Posted by Instagram has been nothing short of a revolution in the world of social media that is well-known for being very dynamic. It not only ushered in for the very first time a social media platform that was entirely visually oriented but also permitted Smartphone users to shoot photos, beautify, and upload them to their Instagram accounts while on the go. It has found great favor with the younger generation who consider the Smartphone as an extension of their existence. Not surprisingly, there has been an exponential growth of users as well as marketers who see it as a perfect platform for increasing brand awareness and boosting engagement. According to blog.hootsuite.com, more than 75% of all businesses in America will be on Instagram in 2020. This means that if your business is not making active use of Instagram, you could be missing out on a lot of opportunities for building brand awareness and driving sales. Some of the top reasons why businesses choose Instagram over other social media:
Matchless Opportunity for Businesses to Reach Out
With its monthly active users exceeding one billion, marketers across virtually all sectors are assured of finding their target audience on Instagram. A large proportion of them are Millennials with lots of buying power. More than 500 million users see Instagram Stories daily which means that it has emerged as a very important channel for brands to engage their audiences. With a massive 89% of its users living outside the U.S., Instagram is a very strategic channel for American businesses with a global footprint, especially in countries like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Russia. Even though its American audience is just 11% of its total user base, it is still a very large population of potential customers for indigenous marketers. The fact that over 200 million users reach out to see at least one business profile daily along with an estimated 62% of users admitting that they learn about a brand or product on Instagram Stories is highly encouraging for businesses.
Optimize Your Specific Instagram Bio
Your Instagram bio plays a pivotal role in impressing people and compelling them to deliver deeper into your account. Your Instagram Bio provides quick and concise information regarding who you actually are and precisely what you are hoping to offer to everybody. That is precisely the reason to treat Bio as the perfect place for flaunting your skills and showcasing your business catchy & strong points. Use cleverly the limit of 150 characters and do not forget to incorporate your business’s name, a catchy and informative introduction to your web design business, and also, include relevant hashtags.
Always remember to incorporate a link specifically to your online portfolio or your official website along with a call-to-action or CTA that helps in pursuing visitors to glance through. In the event you are having multiple sites, you have access to a plethora of tools that would help you in incorporating multiple links into your bio.
Ideally Suited to Businesses of Every Size
With such a humongous base of users on Instagram, there is virtually no limit to what brands can achieve on the platform for elevating their awareness and strengthening relationships. The good thing is that the benefits can be derived as easily by small businesses as the large ones, which is the reason why you will find even mom-and-pop stores competing for your customers with the bigger and more well-established businesses. However, regardless of the size of the business, marketers will have to ensure that their posts are relevant to their target audiences as well as very high-quality, original, and entertaining. The frequency of posting as well as the time of posting needs to be experimented with for the optimum impact and then adhered to consistently. Small businesses that are making a start on Instagram can think of participating in a Like4Like program where they can bump up the likes on their posts on a reciprocal basis.
Take Advantage of Highly-Engaged Target Audiences
Instagram has always been recognized as a platform with high-engaged users. According to entrepreneur.com, it has ten times the engagement rate of its parent, Facebook, and more than 54 times that of Pinterest, another upcoming social media platform. The same report also goes on to say that as many as 75% of Instagram users interact with the posts in various ways after viewing a sponsored post. By engaging with their followers, brands get valuable feedback on the performance of their products and services as well as the content they are posting. The more the number of likes, comments, shares your posts receive from your followers, the better the level of engagement, which in turn activates the Instagram algorithm that pushes your posts to the top of the feeds of your followers ensuring better visibility. The secret to boosting the engagement rate is to know what your followers like so that you can adjust the content of your posts as well as their frequency and timing. Careful selection of hashtags will ensure that your posts are more easily discovered by Instagram users. Local hashtags especially are very useful for driving local customers to your store.
The Facility of Using Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories come with a basket of amazing benefits; not only do they permit brands to occupy the top of the minds of their target audiences but also marketers can diversify the content to keep the target audience engaged better. Instagram Stories also allow marketers to engage their target audiences in real-time that can be used to promote live events or promotional sales. More than 500 million Instagram users use Stories daily and brands are excited by the fact that as many as 62% of users say that they become more interested in a product or a brand after encountering it in a story. Besides the obvious benefits of using Stories, it is also a great way of breaking the monotony of the normal Instagram posts giving you more room to innovate with your content presentation.
It Pays To Be Social
This seems pretty obvious since we are discussing Instagram marketing and business after all. However, you simply cannot underestimate the intrinsic value and power of actively interacting and engaging with your community. This should certainly assist in bonding with other professionals, family, and fans in your industry. This would send further positive signals to all the Instagram algorithms. This should be boosting or enhancing the overall performance of your Insta posts.
Being actively social implies responding to your followers or people using the same hashtags just like you. Remember to send authentic and honest responses that should go a long way in fostering communication and fortifying the bond. You could obtain real Instagram likes when you seek professional guidance from digital marketing experts online.
Perfectly Suited to the Smartphone Generation
Instagram has the unique advantage of being a social media platform that has been designed ground-up for Smartphone users, unlike Facebook and Twitter that had to be adapted for phones from their original desktop versions. The ease of operating Instagram on the mobile phone has been appreciated by the Millennials who form a very large part of its user base. Instagram makes it possible for users to click photos, edit them, apply filters, and post them to their accounts all on the go in a seamless and user-friendly manner that requires a very minimal learning curve. The cleaner interface compared to that of Facebook is one of the reasons why the rate of engagement is far higher.
Conclusion
It is amply clear that Instagram is not a social media phenomenon by accident. It possesses many attributes that are clear winners compared to the gaggle of other social media platforms vying for the attention of both users and marketers. As Instagram is gradually making itself open up to e-commerce, it will certainly continue to gain traction with even greater speed.