Is your business on Instagram? If you’ve found yourself wondering if Instagram is a valuable platform for gaining new leads, the answer is entirely subjective to your audience.
Are they using Instagram? Then the answer is yes!
Without a doubt Instagram has the ability to turn potentials into profits, and if you do your research, and follow a few simple steps your audience can grow rapidly. Once you’ve set up your account, the key to start building your audience is to create valuable, useful content. While it’s common to want an instant audience overnight, now is the time to be patient and have a plan in place. Remember, gaining the first 1000 followers will be the hardest. Trends show that once you reach this milestone, audiences tend to steadily build themselves.
What to post
There’s a bit of a rule when it comes to brands on social media, and that rule is the 80/20. In a nutshell, your audience does not want to see Ads from you 24/7, nor do they want to see 5 posts from you on a Monday and then not hear from you all week.
Break up your content between a few categories: Your services/products, engaging photos of projects you are researching or working on, free advice, testimonials from happy clients, and industry-related funny’s or feel goods.
Cross promotion is recommended to gain new followers, absolutely, but you may want to keep Instagram as a place where you share items that you don’t Tweet or post on Facebook. Keep it special. After all Instagram is a place for rich storytelling through images and videos. Keep the content relevant to the medium, as well as to your business.
Hashtags
We’ve all seen the posts with 75 hashtags. But without going overboard, a few hashtags per post can definitely help you gain new followers – ones that wouldn’t necessarily find you otherwise. Check out the trending hashtags at https://top-hashtags.com/instagram/ to get you started. Then create one for your business name, as well as two main industry-related keywords which you will reuse again and again. Hashtags can be a great way to categorise your work, and can even help you search your posts and track their reach – just keep it to six or seven.
Handy Tools to Make Instagramming Easier
Latergram.me
If you find logging in and posting a bit timely, schedule your content weekly and let this App do the work for you. This App will make sure your messages are released throughout the week at a time of day that you choose. Tip: According to The Huffington Post, the best time for businesses to post on Instagram is 5:40pm on a Wednesday.
Repost for Instagram
Share a post you love without claiming it as your own. Repost for Instagram allows you to credit the original Instagrammer while still allowing you to share it with your own audience.
Photo Grid
Although Instagram was the original App to introduce us to filters, Photo Grid has the ability to take your photos one step further, with special effects (yes, more filters!) as well combining multiple images to create a collage. This can be a great way to showcase a variety of products or projects in the one post.
Find out more and download the App at www.instagram.com
Are you looking to utilise Instagram for your business website? We can help! Click through to our get started page: https://sgd.com.au/get-started/
