I’m kinda addicted to Instagram – Aren’t you??
I know many people who are either Pinterest or Instagram and to be honest both platforms are very addictive and especially for business, great for driving traffic your way, but for me Instagram edges things.
Instagram is great for both leisure usage as well as business, any subject, any topic attracting many age groups, nationalities and best of all totally free to use. They big thing is though for business is – Can it help to give you a return on your time / investment? The simple answer to that is yes as many people and business are growing their incomes thanks to Instagram daily and with many key influencers on Instagram, it is a fantastic place to research for how it can help build your business brand awareness, client leads and sales.
Instagram Tips:
- Grab yourself a username that either is your exact business name or as close as possible to it or lets people know what you can do – remember you have a maximum of 30 characters to use.
- Brand you account with your company logo and a full description letting people know who you are, what you do and how to connect with you outside of Instagram, ie your website URL.
- Choose a theme and be thorough with how you use Instagram. Millions use Instagram, over 500 million are said to be active monthly so this means tonnes of competition so you need to shine out from the rest. By regularly posting updates and sticking to a theme that is relevant to your business (ie it will attract your target audience) will help you to get in front of many amateur users and those which are lazy / lethargic business users.
- Be consistent with your theme. Users will follow and engage with you because they like your style so try and maintain a character rather than swapping and changing all too frequently as this will mean you could ruin what you have built up.
- Get active and show start networking! Just like any other social media platform, Instagram is all about networking so this mean not only you shouting out about yourself, you are also engaging with others by liking their posts, commenting and following also.
- Quality control. Instagram is all about images (videos are also increasing in popularity) so the quality of images will be what you are judges on. Some will want the most high resolution professional photos whereas others will be going for clever sharing, maybe guerrilla / viral marketing is their forte and that odd / strange image that causes debates and commenting on is what floats their boat as such and drives their traffic.
- Videos. From 3 to 60 seconds you can now upload videos to Instagram to include the likes of Boomerang for those more fun postings. Be sure to experiment with videos as they prove to engage audiences better and for longer…
- Let people know you are on Instagram. Sounds obvious though many don’y so make sure you do add the Instagram icon to your website / email signature / shop windows / business cards and more.
If you ever get stuck on what to post, here is a list of a 100 Social Media Post Ideas