Tips for using Instagram for Business

Today, Instagram has more than 300 million members worldwide and is literally a magic spell for businesses in the digital space. It is a social photo sharing App which has proved to be a major brand building social network available in the market. If you want to increase your brand visibility, start using the new golden child of social media – Instagram.  

Without a strong Instagram presence, brands cannot establish their visual presence amongst targeted consumers. In the absence of a strong visual identity, they take the risk of being ignored. Have you tried using Instagram for marketing your business? Here are some valuable and worth remembering tips for using Instagram for businesses.

Prior Research is Important

Start using Instagram for your own personal use before starting to use it for your own brand. Research other popular brands and your competitors in the market for inspiration and for attaining competitive knowledge. This should make you ready for working out and applying a broad strategy for Instagram. This basically should be in sync with your social media marketing goals and targets.  

Ultimately everything should be tied to achieving your business goals. This can range from boosting traffic, to increasing brand awareness and generating product sales for your business. These should be not only achievable but also measurable so that you can track your progress.

Create Visually Appealing & Creative Posts

Harness the power of visual impact by posting interesting, unique, attention grabbing and creative images on your business account regarding your products. Your posts should relate to your brand. Take advantage of it being an image-centric platform to create long lasting impression amongst viewers so that they become your followers. Establish a relationship and culture with your followers by showcasing your product photos in quite an appealing way with aesthetically stunning ideas to convert traffic into sales.

The trick is to align your company’s values with your consumer values. You can also upload short videos up to 1 minute in length. Remember to keep the size as well as clarity of all your photos such that they look really professional and reflect your brand’s identity. Using various available editing tools available on Instagram for further enhancing the images is advisable for creating super quality pics. Besides all of this, use photos for promoting events as well as making important company announcements.

Interact with your Followers

If you have been posting quality images regularly on your Instagram account and creating buzz for gaining followers, you should understand that interacting with your present followers is equally important. Start interacting, liking and commenting your followers’ posts. This will ensure a two-way interaction between you and your followers. If you expect that your followers should engage with your posts, they surely expect the same from you.

Giveaways and holding contests are another innovative way to interact with your followers and advertise your product/services at the same time. Ask the viewers to repost the image as a prerequisite to enter the contest.

Using Relevant Hashtags

Using hashtags is another great strategy that works quite well on Instagram also, besides Twitter. This strategy when applied can be leveraged across this photo sharing App and is a perfect way to increase audience engagement and to be able to get found on social media by your audience. Hashtags are practically the only way you can increase the shelf life of your Instagram posts.

News feeds of your consumers are so crowded that without relevant hashtags, they will get buried somewhere without anyone much noticing them. Be creative with your hashtags and use only relevant ones within your industry. It is considered best to add from between 5 and 10 hashtags, though Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags.  Besides this, creating your company hashtag can also be leveraged to establish your own unique identity. Take care not to overuse the number of hashtags, as that might fetch you more likes but that won’t help you in adding people who might be genuinely interested in your brand.

Measure and Analyse

After making your best efforts in creating & posting on Instagram, tracking and measuring your success becomes paramount. Without analyzing your strategies/benchmarking the progress of your Instagram marketing strategy, all your efforts can fall flat. Instead of groping in the dark, take charge and start analyzing/measuring your results.

Not long back, Instagram rolled out its free analytical feature known as ‘Insights’ to reveal statistics and to measure the success of your Instagram posts. This enables you to know the follower count, impressions, clicks to the link within your bio, total reach and to determine the breakdown of your followers by gender. You can also figure out the name of the region/exact city your followers are from. The overall power of analytics is quite powerful in the digital world.