Choosing Instagram for business provides huge opportunities to reach 700 million potential followers who can positively impact your business fortune. Yes, the number of Instagram users crossed the 700 million mark almost a year ago. The most positive aspect of Instagram is the outlook of Instagrammers towards business. They are eager and ready to engage with it both within the app and beyond.
The business friendliness of the social media platform becomes evident from the fact that numerous business brands enjoy the interaction with 120 million users on the platform. This is great news for SEO because all Instagram business accounts carry links to the business websites that enjoy the patronage of the Instagram traffic. It thus becomes clear that Instagram can reinforce your SEO campaign and make it more effective. That 80 percent Instagram users track (follow) at least one business is the reason that more and more businesses are turning to Instagram as the chosen social media platform.
Connect with real people
Since followers are at the core of your Instagram performance, it is natural that people often go into overdrive to expand their fan base. While you can buy Instagram views that can prop up your business albeit artificially, garnering the attention of viewers organically would ensure that you interact with real people only. Unless you have meaningful interaction with real people, you can never derive the real gains for business. Only when people take an interest in your niche, build a relationship with you and engage with your content that you can develop a band of loyal followers that no bots can match.
For succeeding with Instagram, you must know your target audience and have the means of connecting with them. You must create powerful content that provides a meaningful way of building followers comprising of real people who can contribute to better business results. What you should do to develop real followers that can pay back to your business would become clear on going through the remaining part of this article.
Have a sound strategy for Instagram
To ensure that you can justify the returns on investment, you must have a good plan for using Instagram as a marketing platform. Be clear about what you want to achieve by using the platform, mostly it could be for boosting SEO so that you can devise suitable strategies for implementing the plan. It would point out the audience that you must target to fulfill your business goals.
Know what competitors are doing
By researching on what your competitors are doing, you could know what kind of realistic following you should expect. It would also help to know what kind of content would work for you, the frequency of posting content, what are the key industry hashtags including branded hashtags and more. You would also gain insight into how other businesses interact and engage with the audience that you are trying to reach.
Set goals
Set goals to achieve because it forms the foundation of the Instagram strategy. Consider your overall business and marketing strategy to get leads about how you must frame your Instagram strategy that aligns with the business goals. Whether you want to drive more traffic to websites, build brands or support the SEO and marketing campaign, the platform can support you well.
Give a purpose to your content
Create a compelling story that you can tell by using images that would give a purpose to the content and make it interesting. When there is a purpose behind the content, it creates engagement among the audience you target and would lead to sharing of content that opens the doors for would-be followers. You can share some inside information about your products, uphold how others perceive the brand or present the brand by showing how it has received the wholehearted acceptance of customers.
Engage in cross promotion
Since the purpose of taking your business on Instagram is to acquire high visibility that leads to increased followers, an easy way of doing it is to propagate your Instagram content and account on other social media channels through cross promotion. As you are likely to have business accounts on other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. you must make those fans aware of your Instagram account. By mentioning your Instagram account on other social media platforms and by incentivizing them to visit your Instagram account, you can drive more followers to your account. You can even publish your Instagram posts on other channels.
Hashtags must be relevant
The hashtags have to be relevant to the industry niche or your business so that potential followers who are keen to engage with photos and content relevant to your business would be able to discover you. This would lead to the enrichment of the follower base. When creating hashtags make sure that you infuse enough originality into it that makes it exclusive for your business. Indeed, you must take a cue from popular hashtags by using the search function of Instagram, but you must add your creativity to it. However, you must avoid the lure of going overboard to create hashtags that can be quite weird. Also, avoid using gimmicks in hashtags that might momentarily seem profitable but would keep you away from engaging with real people meaningfully.
Drive people to your Instagram account from all channels of communication
You must not lose any opportunity to showcase your Instagram account and must use all communication tools at your disposal to drive more traffic to Instagram. Spread the Instagram links on all social media platforms and website as well as in online newsletters and e-mail signature so that whenever people visit those places, they know about your Instagram account. Since these people already know you, they would not hesitate to visit your Instagram account. Even providing Instagram links or hashtags in blog posts would further expand the horizon of followers that originate from the blogs.
How much advantage you get from Instagram depends on your capabilities of using the platform correctly.