Supporting local businesses on social media has become a category of content, so it gets done as a monthly feature post nobody asked for. She does it as she goes, in stories, and the reason it works has nothing to do with your followers.
She is filming on vacation on the California Central Coast, and describes what she does in every town she visits, for work or not. She takes photos and clips as she goes, then afterward searches out the restaurant or shop on Instagram, follows them, and tags them in her stories with something specific — this was great, I recommend that.
Her standard for engaging with those accounts is a number: "a five-word comment, not just like, "Great pic."" She frames the whole habit as being a noticer, on your feed and in your day.
What happens next is the mechanism. The business gets the notification, and Instagram prompts them to reshare the story to their own — which she says produced a run of DMs and reshares over a couple of days in one small town.
Two details make it usable for an agent. The post does not have to feature you or your meal; it can be the flowers on the front walkway. And it is not limited to restaurants — tag the home inspector you are meeting, the photographer shooting your listing, the coffee shop where you met a client. Her last point is the one that matters most: the person managing that business account is very often the owner.
“a five-word comment, not just like, "Great pic."”
Chasing followers with content about yourself puts you in competition with everyone else doing it. Tagging a local business puts you in a conversation with one person who owns something in your market, and the reshare puts you in front of their audience, which is precisely the local audience you were trying to buy.
The five-word floor is the part to keep. A one-word comment reads as automation, and business owners see hundreds of those. Five words means you looked at the thing, which is the entire difference between being noticed and being scrolled past.