75 Tips on How to Market on Instagram

Do you want know how to use Instagram marketing to grow your business? Do you want to get enough interaction with your brand? Do you want to know how to get more followers on Instagram? If you answered yes to any of those questions then you’ve certainly come to the right place. Instagram is cool way to connect with your socially engaged consumers. There are over 130 million active users on Instagram every month, and every day 1 billion photos are liked. Use Instagram for business purposes in the right way, and you could have an instant viral marketing success. Use it wrong, and most of your efforts on this young site could be a big empty fail and nobody wants that. Why do you use Instagram?  Do you use Instagram to tell a visual story about your brand, instantly engage with your followers wherever they are, and even get very real user-generated content through photo contests on the app? Whether you’re new to the platform, you want to find out how to get more Instagram followers, or just want a few more pointers, we’ve put together 75 tips to market your brand more authentically on Instagram.

Focus On Engaging Your Customer #1

Post images with your customer in mind. Post about more than your product. Make your business Instagram about lifestyle, and authentically connecting with your customers. Show Your Stuff

Be Creative With Your Photos #2

Use filters to enhance your photos. Use cool angles, lighting and other photography tricks – whether you hire a photographer, or learn a few tricks on your own. Use photoshop, Diptic, or photoshake to edit your pics, or combine a number of photos into one. Here’s an example of three photos in one from the Instagram blog:

Make Videos #3

Instagram now has video capabilities. Use this to make 60 second videos on your Instagram feed. Instagram-Videos

Post Photos and Short Videos of Your Products #4

Take and post cool photos of your goods to share with Instagram users.

Show Your Products Authentically #5

Show photos of your products as they are used in real life. Here’s an example from Whistler Water, showing fans drinking their water at an outdoor concert.

Show Your Products Creatively #6

Be cool and creative on this hip mobile site. Pilot Pen USA is a great example of creative marketing on this Instagram. They sell pens, right? So how you market that on a social site like Instagram? They show photos of handwritten notes, and their pens.

Show Your Brand Story #7

Post cool photos and videos to show your company’s core values and brand.

Show Who You Are  #8

Feature fun photos and videos of your employees. Give your Instagrammer’s a behind the scenes look at your company. This makes you look like a cool company. Williams Sonoma uses this tactic – here’s an Instagram photo showing a behind-the-scenes look at their test kitchen manager before a photo shoot:

Post Fun, Authentic Videos of Your CEO #9

Make your top executives look personable. Make short, quirky videos of them to post on Instagram. For example, get them show one thing they like to do when not working, or doing something fun at the office.

Share Exclusive Content #10

Use your Instagram feed to show photos you haven’t shared on your Facebook, Twitter or blog (and vice versa). This makes your followers feel special.

Launch a Productlive On Instagram #11

If you’re launching a new product, taking your music group on tour, or opening a new store, etc – do it live on Instagram. For example, the day you launch your product, make a few 15 second videos of you and staff behind the scenes preparing for the launch, and the actual launch with excited customers. Post this to Instagram.

Build Pre-Launch Momentum #12

If you’re launching a new product through Instagram, be sure to build excitement. Tease your followers with a 15 second video behind-the-scenes looks at how you’re preparing for the new product – without giving away exactly what it is. (Think iconic Steve Jobs marketing.)

Show Your Post #13

launch staff party (or clean up) -Dare to show you and your employees authentically, by posting a short video of you after a product launch.

Partner With Other Brands on Instagram #14

Whether you’re a small one shop business, or a large multinational, you have relationships with other businesses. If they’re on Instagram too, partner up, and get them to post your products on their Instagram feed. For example, this year’s Wimbledon created partnerships with brands such as Nike. Add More Tactics

Ask For Comments On Your Photos And Videos #15

If you want more engagement on your posts, ask for it. Questions open up conversations. Ask your followers what they think of a new post you made, and more.

Ask Questions About Your Business Or Products #16

Use questions to get your people talking about your business. For example, ask your Followers if they have used your product today. Add a unique hashtag and give your consumers a hub to share photos of how they used your goods with each other. Target uses questions, such as asking followers their favourite popsicle flavour. This gets people talking about products Target sells.

Ask Questions About Lifestyles #17

Ask a question about lifestyles or how to solve common problems. For example, if you’re a fashion store – ask what boots your followers would wear with a new line of jeans you have. Best-Instagram-Questions

Use “Fill In The Blank” Posts #18

Make updates with a sentence followers can complete. For example, if you sell groceries, create a post with an image of breakfast cereals. Include a “fill in the blank” post such as “I love starting my day with a bowl of______”. This gets people talking about products related to what you sell.

Use Photo Caption Posts #19

Another great way to get engagement on your Instagram posts is through photo caption questions. Take a cool image of your products, or something related to your brand lifestyle. Ask your followers to have fun by captioning it. Tip: You can even make a photo caption contest, to entice engagement in your followers through a cool prize.

Crowdsource Photos #20

Ask followers to submit photos of how they use your product. This could help your business gain customer insight, and future product development research. It’s pretty easy to do, but you may need to up the ante. To entice lots of consumers to give you their photos, run an Instagram photo contest. Run Instagram Contests

Run Instagram Hashtag Contests #21

Hashtag contests are the newest and most fun way to gain user-generated content and engage your followers. Followers simply upload a photo with your hashtag and submissions are placed into a gallery on Facebook and your website where they are voted on to choose a winner. Here’s an example of an Instagram hashtag contest run by Jorg Gray. It involves users taking a picture with a Jorg Gray watch, following the brand on Instagram and hashtagging #jorgstyle to win a free watch.

Run Instagram Contests With Cool Prizes #22

When you host an Instagram contest, make sure your prize provides the right incentive to get your customers entering, and sharing with their friends, too. The right prize that connects with your market, can easily make your contest go viral.

Run Instagram Photo Contests WIth Voting #23

Include a voting element in your Instagram photo contest. This will get your contestants vying for the most votes. They will spread the word about your contest to their friends, and friends of friends. Make Use of Mobile

Geotag Your Posts #24

Target your local consumers by using Photo Map to tag where you are.

Bring Offline Online #25

use QR codes to entice your in-store traffic to engage with you instantly on Instagram. Entice them with group offers and coupon codes.

Bring Offline Events Online #26

Are you hosting a live event? Promote a hashtag for attendees to use to share their photos of it.

Bring Online Offline #26

Host an Instagram meetup to engage in real life with local Instagram enthusiasts – and potential customers. Improve Your ROI

Post Consistently #27

Regardless of your follower count, post consistently. This gets your brand seen regularly by your followers. They will be more apt to become more regular customers this way too.

Determine Post Frequency #28

You might need to post 2-3 times a day, or 2-3 times a week. Monitor your account to determine your post frequency.

Find Your Perfect Instagram Posting Time #29

Not all brands have the same best time to post on Instagram. Not all products do either. Use analytic tools to monitor when your photos are getting liked and commented on. Find out when your hashtags are being used. Then post your fresh content at these most active times.

Monitor Your Instagram Results #30

use third party analytics, or track your followers, your hashtag post numbers, your post likes and comments.

Continuously Improve #31

Based on your content results, keep improving your photo and video posts. If a particular type of image drives tons of engagement, keep using those types of posts. If using general hashtags get your posts interacted with a lot, keep searching for and using general hashtags.

Keep On Top Of Instagram Trends #32

Instagram is constantly developing new and innovative ways to engage on this application. Keep learning to stay knowledgeable about the coolest ways to connect.

Set­up Your Instagram Account #33

Create your Instagram for Business account- It’s easy to make a business account on Instagram.

Make a Business Username #34

Use your business name as your username. If it is taken, choose a username that is instantly recognized with your brand.

Complete Your Profile #35

Include a cool, branded photo, a short informative bio, and a link to your website.

Connect Your Account to Facebook #36

Instagram is owned by Facebook. Connect these two very powerful social media sites to boost your marketing efforts.

Make An Instagram Tab On Your Facebook Page #37

This enables you to instantly share your Instagram photos to your Facebook Fans. Companies like Mercedes Benz are brilliant at integrating their Instagram content on Facebook:

Create A Brand Specific Strategy #38

Keep your Instagram content strategy focused on your brand’s unique way of seeing the world. Instagram is a photo (and now video) sharing site. Connect your business with your ‘tribe’ on Instagram in a consistent and particular visual way. Use Hashtags

Use Hashtags In Your Updates #40

Hashtags are a major part of Instagram. It’s a big way of how users can find you through their mobile Instagram searches. Unlike on other sites (such as Twitter), you’re not limited by character count. Include a few tags (but not too many – or you’ll look desperate) in your posts to get connected. Here are a few strategising using hashtags:

Use Brand Specific Hashtags #41

Include your business name in some of your post hashtags. Also, use unique tags for particular marketing campaigns you run. For example, if you’re hosting a photo contest on Instagram, make a unique tag just for that campaign. This tactic both promotes your contest, and it gives your consumers a distinct tag to connect with others participants (so they can see their competition!). Here’s how Dry Soda uses a brand specific hashtag, #fridayDRYday to engage their community, and show off fan photos of the week.

Use General Hashtags #42

Include general tags on your posts, to be found for your products or lifestyle posts. For example, if your business is a coffee shop, and you post an image of your scrumptious latte, include tags like #latte or even #coffee. Often even quicker to go. If you spot a trend, and it fits with your brand, use it. Your post could literally be seen by thousands of interested consumers in a matter a minutes.

Run An Instagram Hashtag Contest #43

A hashtag contest allows your fans and followers to upload photos under a certain hashtag. All submissions are then displayed in a voting gallery on you Facebook Page, website, etc.

Monitor Your Brand Hashtags #44

Your consumers are using your tags to connect with you. Be sure to keep checking your Instagram hashtags, just like you would your Facebook Page and Twitter mentions. Respond to comments and concerns quickly, and you’ll build happy customer relationships. Focus on Your Customers

Make Your Followers Famous #45

Share followers photos on your social sites. Show your customers you appreciate them by acknowledging their cool photos, and share them with your Facebook fan or Twitter followers. NOTE: be sure to ask permission to use their photo first!

Embed Followers Photos #46

Instagram now enables you to embed Instagram photos on your website and other sites. Use this, like Starbucks, to show cool images of your brand and product from your Instagram followers by embedding the entire post. Make sure you tell them you’re showcasing their image, to make them feel appreciated, and to get their permission to use it.

Like Your Follower’s Photos #47

Acknowledge your customers’ awesomeness by liking their photos – particularly if they include your product, or emulate your brand.

Comment on Followers Photos #48

Engage with your consumers by commenting on cool product related photos they post.

Respond To Comments On All Your Posts #49

If someone comments on your posts, respond to them. This is particularly true when then comment is a question, or even something negative about your brand.

Mention Your Customers #50

Mentioning is another huge part of Instagram. @mention your followers, your customers, and any other user with great photos of your products. You show appreciation for them, and you get to engage with your market. Here’s an example of Coke @mentioning a customer who won a recent Instagram photo contest:

Mention celebrities and other related industry leaders #51

If your images are about celebs – let them know. They may just appreciate it enough to share it with their followers!

Determine Content Medium & Ratio #52

Instagram started as a photo-sharing app, but its wide base of creative users publish everything from videos to graphics to Boomerang videos. As you plan out your content on your social media calendar, consider a balance of content types that will work best for the resources you have and the engagement you want from your audience. If video enables you to tell a compelling story about your product, work it into your content more often. If you don’t have the resources to execute video at high-quality level, you may want may want to only use video for specific campaigns and promotions. With composition for Instagram, quality matters, and it is worth spending the time to create the best possible content. Beyond its flagship app, Instagram offers several supplementary apps that help you get even more creative with your posts. The Instagram suite of apps includes:
  • Hyperlapse: This app allows users to shoot stop-motion time-lapse. While the camera moves a short distance, the action between each shot is rapid.
  • Layout: Combine photos and videos together in a single Instagram post through custom layouts and features like mirrored landscapes.
  • Boomerang: Much like a GIF, Boomerang plays a short cut video forward, but also backward, repeatedly to create a nonstop motion. These additional apps allow brands and consumers alike to create even more unique, Instagram-specific content even without in-house design or video production capabilities.

Determine Your Objectives #53

First thing’s first, what do you want to achieve on Instagram? What’s the purpose of your brand using Instagram? Whether you’ve never published a single photo or you’re an Instagram seasoned pro, consider the following for your Instagram marketing strategy:
  • What will Instagram allow you to do that other platforms don’t?
  • Who is your target audience and which members of your audience are active on Instagram?
  • How will Instagram integrate with the other networks in your social media strategy?
Instagram’s focus on visual sharing offers a unique platform to showcase your culture and people in addition to your products and services. For example, Flowers for Dreams has a stellar Instagram profile showcasing events and products with vibrant and eye-catching visuals.

Build Content Themes #54

Review your objectives and determine what aspects of your brand to showcase in your Instagram content. Products, services, team members and culture all offer rich potential for subject matter over time. Once you have a list of specific content themes, brainstorm possible subjects for your images and videos. Your content themes should align not only through your brand voice, but visually as well. For example, Pantone consistently uses similar visuals to help tell a better story on Instagram. Using vibrant and colorful content highlights its products and increases interaction (aka: clicks and traffic). Did you know that Instagram photos with faces generate 38% more likes than those without? Building content themes around what you know works is essential to success. Start by using an Instagram analytics tool like Sprout Social to benchmark your content and see what actually drives engagement. Once you have your data, develop your content themes around that style of visual, whether it’s photos with faces, brightly-colored images or videos of your product. A quick Instagram audit will tell you everything you need to know.

Set a (Flexible) Content Calendar #55

To establish and maintain an active presence on Instagram, determine the frequency with which you will post. It helps to learn some of the best times to post on Instagram so you reach your maximum audience for engagement. Afterward, develop a content calendar that cycles through your themes and integrates key dates and campaigns. Sprout’s Instagram Scheduling features allow users to select, edit and schedule Instagram posts from our dashboard. While you cannot schedule posts directly on Instagram, you can easily prepare content (photos, videos, captions) in advance through Sprout. Some of the best content for Instagram will occur spontaneously, especially if your aim is to highlight company culture or events. By preparing content and setting a general schedule in advance, you can allow the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they occur. During events, be ready to publish quickly to take advantage of real-time social engagement. But use scheduled Instagram posts to fill in the gaps in between.

Curate User-Generated Content #56

If your Instagram community members share posts featuring your brand, you have access to a repository of potential content gold. Curating content from your fans allows you to foster audience engagement and create an incentive for your audience to share posts. Several brands primarily rely on Instagram user-generated content to fill their Instagram feeds these days. Brands like Anthropologie, Home Goods, GoPro and even Instagram rely heavily on UGC to promote their brand. However, one brand that truly lives off UGC is AirBnB. Each image on Instagram is an actual place customers can book through its site. The company has a great landing page for followers to find all the Instagram places mentioned by real customers. UGC can be extremely rewarding, but as always, the photos you choose to curate should match your brand aesthetic. Make sure to review users’ accounts and posts before sharing their content to ensure it’s appropriate to publicly align your brand with their account. Always give credit by mentioning the original photographer in your caption and provide your fans with insight on how to get featured. For Sprout Social users, you can easily share posts through our new Instagram Reposting tool. Users can Regram content straight from the app or schedule content on your calendar.

Establish Clear Team Guidelines: Style, Publishing & Workflow #57

A consistent voice on social media is key to building your brand. And on a visual platform, the need for a clearly defined aesthetic is key. Even if one person is responsible for managing your brand’s Instagram account, establishing guidelines composition, filters and captions will ensure your Instagram account is part of a unified brand experience. When publishing on Instagram, you have more decisions to make than which filter looks best. From visual composition to location tagging and using hashtags in your captions, planning your approach in advance allows you to maximize the potential of each Instagram feature and functionality.

Maintain a Brand Aesthetic #58

Review the existing visual representations of your brand: your logo, website, graphics, stock photography and other collateral. Do you have an established color palette? A cool or warm tone in pictures? Your Instagram content, and the editing effects and filters you choose, should reflect the same. Consider creating a social media style guide to maintain consistent branding.

Understand Your Brand’s Composition #59

Not every social media marketer is a natural photographer. Shooting photos for Instagram is a learned skill. Determine your approach to a few basic elements of composition in order to create a sense of visual harmony when a user looks at your profile, such as:
  • Backgrounds
  • White space balance
  • Dominant color(s)
  • Subject
A brand that continually maintains a well-organized and defined brand aesthetic is MailChimp. Their Instagram feed is often filled with photos, videos and GIFs using a simple background with one dominant color. This allows the subject to stand out.

Learn Your Instagram Filters & Invest in Other Creative Tools #60

Instagram offers several ways to edit photos and videos. Learn your filters and effects to fit your brand’s aesthetic. Also try to keep your content visually consistent. If you need help identifying your own aesthetic, check out our list of our favorite Instagram accounts for brand inspiration. Conclusion So there you have it, 75 tips to find out how to use Instagram and get you better connected to your market. Try them out, and see how authentically successful your visual mobile marketing can be. It’s always best practice to avoid getting complacent with your content. Make sure every Instagram image size is correctly set to the right dimensions and at the best resolution. Tools like VSCO and Afterlight can take you a step further with more complex editing features.

Put Effort Into Your Captions #61

Approaches to writing Instagram captions vary. While captions are limited to 2,200 characters and truncated with an ellipsis after three lines of text, it’s still an important part of your post. While some users omit captions, your brand never should. Captions are essential to feeding to your brand’s story. A great image alone is great, but one with a story is even better. Try to include the most important part of your message within those first three lines. Additionally, use your captions to keep users’ attentions or to inspire them to take an action. You have the space so make sure your captions are put to use.

Trust Your Hashtags #62

To see the most success out of your Instagram hashtags, make them easy to discover, remember and read. It’s always best to use hashtags to connect with new followers and increase engagement on your posts. An excellent example is from Pottery Barn, which uses the hashtag #mypotterybarn. Not only does it give the company great opportunities for UGC, the hashtag increases brand awareness by encouraging users to participate. Pottery Barn often reposts great content through the hashtag and even refers to the specific Pottery Barn item(s) featured. If you want to see the potential to your hashtags, Sprout’s Instagram analytics tools make it easy to measure and benchmark branded hashtags or keywords. Make sure your content is engaging users by tracking your core Instagram engagement metrics.

Try Social Sharing Across Networks #63

Instagram allows you to connect your profile to accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and Swarm. It’s simple to automatically push your Instagram posts to various networks. You can also create IFTTT Instagram recipes to automatically share your photos in Slack channels, as Facebook albums or on Twitter. Determine whether you want to cross-post or promote your Instagram content in this way. If cross-posting is an important part of your strategy, make sure that anyone managing your Instagram account has access to linked accounts in case they need to re-authenticate the connection.

Identify Team Members & Roles #64

Your primary social media or community manager should certainly be part of your Instagram marketing, but other team members may also provide valuable contributions. Depending on your team and objectives, you might divide responsibilities into content creation and publishing, community management, discovery and analytics, and assign them to team members with different strengths. For organizations that require outbound message approval before publishing, establish a clear process for creating and reviewing content. One caveat, though is that capturing and sharing moments in real time is part of Instagram’s purpose. When posting during live events, make sure your workflow will hold up. Luckily, Sprout’s permission settings allow publishers to determine who can draft, publish or schedule Instagram content to specific channels. This is extremely valuable for agencies with multiple brands who want an audit trail for team activity and task competitions. Additionally, our social media team collaboration tools offer premier security features so brands can avoid mixing passwords and login credentials across networks.

Follow Industry Accounts & Instagram Influencers #65

What kind of content do you want to keep a pulse on through Instagram? For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, you’d want to follow top fashion bloggers. Then you could easily keep an eye on interesting content and even find inspiration for your own feed. In fact, you can easily find others in the industry by following specific influencers. After you follow, Instagram will recommend other accounts to follow. It also helps to set basic guidelines around who your brand will and won’t follow. Whether it’s competitors, political figures or random influencers, there’s always a chance for backlash. Vet and inspect anyone you follow to ensure they’re appropriate to your brand and audience.  

Repost Quickly With Permission #66

A study by marketing startup, Crowdtap, and the global research company, Ipsos, found that user-generated content is 35 percent more memorable and 50 percent more trusted than traditional and non-user-generated media. A great way we’ve found to share user-generated content on Instagram is to repost images from our community. This strategy has helped us grow our Instagram following by 500 percent under six months. (If you want to learn how we find the best user-generated content for our account, here’s a short video by Brian Peters, our social media manager.) A typical way of re-posting an image after asking for permission looks something like this: Take a screenshot on your mobile, crop away everything apart from the image, copy and paste or type out the caption, add your own caption and finally, publish the user-generated content.    

Use Tools To Separate Content Creation And Engagement #67

One of the most common productivity advice is to do one thing at a time. A research by New York University business professor, Sophie Leroy, discovered that there’s a cost to switching your attention from one task to another even if the switch is brief. Whenever our brains switch to a new task, the old task leaves an “attention residue” that reduces our cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time. Multitasking actually cause us to take a longer time to complete all the tasks because our brains have to constantly switch between those tasks. For Instagram marketing, there are usually two main things you would do: Creating or scheduling content. Responding to comments and engaging with others, It is easy to be distracted by the notifications when you only want to publish a post. A trick can be to use a tool solely for scheduling so that you can focus on creating content when you want to. Then, when you are in the Instagram app, you can focus on replying and engaging.

Use The Same Filter and Edits #68

Here’s another trick to help you save time and create a consistent profile gallery: use the same filter and/or edits for most — or even all — your images. A lot of the time spent on publishing an Instagram post is usually spent on editing the image. By using the same filter and/or edits for every image, you can drastically reduce the editing time. This not only saves you time but also helps to keep your Instagram posts consistent. If you use a photo editing application on your desktop like Lightroom, you can save a filter and the edits as a custom template. If you prefer to edit your photos on your mobile, apps like VSCO or Instagram itself allows you to rearrange the filters and toolkits so that the most commonly used options appear first. VSCO even allows you to copy the edits made on one image and paste them onto other images.

Repurpose Posts On Other Platforms For Instagram And Vice Versa #69

Your Instagram posts don’t have to exist on Instagram only, and that’s the same for your other social media content. Instead of re-creating new content for each social media platform, you could repurpose your posts on other platforms for Instagram and vice versa. This increases the impact of your content and saves you time from creating new content.

Instagram Strategy Takeaway #70

If your target audience is between the age of 18 and 49, Instagram could be a great platform to reach your potential customers and engage your existing customers. To help with your Instagram marketing strategy, Facebook interviewed and surveyed more than 12,000 teens and young adults and offered these recommendations on how to maximize Instagram’s potential for your business. Showcase what makes you special: If you can share a perspective that only you can offer, you can more likely connect with the teens and young adults on Instagram. Blend in to stand out: Instagram users prefer beautiful visual content and often post such high-quality content themselves. To engage them, you have to create similar high-quality images and videos. Inspire the moment: Teens and young adults in the study describe Instagram as current (42 percent), creative (37 percent), and useful (32 percent). Hence, they would expect such content from brands on Instagram.

There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram #71

CoSchedule did a great job rounding up several studies on the best times to post on Instagram. Here are some of the studies and their findings: Huffington Post: 2 am to 5pm is the best time to post on Instagram MarketingProfs: 1 to 2 pm is best for engagement, CoSchedule: Tuesday 2 pm could be the best time for driving traffic. Lifewire also looked at a few research and found several best times to post on Instagram. SumAll also compiled findings from a few sources Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today and suggested this: 5 to 6 pm on weekdays and 8 pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6 pm. All the suggestions likely worked well for some businesses but certainly not all. This variety in “best” posting times points me to one conclusion. There isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram. If there isn’t a universal best time to post on Instagram, when should you post on Instagram? How do you make sense of these research? Here’s our take: These research are great for you to form hypotheses of your best posting time. For example, like Lifewire suggested, “Around the lunch hour is when people get a break to do what they want; that often includes checking social media.” What you could do is to test posting around the lunch hour and outside of the lunch hour. Which posts did better?  Instagram-Best-Time-To-Post

Businesses Cannot Ignore Instagram Stories #72

Here are two interesting Instagram Stories statistics reported on Techcrunch: Instagram Stories generated, on average, 35 percent more views for brands than Snapchat Stories, according to the mobile video platform, dubdub. One in five Instagram Stories posted by businesses receive a direct message reply. When Iconosquare wanted to study the effect of Instagram Stories on the engagement of Instagram posts, they asked more than 1,200 Instagram users, “Since the arrival of Stories, what do you spend most of your time on Instagram doing?”. They found that “in only 3 weeks, almost one-quarter of the Instagram users we surveyed have seemingly ditched their usual Instagram activity in favour of watching Stories.” The shift in attention led to a fall in engagement on Instagram posts. When Iconosquare looked at the engagement rate of 60 top brands before and after Instagram Stories was launched, they discovered that engagement rate fell after Instagram Stories was launched. This finding was confirmed by several readers of the Iconosquare blog.

Turn Your Instagram into a Sales Funnel #73

Can you sell products via Instagram? Of course you can. The social platform is a great place to take your brand to the next level and sell more. However, selling on Instagram is different. For instance, if you’re not using the paid posts feature, you won’t be able to add an external link to your Instagram posts. Making sales via Instagram is about taking the tried and tested approach. Which is to focus on building a strong brand image with the help of your Instagram profile. You can do this by: Be Regularly Active. When marketing on Instagram, it is important that you add your Instagram activities to your daily routine. A lot of marketers may argue that you don’t have to post to your Instagram every single day. Which is absolutely fine. However, you do have to remain active by logging into your Instagram account regularly, interacting with content from your feed, follow other relevant experts and comment on photos/videos. By being active on a regular basis, you increase the chances of getting your profile noticed by the right people. This may not make a big difference, but in the long run you will find that your consistent activity has positively contributed to your growth on Instagram. Move Beyond Product Photos. While there is nothing wrong in posting pictures about your product, you should put a limit to hosting product related content to your Instagram account. Your Instagram has to appear natural and aesthetic – even if you are running a business. Regardless of the type of business you are running, your Instagram profile can have photographs that reflect your company’s beliefs and ideologies. The content your post can help your followers understand your vision and what you seek to achieve or give them. For instance, you could post quotes that are inspirational in nature, which people like to share on Instagram. This automatically increases the engagement of your content and gets your brand the needed attention. Post Pictures with Real People. When you are running a product oriented business, you have the opportunity to show your products interacting with real people. For example, if you are selling handbags, you can have women in your photographs using or admiring your handbags.

Running Instagram Contests #74

Instagram can work great as a marketing channel for your business but it is necessary that you engage with your target audience in a meaningful manner. One simple yet proven way to do this is to run an Instagram contest or giveaway. While there is a definite learning curve when it comes to running a successful Instagram contest, it’s not rocket science. When done right, you can benefit from them in more than one way. You can not only increase your followers but also give your product or brand the exposure it needs. The good thing about Instagram is that it doesn’t have any limitations when it comes to running such promotions. In other words, you are only limited by your imagination. Here are three popular types of contest that you can run on Instagram. Like Contests: Like contests require the users to simply like your photo to qualify for the competition and get a chance to win. Since the user does not have to do much to enter the contest, it helps in increasing the engagement and get a better response. Also, when you run a contest where you are simply aiming to get more likes, things naturally get easier. Comment Contests: This contest is similar to running a like contest. The only difference being, people need to comment on a photo or video to enter. This type of contest works really well when you are looking for some targeted feedback and at the same time want to increase engagement on your post. Photo Contests:If you are active on Instagram, you should know that a photo challenge contest is a highly popular form of contest. Interested users have to post a certain type of photo on their personal Instagram account and use a hashtag you designate. Now, the reason this contest works so well is because it helps you get more exposure through your hashtag. Instagram-Giveaway-Ideas

Build an Engaged Instagram Community #75

As a business owner, it’s crucial that you focus on creating an engaged following on Instagram. If your followers aren’t excited or eager to interact with your content, you won’t see a favorable return on your time investment. Let’s see what you can do to build an engaged community with Instagram marketing. Know Your Followers, If you don’t know who your audience is, you will not know how to serve them better. Even if you manage to post great photographs and videos, you won’t find success unless your content is seen by your target audience. This is why you need to put an extra effort to learn more about your audience and the kind of content they like so that you can post more of it. Remember, the more effort you put into understanding and studying your Instagram followers, the better results you will see from your marketing efforts. Ask More Questions, Asking questions to your followers works great for increasing engagement. The reason being simple, people like to feel valued and heard. More specifically, they want you to see their opinions as important. By asking the right questions you create a more engaging community. It could be as simple as asking your followers about their day or what their immediate future plans are. Or you could simply take a photograph of your new office space and ask you followers for their opinions. The point is, you have to interact with them and get them to talk with you. Give your Instagram marketing a human touch. Initially you may not get the kind of response you are looking for, but gradually you will see more and more people replying back. Stand Out from the Rest, Instagram is dominated by brands and small businesses that are trying to market themselves. This is why it is important that you set yourself apart from the competition. If you are a travel blogger, maybe you could share a travel tip that is you unique to you. Sharing your experience or knowledge that is not available with anybody else is a great way to stand out from the rest. You could share simple tips every day to connect to your audience. The more knowledgeable and information oriented your Instagram yes, the easier it will be for you add value to the lives of your followers.  

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