Five Tips on How to Use Instagram for Business

With over 500 million active users and a more engaged audience than Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is definitely a must if you want to build a quality online presence for your business. Another reason that goes in favor for Instagram is its low-cost advertising that allows you to target very specific audiences which will be interested in your products.
If you are just starting with Instagram or you already started, we will present you five tips on how to manage your Instagram profile that provides the best results for our clients.

1. Create a strategy

Building a strategy on Instagram will be a crucial part as it will determine the way people recognize your brand in the future. If you are a small business without a clear idea on how to start on Instagram, we recommend researching what is your competition doing. What and how often do they post? What’s the main message they are trying to share, and how often people engage with their content? This will give you ideas on how you can start, but keep in mind that you don’t want to copy others. Just gather ideas and create your own approach to building your brand on Instagram. Your main goals on Instagram should be: Raising brand awareness, increasing traffic to your website and increasing product sales.

2. Collaboration

Whether you are just starting out on Instagram or you have been on it for a while, you always need to collaborate with others. We recommend on finding your niche influencers and offering them collaboration. For example, if you are in the fitness industry, offer collaboration to bodybuilders that have a strong following. You can give them a sample of your products which they can test and share their opinion on Instagram. They will tag your brand on their post which will attract a new highly targeted following for your brand with a little investment.

3. #hashtags

Using hashtags will expand your organic reach. Use relevant hashtags that go along with your brand. They are very popular on Instagram where people actually click on them. A maximum number of hashtags that you can use on a single post is 30. We suggest putting at least 10 relevant hashtags on every post you publish and adding 2 – 3 that are used the most such as #instagood ( used in 300 million posts).

4. Personalized approach

Instagram is much more different then facebook when in comes to building a brand. We mentioned earlier fitness industry as an example where Instagram users would like to see a real value behind the post instead of just standard visual where you are trying to sell a product. The personalized approach would be a photo or video of behind the scene where you can show to people, for example, where and how the product is made. Another example would be a video where your brand ambassador talks about the product and how it benefits the human body. Furthermore, the good content for fitness brand would be everyday advice on how to do certain exercises and their benefits. Going for a straight sale on Instagram is double edged sword. Value comes first.

5. Contests & Giveaways

Contests are a cheap but powerful way of spreading a word about your brand. You can do giveaways or contest where people share a photo about your product, or show why they are the perfect match for it. Ask people that participate to use certain hashtag so you can keep track of all shares for the contest and reward most creative photos that your community shares.