5 ways to improve your business with Instagram

Instagram may have been around for a while, but it continues to reign as one of the top social networks. Plus, it’s a great place to market products and boost sales across a wide array of industries. Having a digital presence on Instagram is an increasingly reliable way to boost awareness or your business. Here are a few ways you can leverage this powerful tool:

1. Engage with your audience

Instead of using Social media marketing to spam your followers with nothing but sales material, you should try to engage with them as much as possible. This also helps make your company feel more human and less corporate. To encourage interaction, you could share your followers’ images and hold contests.

2. Use Hashtags

Adding hashtags to your posts that are relevant to your business can help get account reach users beyond just your set number of followers. You can include up to 30 hashtags per post and up to 10 for Instagram Stories. When it comes to hashtags, the key is to ensure that you are not using the same hashtags over and over but that each post is tagged with unique and relevant hashtags.

3. Post at the right time

It can be time consuming trying to figure out the best time to post for your audience. It would be best to do a little research to figure out what works best for you in your industry. To do this, you should monitor your posts – and your competitors’ – to arrive at an optimum posting schedule for your account. You can also use Instagram Analytics and other social listening tools to help you.

To start you off, here are a few tips for scheduling your posts:

• Aim for non-work hours such as lunch and evenings
• If you’re a B2C company, post on weekends as well as weekdays
• Wednesdays and Thursdays seem to be best for engagement

4. Tell Stories

With Instagram Stories, you don’t need to try to convey your entire message in a single image, you can string several together to tell a narrative. Each ‘story’ is deleted after 24 hours, however you can create highlights on your page, where you can create a singular narrative that will stay there for as long as you choose. You can also add to your highlights as often as you want, making them as long or a short as you desire.

5. Boost your posts

Instagram knows it’s good for business, and for this reason, it allows users to create Business Accounts. As opposed to a personal page, a business profile opens up more opportunities for business marketing, including:

• Paid (or sponsored) advertising campaigns – these can be tailored to a specific audience and budget
• Access to metrics to see who is viewing your content and how your followers are interacting with each post
• Shopping on Instagram, in which you can actually tag your products within each post

If you would like advice on your business’ social media, please feel free to contact me. I would be more than happy to help!