The world of marketing has changed tremendously in the past few years particularly with the growing popularity of digital media such as social networks. Instagram for one has been the main buzz word in the last 2 to 3 years or so.
Is your business Instagram-friendly?
For the longest time, Instagram has grown from a small startup into one of the most sought after platforms and today is considered to be the top place where photos and videos are shared. To date, it has recorded more than 800 million users each month and over 60 million photos have been posted daily. Out of this, it has recorded more than 1.6 billion ‘likes’.
With such staggering numbers, is your business ready to roll with Instagram’s popularity or are you just sitting idle losing out to your competitors?
Influencers on Instagram are taking the world by storm. Thousands of followers are with them. If you run a business, you need to have an influential brand and this can be done only if you have a plan in place.On Instagram, it is not just about posting what you think is interesting. It is selecting the right content (carefully) and knowing where to start. Below are tips that you must know if you are to ride on this bandwagon.
Go business. Forget personal!
The first thing you need to do is to switch your Instagram account into a business one. This is what you need to do before anything else. It simply means ‘you mean business’.
No sweat, you are not going to delete your current account which you have been using for years. Just switch it at the ‘Settings’ and you are on your way. What you get when you use a business account is that:
- Your followers can get in touch with you immediately when they click on the contact button
- You can publish ads through Instagram without needing to go through Facebook
- You have access to Insights, which are the analytic tools provided by Instagram
Maximize the tools from Instagram
If you are familiar with the business profiles on Facebook, chances are you will see a lot of similarity in Instagram business profiles too. One of the highlights on Instagram is their Insights.
You get to know and understand how your page is doing through recorded engagement data and impressions. Besides that, Instagram gives you other data like demographics and behavior too.
By using these tools, you can determine what you can do in the near future.
Tease, tease, tease
What you might not be aware of is that Instagram is one of the top places for advertising today. You WILL sell more by just simply posting product teasers!! The trick really is to use the right content and not irritate your users. The rule of thumb with product teasers is:
- Tease, not annoy
- Use pull not push
- Create excitement
Use the Starbucks example where they like to announce seasonal drinks and then talking about it without pushing their customer to buy. This is one tactic you need to be mindful. If you can tease them and not push them to buy, they will most likely make the purchase on their own. Even if they don’t buy, they might just ‘like’ or ‘share’ the post. And that would spread your teaser further.
Instagram Stories
This is currently the order-of-the-day. Instagram Stories are currently the hot item online. It is one of the best ways to generate leads for your business. Using a ‘slideshow’ format, Instagram Stories is different from the posts you see every day as they are ‘live’ for only 24 hours.
If you are familiar with Snapchat Stories, this is about the same thing. What makes Stories so interesting for your business is that your followers will see it on the top of their timeline. Use Stories to tell special stories and not your regular post. This can be a ‘Behind The Scenes’ or ‘Special Feature’.
Use Influencers
This might cost a bit of money but if possible, set up a partnership with an influencer. This is if you have a certain target market that you are intending to reach and certain influencers will have its own following which can be quite large.
They will mostly be ‘influenced’ by their idols who use or promote a certain product (yours if possible). Your brand will stand out in front of the followers if you partner with the right influencer. Take note that each influencer is more popular in certain industries.
Get your users involved
If you have your users involved in growing your Instagram page, then half of your marketing battle is won. This is one way to get content without needing to create any content. Since you already have a group of followers, they can be the ones who take photos of your products and post them on your page. Be sure to give them incentives if they do.
Run weekly prizes for the best photo or most-liked photo. Such content is priceless. This is one strategy that has been successful implemented by international cosmetic brand MAC.
Use an interactive branded hashtag ###
Interactive hashtags are great to create engagement and you can get them quite instantly. Using #itgivesyouwings, Red Bull has been able to collect almost 300,000 posts.
What you get from this is that the customers can search for all these posts that are related to your brand and if that is your company’s name in the hashtag, it is as if you are enjoying advertising which is almost free-of-charge.
Know what works and what don’t
At the end of the day, you need to know what works for your Instagram page. This can be determined through Insights while there are some that you very much know by evaluating our site. Posts that do not perform should be minimized and you push the contents that work.
Likes and Comments are very important because they give you an indication of what your users think about your brand. There are many third party metric platforms that give you such data.
