Behold, another social media platform! With what seems like a new one coming out just about every day, I can understand the feeling of being overwhelmed with trying to stay on-point and up-to-date. You may even be questioning yourself about if delving into yet another social media platform would benefit your business or just put it at a disadvantage by spreading itself out too thin. We’re here to tell you that this one’s a keeper. And now that’s it’s available on android phones (after having been exclusive to Apple) you should download it now (I’ll pause for you) so that you can jump right in after reading these tips.
1. Build Your Brand Personality: Use images to tell a story, but not necessarily blast your branding. Users are following you for a reason, show them who you really are as a business. Try posting pictures or people enjoying your products or services. Or event add some humor elements in your photos.
2. Learn the Power of Hashtags to Build a Following: The best thing to do with hashtags is to create your own. That way you can tell directly who is talking about you/your business. Hashtags enable you to find others who are interested in similar products that you may offer.
3. Reach and Engage Directly with Users: Asking questions increases engagement. That’s a fact. This makes Instagram a perfect tool for engagement because captions give you the ability to ask questions or start a poll. This is a form of personalized communication that can really engage your audience members and allow you to create a bond with them. You can learn more about personalized marketing and communication at SheerID if you’re interested. Just don’t make your questions too text-heavy; remember that you want to portray your brand as interactive and engaging. Users are also able to tag you with their response answers, or even use hashtags! This can be the easiest way to grow your instagram audience.
4. Show Your Products: If you actually have products, you can show off a collection via Instagram. Or even a piece of a popular product and have users try to guess what it is. (Remember, it’s about engagement!) If you offer a service, you can still show off the supplies and equipment that are essential to the services you provide. The importance of ecommerce shouldn’t be underestimated here; read up on guides such as What is Ecommerce by Salesforce to get familiar with selling your products online, especially if you’re using Instagram to promote them.
5. Expand Your Audience: Instagram has the capability of sharing photos posted with other social media networks such as facebook and twitter. Taking advantage of this toll is a great way to join in on the larger conversations throughout all of the platforms. Be cognizant of which networks use hashtags and which don’t. Also, only share photos when they are valuable to the other platform’s personality or brand image.
6. Build Anticipation With Sneak Peeks: In order to maintain an effective marketing campaign, a business needs to keep their target audience interested. You can do this with teaser photos about new products, services or events that make them feel like they’re receiving insider (VIP) information by following your business. Reward them and make them feel special!
7. Behind the Scenes Photos: As human beings, we are naturally very curious. Posting photo breakdowns of how exactly a product or event is made would really be a fun and creative twist to interact with your audience.
8. Before & After: This one kind of builds off of the tip above. There are many apps you can download in order to make collages of pictures. With these (like Split Pic) you can upload a photo of side-by-side pictures: before and after! This will also showcase the difference or improvement upon a product you started with or an empty room that you transformed.
9. Introduce and Involve Your Employees: By taking photos of employees you can humanize your brand. You can spotlight certain attributes or accomplishments of employees with an appropriate hashtag each month, for example.
10. A Day in the Life: This has been made popular thanks to YouTube, where vloggers record their daily life in clips of about 10 minutes or so. The audience automatically feels connected to your business and starts to build a relationship and loyalty. You can do this by showing off your office, or the more relaxed side of your business rather than the brand they are used to seeing elsewhere.
11. Take Us With You: You travel for business? Perfect! We’d love to escape to a unique destination by living vicariously through your adventures! Daydream vacations in the middle of a work-day are the best pick-me-ups. But in all reality, showing pictures of your travels goes along with the tip above, as well as shows the bigness of your business.
12. Be Creative: Your followers will not want to see generic stock photos, boring store images or text-heavy images. Put your creative hat on and personalize your photos. PS: Instagram makes it easy with their oh-so-trendy filters.
13. Be Consistent: Based on our experience, we advise this one the most. You want to post photos on Instagram often enough to where people realize you exist and have you top-of-mind But you do not (I repeat; do not) want to over-hog their feed with random pictures. A definite way to get users to unfollow you. A happy medium does exist. Furthermore, if you are looking for ways to ensure your business is posting regular, quality content, then an instagram scheduler could be the game changing solution you need.
