5 Tips to Master Instagram for Businesses
Instagram isn’t just avocado toast and FitTea—in fact, it’s one of the most critical platforms for consumer engagement. With over 500 million daily active users, utilizing Instagram to its full potential is becoming increasingly important for brands to stay relevant and connected to their audience.
- 2 Million + advertisers worldwide use Instagram
- 60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram
- 200 Million + Instagrammers visit at least one business profile daily
From analyzing insights to encouraging sales, Instagram has integrated functionality to help you reach your goals. New to Instagram? When you set up your account be sure to set it up as a business page rather than a personal page. Here is a quick guide for setting up a business account. With a business account you get additional features such as profile contact information, category listing, call-to-action buttons and profile analytics.
Wondering how your business can master Instagram? You’ve come to the right place.
Here are our top 5 tips:
Identify Your Audience
Before developing your content strategy, you need to firstly identify your audience. Using insights and analytics from your other social media channels and your website can help determine what market segments engage with your content and purchase your products and services. Also be sure to complete some in-depth competitor research, consider the following:
- What channels they are on
- Following size and growth across platforms
- Posting frequency by platform
- Post engagement and what type of content receives the highest engagement
Tools like Buzzsumo help make the competitive analysis a breeze.
Post Regularly
To continually grow your following and engagement, your business profile will need to be posting regularly. Aim for at least 3-5 posts per week to start, you will eventually want to be posting 7-10 times per week. To help keep you on track, develop a social media posting calendar. In all of your posts, incorporate trending hashtags to increase your chance of discovery also tag individuals when appropriate. When sharing content, also utilize Instagram stories and live video for exclusive behind the scenes content, how-tos, polls and announcements.
User Generated Content
In addition to posting your own content, also leverage user generated content (UGC). keep your eyes open for any mentions and hashtag uses related to your brand, these can be used for social content and tend to receive higher engagement. With all of your postings engagement is critically important. Instagram’s algorithm prioritizes posts by the engagement received, higher engagement equals higher placement in the Instagram feed.
Instagram Ads
Utilize Instagram ads to display your content to much a wider audience beyond your followers. Instagram ads can target user locations, demographics, interests & behaviors—making your campaign extremely targeted. Instagram ads also display a call-to-action of your choosing, encouraging users to convert.
Analyze + Optimize
With any social media channel, regularly analyzing and optimizing performance is essential. At least once a month review your profile analytics to learn who is following your account and what content is performing well. Make sure you implement your findings into future content strategies. Also take a look at what time of day your followers are using the app, schedule future postings for when they are online to maximize engagement. In addition to analyzing your own account, also regularly monitor your competitors. As part of your analysis, set performance benchmarks and also compare performance to industry averages. For more information on benchmarks check out Benchmarks: Don’t Just Keep Up—Get Ahead.
Sources
https://business.instagram.com/blog/500-million-windows-to-the-world/
https://business.instagram.com/getting-started