Benjamin Thomas About half a billion Instagram users post daily Stories updates to their millions of followers.
Once upon a time, Instagram was just the immature little sister of Facebook where people would post photos of their ramen after applying filters. Companies are increasingly using Instagram as a means of making cash.
Strategies for Expanding Your Instagram Following
Now that I’ve persuaded you of Instagram’s long-term usefulness for brand marketing, you should sign up for an account and begin sharing photos with catchy captions and relevant hashtags in order to attract and retain a sizable following.
Get people together around a useful Instagram hashtag
This method is ideal for generating interest in your brand and can be used to other social media platforms, such as Twitter and Pinterest, with great success.
Instagram SEO relies heavily on hashtags, which may increase exposure in search results and boost interaction.
Join forces with a charity that shares your brand’s ideals
One way that I’ve seen certain companies stand out is by the way they use social media to promote and inform their audience about the connections they’ve formed. Among my favourite places to get a bite to eat during the workday is SweetGreen, a salad bar, soup kitchen, and frozen yoghurt parlour that takes great pleasure in using only the freshest, highest quality products obtained locally and organically wherever possible.
The partnership they’ve established with the non-profit organisation FoodCorps is just one example of the excellent business decisions they’ve made. FoodCorps’ goal is to help kids make better eating decisions, thus their work dovetails nicely with SweetGreen’s emphasis on healthy living.
Instagram may not be as stringent as Twitter when it comes to character restrictions when captioning a photo, but that doesn’t give you licence to write a novel in the space provided. My advice for photo captions is to keep them brief yet descriptive.
Get in touch with your audience while maintaining brand identity
You should constantly try to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customers. It’s likely that you already have some buyer personas in place and have a general sense of the demographics of the leads you’re pursuing and the customers you’re satisfying. But now you must consider their Instagram motivations. For the sake of passing the time? only curious about what their pals are up to. As a way to see how their kids are doing?
Let’s assume you’re a salesperson for a financial consulting firm, and you’ve learned that your clients have a passion for sports cars and prefer to follow well-known automakers on Instagram. I know, just share some images of expensive sports vehicles! Right? Maybe you’re selling a quick and flashy beamer, so in your enticing description you write, “Wouldn’t you want to buy this lightning fast beamer? If you begin making wiser choices with your money, you can. We provide free 30-minute consultations, so call us immediately. If you don’t want your target audience to assume you’re in the sports car business, you should probably cease publishing vehicle photos for a time.
To avoid unnecessary posts, please refrain from doing so
This Instagram rule of thumb is fairly obvious, but new users should know that excessive posting is frowned upon.
When my buddy initially joined Facebook, he uploaded an entire photo album without any moderation, and soon had friends from all around the world telling him to calm down. Using Instagram’s album function, you can create a carousel gramme that features many images in a slideshow style, which is perfect for those times when you just can’t decide between posting one or more photos. That way, you won’t overwhelm your subscribers’ feeds and risk losing them forever.
Put your Instagram account out there
It’s quite obvious what to do here, but just like with the other social media platforms, you need to make the most of this one, too. Are there social media icons on your website’s front page and individual product pages that direct them to your various profiles? It’s also missing an Instagram symbol.
Connecting your Instagram with Facebook will help you attract your friends’ attention, but that’s just the beginning of your marketing efforts. You should run Instagram campaigns across your social networks and remind your employees, brand-ambassadors, and partners (basically anyone who has established a positive relationship with your brand) to use your business hashtag and any hashtags that are relevant or important to a marketing campaign you have going.
You should require (er, encourage) any workers who regularly correspond with leads and customers to include a link to your business’s Instagram account in their email signatures. Including a badge representing your Instagram account on your LinkedIn page and business cards. Share your Instagram photographs on your personal and professional Twitter accounts. The possibilities are unlimited, but you need to get your Instagram out there to people once it’s appealing enough.
Discover the allure of your brand
A large number of B2B organisations have already written off Instagram as an unsuitable platform for their business, with the rationale that they don’t offer food, beer, or apparel and that their products are either unappealing or intangible, so why would they utilise a photo-sharing app?
Well, I understand it; maybe you’re selling software and you’ve found that pictures of your product don’t do very well on Instagram. Although I understand your frustration, I cannot sympathise with your decision to forego Instagram completely. There are plenty of other channels via which you may expand your business’s online presence apart from the simple display of product photos.
Snap some shots while you’re at work or around the workplace to offer your followers a glimpse of the fun and creative atmosphere your firm fosters. Reduce the burden of labour on your own shoulders by enlisting the help of your staff.