With more than 800 million active users, Instagram is quickly turning into a force to reckon with, according to HootSuite.
As more than 500 million active users log into Instagram each day, it’s an opportunity for your business or brand to make an impact.
More than 80% of Instagram profiles follow at least one business or brand on Instagram. It’s time they started following your business too.
Instagram is the next best thing only second to Facebook. If you feel that Facebook is getting a little too expensive for advertising, Instagram ads are the way to go.
Also, it wouldn’t hurt to have Instagram along with the other social networks anyway only because it’s growing and it’s full of savvier, smarter, and more highly-engaged audiences.
Here’s how you can make Instagram work for your business:
Start with the right bio
A few lines and a piece of text — that’s all you get for your profile on Instagram. You better make it count, eh?
You can make your Instagram bio reflect the ethos of your brand — keep it funny, intellectual, or engaging. Use the bio to succinctly explain what your business does, or point to an ongoing offer or campaign. It’s really up to you as to how you intend to use your Instagram bio.
Almost as if on cue, Andrew Tate of Adespresso just happened to write an amazing post on how to Write an Instagram Bio, With Examples for you to get inspired.
Keep those posts coming
What’s the secret to successful blogging?
What’s the secret to start and grow a YouTube channel?
You’ll be surprised to know it isn’t about quality, the strength of your network, or how much time you take to produce.
It’s always consistency.
Do that on Instagram and you have the highest possible engagement, ever.
As with blogging or running a YouTube channel, your Instagram account only works for you if you post updates consistently. An update here and an update there aren’t going to do anything for your Instagram presence.
Whatever you do (or don’t0), keep posting updates on Instagram.
It’s all about themed showing off
Instagram is particularly awesome for ecommerce stores, individual artists, craftspeople, painters, art, decor, and more. But then, everyone can use Instagram.
On Instagram, it’s all about showing off (in a nice way). Show off what you have and you get a little following of your own. If you are a service-based business, you can still post on Instagram to share bite-sized, visual pearls of wisdom using crafty graphics, images, and more.
The point, however, is that you theme it with Instagram. Instead of showing off absolutely everything, keep your updates and messages limited to your business. As long as it’s about your business, anything goes.
Use Instagram Stories
L’Oreal Russia managed to get a 16-point lift in ad recall, reached over 70% of its total audience on Instagram, and managed to run ads at 22x lower cost per click with Instagram stories ads.
Instagram Stories are highly-engaging, while living for a very short duration of time (24 hrs, anyone?). Maybe that’s part of the reason why Instagram stories works so well. Instagram Stories — all by itself — has 250 million users, according to Neil Patel.
When you put up content on Instagram Stories, you are hosting the content natively on Instagram Stories. You might just want to make it unique and keep it there, meant for Instagram users to continue.
If nothing else, there’s tremendous brand recall with Instagram Stories.
Instagram Videos help make an impact
Instagram Videos are highly popular. In fact, Instagram Videos have been growing 80% per year, according to Instagram. For your business, Instagram Videos make for a great way to introduce your products, explain your services, or narrate your story.
If you have a budget, consider using Instagram Video ads to actually start pushing some traffic to your sales funnels or landing pages.
Videos are effective, and we all know that. Videos on Instagram can actually bring results.
Take the Indonesian travel company tiket, for example. Using Instagram Video ads, tiket managed to reach out to 26 million Indonesians, gain a 10% lift in app installs (leading to a total of over 239,000 app installs).
The side benefits of using Instagram Videos or Instagram Video ads are brand recall, ad lift and more traffic (relatively cheaper than Facebook, but the gap is closing fast).
How are you using Instagram to generate leads, for branding, or for connecting with your audience? Tell us about it.