are women and they often live in a castle, manor, historic estate (with kitchen garden, stables, pool, yoga studio, gift shop etc). These houses are then cleverly turned into a digital ‘lifestyle platform’ to forge brand partnerships and promote their unique personal brand.
Examples of Chatelaine Divas we follow include American Viscountess @juliemontagu, (178k followers), chatelaine of the Mapperton Estate in Dorset (another 68.9k); @mrsalice (aka socialite Alice Naylor-Leyland) with 208k, flogging her own ‘Tablescapes’ via the stage sets of family and friends’ mansions, from Lake Como to Cambridgeshire; the glamorous Fee Drummond, (32k), A list content creator and chatelaine of the Cadland Estate on the south coast in Hampshire and ambassador for luxury brands including Moke mini-jeeps, Bamford, Heidi Klein swimwear, Penelope Chilvers (as worn by Princess of Wales) and other brands.
Many super-influencers with a Big House are also being paid (very well, thank you) for glossy posts (often using a stylist and pro photographer) aligning their Cecil Beaton-like country house ‘lifestyle’ with that of top sustainable brands who are now moving away from print to social media for ‘campaigns’. Whist it’s easy to snipe that some of these ‘super influencers’, with their perfect houses, lives and family, now only have a media profile because of the success of their Insta account, the truth is that most work incredibly hard, and if it was easy we’d all have armies of followers.
Before Insta, being an It-Girl, socialite or fashionista could be a lot of fun – free shoes, handbags and cashmere being couriered to your London flat, and being able to borrow jewellery or unaffordable dresses to attend a party – but it was hardly a career. Now the likes of ‘luxury fashion, beauty and travel’ digital creator Juliet Angus (@juliet, with 308k) have turned their PR connections into a lucrative job.
Being a Content Creator (never use the term ‘social influencer’) has become a smart business career. Back in August, the news that the Duchess of Sussex might earn up to $1 million per Insta post for her new account @meghan (currently 125k with no posts) sent the Cash household into a spin when I read that the value of ‘several posts and even personal appearances’ could be worth $20million (£15.9 million) over a few years.
A few posts for $1 million? Surely not. But then I thought, instead of whining about being left so far behind, why not turn ‘pro’ and try to join this smart social Big House chatelaine influencer club?. ‘Lets’s aim for 10,000 followers in three months’ I said ambitiously. Laura agreed so we thus set an unlikely challenge: ‘Could the Cashes become the new Kardashians?
The strategy, cooked up at 6am in bed, was to focus all-out on pushing our historic Elizabethan country house account in an effort to promote our award-winning holiday group stay and film/commercial business. Our Insta strap-line: ‘Backstage life and family mayhem at Shropshire manor with holiday lets and tours run by milliner/writer. Telegraph Top 10 Stately Stays’.
The plan was to follow anybody who was anybody, seek brand partnerships, speak to social media gurus, post with disciplined regularly (around 6am on a Friday or Saturday) and create a surge of interest in our Big House account which had hit a wall at 3, 600 followers in August. We’d learn how to post and edit ‘Reels’ and ‘boost’ posts by spending a few hundred pounds on marketing if we thought we could send a post ‘viral’. The only thing off-limits was not buying any bots or followers, considered an insider trading offence in the brand ambassador world.
We were lucky in having recently commissioned a film company, Lush Films, run by Tom and Miche Middleton, to create a 20 minute film, with aerial drone footage, about the 50 year restoration of our house, along with a 3 minute film on our holiday cottages and Dragon Hall chill-out/fine dining space known as the ‘Pig Palazzo’. The films cost over £10,000 but it meant we could salami-split the footage into 1 minute segments so we had a steady stream of professional video content going out on Insta .
Alas, it quickly became evident that after the first blitz – which sharply sent up our follower numbers – our audience want to keep waking up and be subjected to a long running ‘restoration’ documentary or my 83 year old Tory MP father talking about the 500 year history of the Cressett family. People want funny, witty, real-life posts, not a hard history sell, or worse, an advert. What performed better was when Laura posted a quirky short ‘Reel’ – to the track Is It Any Wonder? – of us frantically getting the Gatehouse ready before 4pm guest arrivals, still ferrying fresh flowers and warm lemon drizzle cake up the oak spiral stairs as guests were driving through the gates.
‘Social Media is a long game’ said Tom Middleton. ‘In order to grow an audience, you need to be posting regularly, every day, with something that is of interest to your key audience giving either humour, education or adding value to their lives. You need to read your platform and keep up with trends. This doesn’t happen overnight, so you need to make sure that you are under no illusion this is an easy target’.
Adds Alice Audley, founder of the Blogosphere Awards and a social media expert: ‘Posting about a beautiful old property, or your lifestyle, is not enough to get engagement. Where you get a surge is all down to individual personality which is key to content, along with brand partnerships. It’s very saturated out there. What is unique to people is their personality. Followers want authenticity and consistency above all. You need to remember what you are giving to your audience versus what you ask of them’.
Our first challenge was to make sure we had the right Insta account to market. When we began in August, we had four accounts between the two of us. ‘You need to have one highly focused platform where you direct your ‘Creator’ energies’ one expert told us. My wife Laura is a society, royal and racing milliner @lauracathcartmillinery with 9, 500 followers but since she only posts hats that was never going to propel us to Insta-couple superstardom.
There’s also my @williamrpcash account with around 1880 followers, featuring a photo byline of myself sipping a large Pina Colada (mixed by a hotel barman in Marrakesh). It covers rare sightings of my slowly evaporating social life after having two children and moving to the country, even rarer holidays and posts of my sweating eighteen stone body plodding along some punishing pilgrimage path in the Holy Land, Portugal, Italy or Spain in an effort to renew body, soul and liver. Zero chance of much sponsorship there.
The other problem is that some posts fell into the ‘How to Lose Followers and Alienate People’ category. An example was when I posted a screenshot of a Daily Mail headline referring to how ‘William Cash and his wife Lady Laura were branded “slave drivers” after advertising for a summer nanny at £12 an hour’. The post initially lost us dozens of followers, although most people saw the funny side and we clawed back another few dozen new followers (‘Class ridden spite, ignore’ was a typical comment).
Clearly, we needed tutoring. So I rang our Digital Content Creator friend Fiona Drummond, a sought after brand ambassador who juggles three accounts including her creative and marketing company @thesea-studio (‘Media Story Telling, Brand Partnerships, Film & Locations, Wellness & Events, Bespoke Boating and Travel); there is also @cadlandestate, her husband Aldred’s beautiful ancestral coastal estate opposite the Isle of Wight, and her own nature-inspired personal brand @feedrummond.
The latter will typically feature her adventurously cantering bareback along breaking waves, or wading into the Solent with her grey horse (‘Bella’) wearing a high-rise designer black swimsuit made of recycled plastic (the image went viral); or gliding a foot above the sea looking very Jane Bond in a wet-suit on the @fliteboard, a sleek, high-tech carbon fibre motorized surfing board for which she is an ambassador; or racing in Weymouth with her three children (one sails for the British junior team), passing through Sienna or Lake Geneva, or just enjoying a (normal) family summer picnic on the lawn looking out to the sea wearing a chic blue floral Emilia Wickstead dress, Heidi Klein sunglasses and shoes by Gianvito Rossi.
‘Instagram is like a magazine to me’ Fee says. ‘That’s how I use it. I’ve never done a social media course. I’m entirely self taught and have been obsessed with taking pictures since I was eleven when I got my first Olympus camera. I think in pictures. I love telling stories through pictures. It’s is not a marketing philosophy but more a diary of my life – my Insta is more a mood board of everything I like to have pinned in one place’.
Her 32,000 plus influential followers are a perfect example of how it’s not the number of followers that matter to brand managers so much as the A list quality of followers (such as style guru India Hicks) and level of their ‘engagement’. Fee tends to still use a professional camera when doing a shoot rather than her smart phone and regularly uses professional photographers to create brand partnerships.
So there is a clear divide between her work and social/family life, and she has her own production company, along with several leading photographers she can call on for content collaborations. Her partnerships are carefully chosen to be ‘always aligned’ to her sustainable values and, as a social media pro, she always clarifies when a post is a ‘paid partnership’.
Fee’s husband Aldred, a property developer who also manages the 3500 acre family estate, is not an ‘Insta-Husband’. ‘He is not on social media and certainly does not hold the phone’ she says. ‘My day job is creating marketing campaigns for brands in and around the playground that is my hood on the south coast. I bring brands together in the ultimate outdoor and off-grid showroom, curating marketing strategies, brand content & events for a living. It’s a creative flow space and inevitably personal things are also involved. It’s all about that balance. Under the creativity, I’m a tech nerd and editor. That’s my flow space … ‘
Brought up in Jordan, Mumbai and Singapore, Fee, aged 43, comes from a family of scientists and created a successful 60 client brand marketing business with her mother (Selina Craig), along with founding the children’s brand Mini-la Mode so Insta is just an extension of her creative marketing skills.
‘Insta is a place where you can curate your favourite bits of real life. It’s like a creative concept mood board but it’s always good to put real life in there as everyone is human. A little whimsical reality helps everyone remember not to take it too seriously’.
On the subject of social media envy, Fee says that those who ‘judge’ are usually those not brave enough to post creatively themselves and, she says ‘you have to put yourself out there’. That’s the golden rule. To join the super-influencer club, with hundreds of thousands of followers, you just have to post and not worry too much. ‘People either get it or they don’t, and people just don’t need to follow’.
So how did we do? The truth about the world of Digital Diva Creators, as I found after three months of effort and humiliation, is that exhaustive work and patience is required to add just a few hundred followers let alone amass an army of 30-50K or so (real) loyal followers; and even harder to get the ‘engagement’ for the holy digital grail of ‘paid partnerships’ (the real money is on YouTube).
The biggest mistakes we made were not posting enough to be ‘consistent’ and to not treat our Insta like a job, more like a part-time marketing sideline. We began our experiment with 3,600 followers and three months later we have around 4200. ‘Disappointing’, as my old school report might have said.
Another problem, as our Shropshire neighbor Mel Lewis @ex_tenants_of_morville_hall explained, is that Instagram has recently changed so that it is ‘algorithmically driven’ so that hash tags don’t attract new followers like they used to. Insta can ‘definitely be an addiction’, she says, with the risk of ‘burn-out’.
Lewis has built up 15.3k followers posting about her vicissitudes as chatelaine of a National Trust manor house where she was forced to move out after an attic water tank exploded. ‘I get an endorphin rush from people liking what I’ve done’ she admits. ‘But it’s much harder now. I went from 8,000 to 15,000 in a week. You can’t do that now as they restrict your ability to reach people unless you pay’.
Only 3.6 % of our followers were aged between 18-24. Most were between 35-54. Over 68% of our followers were women. One of our best performing posts was a video clip taken by Laura of myself swearing as I had to lift up a heavy trapdoor in my study and wade down into our gloomy basement cellar after a rodent had gnawed their way through an internet cable. The clip was straight out of Fawlty Turrets. Nobody can say it wasn’t ‘authentic’ but, alas, we are still a long way from that $1 million payday post.