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Instagram For Business

by | Oct 6, 2016 | Social Media

Avid Instagram users may have noticed by now the addition of the little contact button that has appeared on the accounts of businesses.

Since their first announcements in mid-march and despite a large scale backlash from the online community, Instagram have gone ahead with the rollout out of algorithm-driven feeds. These new feeds aim to re sort its date and time relevant content to what it believes is ‘best suited’ to you.

Much like its just a tad successful counterpart “Facebook”, Instagram have now also introduced business accounts into the world and entered the market of paid advertising.

Advertising costs with startups are things to avoid. Business owners often consider what they can do to increase brand awareness and gain free exposure in the digital world. Yet with Instagram putting a clamp on unfiltered content, it’s leaving marketers asking if it is all too late and is it even worth it?

Competition with advertising often comes down to who has the largest budget to reach its target market, but with the correct strategies, engaging content and key consistency, there is no reason why small business cannot get ahead – well at least before any more changes come our way!

Engagement numbers on Facebook have sadly dwindled to what we would consider anything over 1% to be a blessing, with most organic posts providing anywhere between 0.5%-3% (wearesocial.com). It’s with great pain to say that Instagram will likely be going to these lengths in the not to distant future, so the time to act on this platform is now – get ahead while you still have a chance.

Rather than analyzing whether this was the correct move by Instagram – we are going to show you some tips on how to boost engagement so even small businesses and budding entrepreneurs can compete with the big boys.

Top Tips for Marketing Your Business Through Instagram.

 

Do your research

Brand building takes time – be sure to check out your main competitors who are advertising to the same target market.

Search broadly, then become more specific. Have a look what the players with thousands upon thousands of followers are doing, then bring it down to your main competitors both geographically and segmented to your audience.

Having trouble? Try using web apps like Websta

 

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Find Your Competitors

Have a look at their content and their advertising approaches – are they giving consumers the ‘hard-sell’ or are they taking a softer angle by selling them the lifestyle that comes with the business products or service?

What’s working the best for them?

Look at their posts specifically. What’s creating conversation and what do you explicitly notice about the posts attributes that are causing them to engage more?

Think

  • Colours
  • Brightness
  • Hashtags
  • Phototags
  • Time of post.

Have a look at the difference in engagement numbers between a bright/colourful and a dark/shadowy post.

comparing impressions for instagram


 

Do it Better

If you can do what they’re doing, but do it better – there’s no reason why you can’t attract their follower base over to your page.

 

Scheduling your posts

If you’re working with a new account, sit down and design a strategy – work out your first 30 posts and schedule them in.

Below are stats for peak time in traffic.

instagram peak times for user activity
Use web apps such as Hootsuite or Schedugram to schedule your posts ahead of time.

 

Break Free from the Square

Some time ago Instagram changed their infamous square formatting to landscape and portrait.

So?

Uploading photos in portrait only means one thing, more advertising space for free – so use it!

 

Engage

Marketing is all about making yourself visible – if no one knows you exist, how are you going to sell anything!?

 

Three simple steps

Follow – Get on your competitors follower lists and follow someone.

Like – Like 3 of their most recent photos.

Comment – Comment on one of the photos (Be appropriate).

And repeat cycle.

 

In a recent Study it was found that with every 100 users…

instagram followback stats

Influencers

Another great tool to use on Instagram is the use of social influencers – there are communities of users on IG who promote products and services to their large audience bases.

The bigger they get, the higher they charge for product placement – but if you do your research it’s not hard to target influencers who will promote in exchange for free goods and services.

Note – check up on their engagement numbers. Is the ratio between followers and likes per post normal? Up to to 20,000 followers, 2-8% (approx.) engagement is acceptable and will begin to drop slightly after that.

 

Choose the Correct Hashtags

If you’re new to the social world, hashtags are simply keywords that users can use to find particular interests users have.

Here are some of most used hashtags on Instagram

instagrams most used hashtags

However, be more specific to your business – if you’re going to use any of these, only use a couple. Also think geographically as well (e.g. #brisbanefood). Yes, there are going to be fewer hits, but these will be audience specific.

Choose a set of hashtags, and save them in your notes. You can then copy and paste them into every post easily

 


Final Thoughts

If you are reading this as a business owner or entrepreneur, a call to action from this article would be to act immediately on spanning across all communication channels on social media. Get the most you can out of free advertising on channels such as Instagram while they are still readily available.

 

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