i have somewhat random but also important question

same here as the comment below, I'm studying marketing and promotion regarding the music industry (including social media marketing), and I absolutely second what the previous person said!
*sry for the long post just trying to give some background to my tips as well*

- timing is incredibly important as is finding your 'target audience', for example, search up the more active hours that your target audience is online and try posting during that time frame so that it will show up on their timeline.
- also paid promotions are sometimes underplayed by newcomers and I've been advised multiple times on different courses about how important paid promotions are for new pages, so he should probably invest in promotions (i barely use Instagram and yet the amount of promotional paid posts i see compared to my friend's posts is much bigger tbh)
- keep the followers updated whether that is through stories or posts to keep the engagement
- keep an eye out for the type of content that gets more engagement and make sure to give that some importance (for example, using my own examples, there's this singer here that gets the most engagement in pictures of his travels, so he posts a lot of those, there's also a band who gets the most engagement in behind the scenes videos, or posts about their personal life, so they try to post those every so often, etc.. depends on each page and case obviously so he should see what works best for him)
- once he gets a good following, having just an occasional interactive post would be good, like a giveaway or something else more creative!
- TAGGING! # are so important so that people find his products too (or whatever he is marketing), also tagging other brands that could be helpful in the future (like say, a beauty guru would tag the brand of the brushes or makeup they use, some official pages then repost this and it gets them visibility)

as i don't specifically know what your friend's page is about, I can't be super specific on the help -also im not a professional yet either- so i'm just sending out general tips that could be helpful and they could look through, pick and chose and change them to apply to his own business. but good luck to him ^^

I should really know this because of my degree...
One thing I would say from experience is to pinpoint a good timeframe where their page is more likely to get "traffic", even scheduling occasional promotional pages for the merch to keep activity up and also interaction with people. A lot of small brands I've followed since lockdown seem to have a platform for people to look in and interact whether is behind the scenes of a product being made or maybe in a musician's case; the recording process.

I'll probably have more thoughts if I can dig out my college stuff but that's from the top of my head.

What is their brand? If it’s music tell her to follow producers only because following her favs would less likely be a great encouragement. Her favs would be her rivals.

i typically follow pages that are dedicated to a specific fandom or topic. i also follow them based on what types of things they post. a lot of people are attracted to memes or 'relatable' posts.

it just depend on what kind of page
could a fashion, or art for me
fan pages too