10 Proven Points to help your Business on Instagram
Everything has become very visual these days, which of course has been driven by the fact that it is so easy to take a picture with a digital camera or a mobile phone. In today’s world all social media platforms focus on images to help drive engagement, but arguably the one network that really puts the picture first is Instagram.
Instagram started in October 2010 and was purchased by Facebook after just 18 months of trading which says a lot about the success of this social platform.
For businesses the world over sharing images that reflect your business is a great way to attract new customers providing you do it right, and to help you with that we have put together 10 proven points to help your business on Instagram. Take each point in isolation and they are pretty harmless, but when you put them together you will see things change for the better.
1. Post Consistently
Consistency is very important when it comes to any activity on social media platforms and that is very much the case with Instagram. Consistency beats frequency for attracting and keeping followers. As a guide anything from 3–5 times a week is a great place to be if you are starting out.
2. Plan
Think ahead when it comes to posting. Why? Because you are marketing your brand/ product/ service and there is no reason that you can’t link your Instagram posts to a promotion, or new blog post. In fact, I would recommend that you do as it will help you achieve your overall sales objectives. Planning also prevents impulsive sharing and when you impulsively share images it often leads to using an image that might not have the quality to be up to scratch or that your selection of hashtags might be lacking which will damage your exposure.
3. Image Selection/ Editing
Images are Instagram and whether you are adding text to appear over the image or not the quality of the image will make or break your post. This also applies to filters that you use when posting the image. With technology today, you don’t need to be a photoshop expert to edit your images for posting. Online tools such as Canva, or Snapseed are great for editing images.
4. Engage with others
Liking, commenting and following other user’s posts shows that you are an active user and this will encourage other users to do the same with your posts and this will help your posts get more likes and more followers.
5. Use relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are an essential tool to get your post seen by a broader audience. Users use hashtags for searching within Instagram and it’s a great way to expand your reach. This again feeds back to the planning stage and thinking about which hashtags are relevant to your industry/ product/service and critically to think about which keywords customers might use to find your product or service. Instagram permits you to use up to 30 hashtags per post and it really is worth taking the time to use as many of these as you can.
6. Use the link in your Bio to promote specific landing pages or blog posts.
This again comes back to planning, but using the link in your Bio is key to helping you achieve your goals of increasing sales or driving awareness of your website. Instagram gives you one link to use so maximise it and mention the Bio in the text that goes out with you post.
7. Create a Signature style
There are approx. 95 million images shared on Instagram every day, so you need to do something different to help your posts stand out from the crowd.
Think about how you want your brand to seen, to help images stand using filters etc can make all the difference. Here you can see our attempt to create a style that stands out.
8. Analyse your account
Once you have more than 100 followers and you have a business account you will get some great analytics about what is happening on Instagram. How many likes and comments each post gets to also telling your specific demographics about who is liking your posts. You can also see metrics such as reach and impressions. It is worthwhile taking some time each week to check on some of the key metrics and to ensure that your posts are working for you.
9. Use Instagram Stories for business
Instagram stories are becoming a popular way to reach users outside of your normal posting. This is a great way to create further engagement. Each story is only live for 24hrs before they disappear so its a good way to promote or share posts. Whether you want to share fun and light-hearted content, promote a marketing campaign, or even drive ecommerce sales, you can do it all with Instagram Stories for business.
The great thing with stories is that can be impulsive or creative and use apps like Canva to create great posts.
10. Post when your users are most active
There are lots of different views on the best time to post, but the reality is that the best time for you to post will be unique to you. So, you will need to experiment and check your analytics as you post. You will soon get a sense of what times work best for you.
Of course, if all that sounds like hard work you can look to outsource your Instagram account management to a digital marketing agency like Influence Media.
At Influence Media we pride ourselves on our own social media activities, and of course we are on Instagram as @Influence_media. As quite a new business, we have instigated our markeing strategy and this has seen fantastic growth since we started.
We can do the same for you, we can manage specific campaigns, general postings and take care of your account managing it to achieve specific goals and objectives.
Contact us for more information.
Originally published at www.influence-media.co.uk.
