Right now, Instagram is considered the sweetheart of the social media platform options for marketers. With over 1 billion daily users and 50 percent of these following brands, it is not difficult to see why many small businesses are finding there is significant value in improving their social media game and working diligently to capitalize on Instagram for targeting their audience. If you aren’t sure where to start, we’ve gathered some tips for you to up the ante in making Instagram work for you.
Know how often and when to post.
Businesses must be active to attract followers and encourage engagement, but often it is difficult to know how active your business should be. According to studies, a consistent 1-2 posts a day is your best bet. Obviously, what matters most is knowing your audience, so it’s important to consider not only how often, but also knowing what time is best, especially when using Instagram’s algorithmic timeline. Recommended posting times vary considerably, depending on which experts you are listening to, so some may find it hard to know what is best.
While posting more frequently has not been shown to decrease engagement, the key is understanding that frequency and timing seem to matter less than consistency Making a routine of posting several times a day and then shifting to only a couple times a week will cause you to lose followers and diminish your engagement per post. You are better off developing a posting frequency that you can consistently maintain for the balance of your business’s life.
For the busy business owner (and what business owner isn’t?) remember that there are tools and apps that make scheduling and publishing posts easier and more efficient. HootSuite is one of several that allow you to schedule your Instagram photo or video posts in advance, so you no longer have to worry about forgetting to publish them or worrying about being available at the time you want them to appear. HootSuite will send you a notification when the time to publish arrives, and because maintaining your consumer loyalty requires regular posts and ads, this type of app is an invaluable asset that will help you design and manage a schedule where you can post at regular and natural intervals.
Be sure to tell a story.
Remember that Instagram is supposed to be a “visual inspiration platform” through which you captivate your audience through images and video. Being too preachy or using marketing missives that don’t tell a story will be disengaging. Your pictures and videos are “micro-stories” of a larger idea that you tell over time. Through intriguing images and captions, you are drawing viewers into your world and creating a community that can help you figure out how to grow your Instagram followers even more. User-generated content that flows from these images will also resonate with those following your profile. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how many pictures a video is worth!
If you’re not sure how to do this, try one of the many exceptional tools that create appealing videos that Instagram offers. A suite of video options for marketers to deploy includes Boomerang, which is one of the simplest and easiest to use. It has become a critical part of many businesses’ marketing protocol because it allows you to connect with your followers in a very real way. It can be used for filming one-second video clips that capture moments behind the scenes or show your product in a new or innovate way. Because there is no audio, there is no need to work on dialogue or sound, making the process all about the visual aesthetics.
Choose the right hashtags and the right amount of hashtags.
Selecting the most appropriate hashtags for your Instagram posts is key creating top posts instead of sinking to the bottom of other users’ feeds. Try to focus on a community that shares a common interest in a specific theme. The more specific you are able to be with your hashtag, the more niche your audience will be, increasing the potential for engagement. You can start by developing a hashtag unique to your business or brand, or find one or two existing examples that fit your product or service.
Making your hashtags too generic that will give results that will cause you to fade in the face of millions of other posts using the same tag. It’s better to use a mix of trending and industry-specific hashtags that will connect with your target audience. The goal is to find something that markets itself to your users so that it filters their posts aboutyour store, product, or service and anything that directly relates to it.
The number of hashtags you include is also important. Instagram lets you use up to 30, but a lot of tags under your caption can seem unprofessional. That’s why 91 percent of posts by major brands use seven or fewer hashtags to get likes. You should not have more hashtags characters than you do content characters. You want your post to show up in the searches that will matter most for your business, so use the hashtag to highlight keywords and phrases that will get new customers to your business page.
Know how often and when to post”, Kindly change the existing sentence, Instead of “Businesses must be active to attract followers and encourage engagement, but often it is difficult to know how active your business should be.” add this “Businesses must be active to attract followers and encourage engagement on Instagram, but often it is difficult to know how active your business should be.
