Posted by Instagram is a game changer for businesses. It’s free, it’s visual, and with more than 500 million active users daily, its potential to reach the right audience is huge.
That’s not the only number you should look at. 83% of Instagrammers say they discover new products and services on Instagram. That’s quite a lot! So here are some tips to help you grow and use Instagram more effectively for your business.
1. Design original content. UGC is good but you still need some original content. Use Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud Express, or click your own pictures.
2. Tease your content on Instagram to lead people to your site.
3. Frequently use Instagram Stories for branded content pieces and house content.
4. Let your brand mission inform your content strategy.
5. Acknowledge your audience on social media. Always. You can choose to reply or like their posts, comments, etc.
6. Curating content should not be a difficult task. Use tools like Crowdfire.
7. Build meaningful, relevant partnerships with Influencers. They’ll help you reach your target audience faster.
8. Create Behind the scenes stories with the employees.
9. Craft engaging contests to drive audience participation.
10. In order to grow your community, interact with your audience, listen to them, understand their needs, focus the core of your content on your community’s interests.
11. Follow the two golden rules are — Be Consistent & Be Authentic!
12. Remember each piece of content that you put out there should add value to your audience.
13. Make User-Generated Content a part of your strategy. It not only helps you fill up your content calendar, it also enables high engagement with your community.
14. Tag them if you are using their content. It’ll give you a higher reach.
15. Keep your hashtags crisp and concise. Don’t string too many words into your hashtag. There are more chances of people typing in and looking for #SocialMediaTips instead of typing #SocialMediaTipsForHigherEngagement
16. Use hashtags that are relevant to your post. You don’t want to annoy users by showing an image of river and forests and hashtag it with #SocialMediaTips.
17. Look at the audience you want to target/cater to and see the kind of hashtags they’re using. You want to make sure your hashtags are similar to the keywords they’re searching for and using.
18. Irrespective of how you find the hashtag, the key here is to make sure you’re using a combination of both popular and niche hashtags on your posts.
19. Use tools to make your posts cool.
20. You won’t ever hard sell to your friends, so don’t ever hard sell your audience! Keep the messaging fun, light and maybe even silly.
21. Short and catchy vs. long and meaningful – choose whichever you like. If your story is compelling they’ll read.
22. Think of your audience as your friends and have a conversation with them, whenever possible.
23. Make your posts and captions relatable. Use action verbs (like discover, learn, register now) to prompt people to do something, instead of just scrolling by.
24. Keep your brand’s tone consistent.
25. While writing a caption don’t rush the process. Schedule time, write and rewrite.
26. Keep a log of caption inspiration from brands you love. Refer when you need some creative juices flowing.
27. A bit of colour in the caption is a pleasant way to catch your audience’s attention. Use emojis.
28. Front load your caption, with the call to action messaging.
29. Unlike Instagram posts, there is no Best Time to post on Stories. They’re live for 24 hours and if you post often Instagram will eventually get more accounts to view it.
30. Use text/ elements native to the platform. Use stickers, fonts and filters available on Instagram.
31. Instead of posting everything in one go, space out your Stories so that they look more current. Showing people your morning tea at 6:30 pm might not be a good idea. Posting intermittently also ensures you’ve always got something in the stories newsfeed and this, in turn, will boost engagement.
32. Hashtags and locations work well on Stories. Always use them.
33. For better engagement on your landing pages (blog, website, product page) — Use the Swipe Up feature to repurpose content ⬆️
34. Stories are the best way to beat the Insta algorithm. They provide a way for your business/brand to stay on top-of-mind even if your content isn’t always at the top of the feed. Not to mention, the more engagement your stories get, the more likely they are to show up first on your followers’ feed.
35. Instagram Live is a great way to interact with your followers. Have a content plan, schedule a time and promote it, keep it fresh and exciting.
36. Elevate your storytelling, and make it more diverse, by including Instagram Takeover in your content plan.
37. While spontaneity is a major element of Instagram Stories, having a broad content plan in place is definitely recommended. Create a daily storyboard to keep a check on your frequency.
38. Carve some time out to go through all your posts, story highlights, tagged images and thoroughly examine what reflects your brand identity and what doesn’t.
39. Remove everything that isn’t relevant to your brand anymore. You don’t have to delete the posts, you can just archive them.
That’s all folks!
