In 2020 Instagram celebrates its 10 year anniversary and is the go-to place for hundreds of millions of people to share their photos, videos, and stories every single day.
With the social media platform’s huge growth over recent years, it’s left many business owners and marketers asking, “How can we use Instagram for business?” Our two part blog will help you answer this question.
Part 1 gives you our top 10 tips on how to get started, create a great design aesthetic and produce consistent quality content.
1. Write a brilliant bio
Whether someone stumbles across your Instagram page or consciously seeks it out, it will only take them a second to form an opinion on your brand. This means it’s incredibly important to make a great first impression with the content of your profile and bio. The look, feel and posts on your page will dictate whether they stick around and explore or move on to another account.
What to include:
· Explain a bit about you / your brand and what you do
· Appeal to your target audience
· Use your brand tone and voice to help you connect with your community
2. Add a link
The only place on Instagram where you can share a clickable link is your bio. Make sure you add a link to drive traffic back to your homepage or to a campaign-specific landing page.
3. Create an Instagram Business profile
One of the first things to do is to either create your Instagram account as a business or switch it to a business profile. This is easy and free! As a business you’ll be able to include additional information on your profile. E.g. a phone number, an email address and your business’ physical address. It will also allow you to get ‘insights’ into your page which will be very useful. (More on this next week!)
4. Logo for your profile
When it comes to choosing a profile picture (much like Facebook), it’s important for people to instantly recognise it when they visit your profile. For most businesses, this means choosing your logo. There’s no right or wrong here, but think about what will help people who visit your page to recognise your brand the quickest.
5. What are your objectives?
If you’re going to invest your time and money in Instagram for business, ask: “What do we want to achieve?”
Here are some common goals that brands, teams, and individuals tend to choose for their Instagram presence:
· Showcase your products or services
· Build your community
· Increase awareness of your brand
· Showcase your company culture and values
· Advertise to potential customers
· Increase brand loyalty
· Share company news and updates
6. Have a design vision
Think carefully about your colour palette, font type and tone so that you create a distinctive and consistent style. Try to think about your brand colours and visual style and how you can make your content feel aligned with your brand’s overall aesthetic and brand colours. It’s also important to also think about the font you’re using and how it relates to the fonts used on your website or other marketing materials.
7. Good captions are key
Captions are a chance to enhance your content further. Consider if you are sharing stories and micro-blogging or prefer a short, snappy headline to a post. Posing questions on your caption are a great way to encourage replies. The possibilities are endless. What’s important is to ensure the copy is aligned with your brand.
8. Post consistently
Consistency and publishing frequency can help your audience learn when to expect new content from you, and keeping a consistent schedule makes sure you maximise engagement. Any Instagram strategy should clearly outline a target post frequency to help keep you on track. Once a day seems to work well for a lot of brands.
9. Use Instagram stories
Stories are a feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. Content shared to stories also won’t appear on your profile grid or in the main Instagram feed. Stories are empowering us to tell better and deeper stories about our brands. Whereas you may only post one or two images or videos to your Instagram feed per day, stories enable us to go behind the scenes and share more real-time, less-polished content. This can give your followers an exclusive peek into life at your company and make them feel a part of your brand.
10. Don’t be tempted to ‘buy’ followers
Whilst it might be tempting, buying followers isn’t a good idea. Only organic followers will be recognised by Instagram and potentially earn you that magic blue tick on your profile.
Next week, in part 2 we’ll give you some growth tips to help you build an engaged follower base.
If you would like support with using Instagram as a PR tool, we are here to help, so don’t hesitate to contact the Profiler PR team at hello@profilerpr.com.au