Aesthetic travel and food photography may have propelled Instagram to fame, but these days, social media is about much more. Small and large companies alike across all sectors have come to terms with the fact that a sizable portion of the population is constantly exposed to their content while waiting in line, riding the bus, or otherwise killing time. You can’t afford to ignore mobile marketing if you want to expand your company, and Instagram could be exactly what you need. If that’s the case, read on to find out how to use it to your advantage.
Don’t Forget Your Bio
Your Instagram bio is something that can easily be ignored when you’re setting up your profile – perhaps you just want to get to the images so you say you’ll do it later, or maybe you just don’t think about it at all – but it can actually help hugely when it comes to marketing. After all, at the very least, it will let people know they’ve found the right place (if they were searching for you) and give them an idea of what you do.
In order to create a good bio, ask yourself some questions. Does your profile picture convey what your company does or who you are? Do you have an interesting explanation of the products or services that you offer? Have you included a link to your website? Do you have any hashtags in your bio that users can click on? If any of these questions elicited a “no” response from you, you should begin by honing and perfecting the content of your Instagram bio. It could make a big difference.
Add Quality Content
Due to the visual nature of Instagram, captivating images are essential. Distinctive, high-quality images that are gorgeously curated and edited will get more attention than anything else. The use of free photo editing apps can help you stand out from the crowd by giving your photos a polished, professional look, meaning you can easily use great free stock photos when you need to and make them your own by giving them your own branding spin.
It’s well worth spending a fair amount of time on getting your images just right because they are the very basis of everything else you do on Instagram.
Have a Consistent Posting Schedule
Customers are more likely to make purchases from companies that they (and their friends) have confidence in. By maintaining a regular posting schedule of high-quality content, you can lay the groundwork for a relationship with potential customers.
Hootsuite now provides free tools for posting to social media, allowing users to schedule multiple days’ worth of posts in a single session. A helpful piece of advice is to determine when the optimal time is to post your content on Instagram and then commit to that schedule.
Use Instagram Stories and Instagram Live
Together, these two tools can make any photo come to life. Live and Stories provide a more in-depth look at your company and give it a much-needed personality, while pictures only provide a fleeting glimpse. The polls and other widgets on such sites allow for user participation and provide prompt feedback and simplified navigation.
Formerly, Instagram Stories would automatically delete after 24 hours, but now, you can find them all in one place by linking to them from your bio.
Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags serve as road signs that point potential buyers in the direction of your post. Hashtags help users find (and follow) relevant content quickly and easily. And interestingly, more people interact with posts that include at least one hashtag.
Make strategic use of relevant hashtags for maximum impact in your field. However, just because you can use up to 30 hashtags in a single Instagram post doesn’t mean you should. You should add the top ten in your field to each of your posts, and no more. Too many looks as though you haven’t really thought things through, and it might signal that you don’t even know what the post is really about. That’s off-putting.
Track Your Analytics
Using hashtags and Instagram Stories is great, but it won’t do you much good if you don’t also analyze your data.
To find out how well each post is doing, you can use Instagram’s analytics features. Find out who is reading your posts, how they found you, and who clicked a link in your bio by selecting “view insights” under each post. In the world of digital marketing, analytics are what you need to understand. If you can keep track of the numbers, they can do the thinking for you.