3 tips to up your Instagram business game

 

Instagram is no doubt a fantastic tool for small businesses to create awareness, drive sales and build brand reputation. But are you winging it? If so, here’s a few things you can do to give your business Instagram account a more strategic approach.

1. Work out what style of posts attract your ideal audience

This one is all about trial and error, but as someone once said, “Make mistakes, learn from them and move on.” Or something like that. 

If you’re just starting your business Instagram account, don’t expect to have 1000 followers over night. It takes time to build an audience, and you can only build your audience when you know what kind of content they want to see. We would encourage you to trial and few different post styles. An example could be including one photo post, one video and one carousel post per week. You can then click ‘insights’ which shows you the post analytics, outlining what received the most engagement, reach, likes etc.

When you get an idea of the content your audience engage with the most, you can better plan your content for ultimate success.

2. Get your #hashtag on!

A lot of businesses still choose to completely neglect hashtags, despite research showing that strategically using hashtags increases the visibility of a post. The key word there is ‘strategically’. You can use up to 30 hashtags in a post, and it doesn’t matter if you choose to add them in the caption or the comments. What’s important is which ones you choose to use. Here’s a little formula for selecting the best hashtags for your posts:

  • Choose 3-5 popular hashtags (e.g. #socialmediatips has 1.7m posts associated with it)

  • Choose 3-5 moderately popular hashtags (e.g. #brandstrategy has 640k posts associated with it)

  • Choose 3-5 niche, industry specific hashtags (e.g. #marketingsolutions has 63k posts associated with it)

These are just some examples to give an idea of the numbers indicating how popular a hashtag is. The reason you don’t want to use too many popular hashtags i.e. #love or #pretty, is because they’re highly saturated aka. they’re used A LOT and therefore posts including them get lost quickly after posting. This ultimately decreases the chance of your post reaching a larger group of people.

So, how do you know if your hashtags are working?

Here’s an example of how to analyse your hashtag success using the Instagram Insights tool. Below you can see a post recently shared on our account. Next to it is the analytics that we can see when we click on the ‘view insights’ that sits just below the image. 

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This post outlines that the selection of hashtags were a good choice to reach a wider audience. 493 of the 583 people reached, saw our post because of the hashtags selected.


3. Humanise your brand

Brand personality can be almost entirely attributed to people. Why? Because there is no better way to build brand trust than by showcasing the people who are behind it! Introduce your team, include them in product posts (example below) and personalise posts by using their names (should they be happy for you to do so).

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We totally get it, not everyone if a huge fan of having their photo taken or posting photos of themselves, but showcasing the people behind a brand can influence the consumers decision to follow or purchase from your business.

If you’re already nailing these 3 tips, perhaps Instagram Reels might be something to consider. Read more about this awesome new feature below.

 
Guest User