Portfolio · case study
Začarani Kutak on social.
We run Instagram and TikTok for the Začarani Kutak bookshop in Pančevo. In the first 90 days the account took 27,546 Reels views, reached 24,827 accounts and gained 182 new followers — after a spring spent standing still. Every figure on this page comes from the account's own analytics and carries the date it was taken.
The client
Začarani Kutak is a bookshop in Pančevo. The owner opened the account and ran it herself, between the till, the ordering and everything else that comes with a small shop — which in practice means posts went out when there was time left over rather than when they were needed. We approached her at the end of May 2026 with a proposal to take the profiles over completely: to make posting regular, to give it a recognisable voice, and to keep it going in the weeks when nobody in the shop can sit down and think up content.
We took the account over on 26 May 2026. Everything in the analytics before that date is her work, everything after it is ours. That is why this page can show an honest "before and after" — the line is one specific day, not an estimate.
What the account looked like before us
Two things were clear from the analytics alone.
Followers were flat. In the 90 days to 7 July — a window that already includes the first weeks of our work — the account gained a net 101 followers, and the growth chart shows days in the negative, with the largest single-day drop in May. That is not an account growing; that is an account holding on.
The best reach wasn't coming from the content. The two most-watched posts of the year before us had 6.0k and 5.2k views. The second of those was made with paid support from outside and finished with 19 likes, no comments and two shares. The reach was bought, but the audience never picked it up and carried it — and that carrying is exactly what keeps an account moving once a campaign stops.
What we changed
- Format before topic. Instead of one-off posts, recognisable series that come back: "POV" clips from inside the shop, reader types, honest lines about buying books that a reader recognises as their own straight away.
- Pančevo in the frame. The shop is physical and lives off people walking through the door, so the town isn't hidden — the street, the window display and the shop cat are part of the content, not the backdrop.
- A cadence that holds. In June, the first full month of the engagement, 8 Reels, 10 posts and 4 stories went out. In the 90 days to 16 August — 19 Reels.
- Editing. We shoot and cut the short clips ourselves, because reach on Instagram today comes from video, and video that isn't edited doesn't get watched to the end.
- Captions that ask for an answer. The caption puts a question the reader actually has something to say to. The post "What kind of reader are you?" has 40 comments, more than any other.
- A monthly review. At the end of the month we go through the analytics, see what landed and what didn't, and plan the next month around that.
Results over 90 days
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Reels views | 27,546 |
| Accounts the content reached | 24,827 |
| Net new followers | +182 |
| Total followers (16 August) | 2,479 |
| Likes | 2,955 |
| Comments | 131 |
| Shares | 923 |
| Saves | 418 |
| Reposts | 76 |
| Reels published | 19 |
Source: PDF report and screenshots from the analytics of @zacaranikutak, taken on 16 August 2026. The 18 May – 16 August 2026 period is Instagram's standard 90-day window; it includes the eight days before the engagement started.
The number that says the most here isn't the view count, it's the 923 shares. A share means somebody sent the post to a person they know — and for a bookshop that is the closest measurable thing to a recommendation.
The first full month in numbers
June is the first month that is entirely ours. Instagram produces its own monthly account summary, and for June it showed 19k views, +71% on May, 54% of views from people who don't follow the account, +125% on May, and 44 more followers than May.
That second figure is the important one. Reach inside your existing followers is nice, but it brings a bookshop no new people. When more than half the views come from accounts that don't follow her, the content has left the circle of people who already know her — and that is the only way a follower list grows at all.
The post that broke the account's record
On 4 July we published a Reel: "POV: you found your favourite cat in Pančevo".
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Views | 11.7k |
| Accounts reached | 8.9k |
| Likes | 647 |
| Comments | 16 |
| Shares | 116 |
| New followers from that post | +26 |
The account's previous twelve-month record was 6.0k views and 68 likes. This post passed it by nearly double on views and nearly ten times on likes, and brought in 26 followers on its own. The paid post from May, at 5.2k views, had 19 likes.
And it isn't one lucky hit. Of the account's eight most-watched posts of the last twelve months, six are ours — and ours only start at the end of May.
Who the content reaches
On 16 August the account had 2,479 followers. 81.2% of them are women, and 84.9% are aged 25 to 54 (35–44: 34.8%, 25–34: 28.3%, 45–54: 21.8%). 78.4% are in Serbia, and by city: Belgrade 32.0%, Pančevo 19.6%, Novi Sad 7.4%.
Pančevo is the number we care about. Nearly one follower in five is in the town where the shop is — those are people who can physically walk through the door. For a bookshop that audience is worth more than any number of views from abroad, which is why we deliberately keep local content in the plan even when broader topics would probably reach further.
What we are not claiming
This is a case study about social media management, not about revenue. We have no access to her till, and so there is not one sentence here about sales, turnover or footfall. When the owner gives us that figure and permission to publish it, we will add it — in her words and as her estimate, not as our metric.
The same goes for TikTok. The same material goes out there too, but we haven't exported the TikTok figures from the account yet, so they are not on this page. Better one platform with verified numbers than two with estimates.
How we measure
Every figure above comes from the account's own analytics: a PDF report and screenshots from the Instagram app, taken on 7 July and 16 August 2026. The windows are Instagram's standard 90-day windows and are named next to each table, because a metric without a period means nothing. The two windows partly overlap, so we never subtract one from the other.
One note about views, because it counts against us. 27,546 is Reels views, not total account views — photos and carousels are counted separately and are not in that number. The true total is noticeably higher: in the window from 9 April to 7 July the account had 60,817 views, of which 38k came from posts that were not Reels. We do not quote that window as our result, because almost half of it falls before 26 May. We will add total views for 18 May – 16 August once we export them from the account. Until then the smaller of the two numbers we have is the one standing above, not the larger.
Three figures — 11.7k, 8.9k and 19k — are shown rounded by Instagram itself and we leave them exactly as they are. The rest is exact to the unit. We have rounded nothing up, and we quote no percentage we cannot show you in a screenshot. If you want to see them as a client, we show you the same screenshots.
Want growth like this on social?
If you run a shop or a business and you want a consistent, thought-through presence on Instagram and TikTok, get in touch. We look at the account, propose a plan and give you a clear price, with no obligation. There is more on how we work on the social media management page.