INSTAGRAM IN NUMBERS
If your audience hangs on Instagram, you are here at the right place. Instagram is the fastest growing social platform at the moment. It was purchased by Facebook in April 2012 for $1 billion. As the Facebook’s baby, you may notice that there are similar advertising rules applied to the both platforms and existing advertising bond between them. For example, while placing an Ad on Facebook, you have an option to have the particular ad running on Instagram at the same time.
There are over 400 million users monthly on Instagram with more than 40 billion photos shared. It is the social network with the most engagement rate. 2016 Instagram Statistics Measurements state that there are around 3.5 billion likes clicked per day.
You can build a strong community on this platform by taking advantage of engagement opportunity.
Therefore, 85% of big companies have opened their accounts on Instagram. Instagrammers love connecting to their favorite brands. Most comments on images happen the first six hours (4.2% average)
So, if these numbers are encouraging enough for your company to succeed on Instagram, let’s dive deeper into the useful tips that will help you stand out among the competition.
WRITE AN EFFECTIVE BIO
As on every platform, on Instagram is important having an attention catching Bio, too. Be a great copywriter and in few sentences describe the core of your business, always adding a link to your website. The link to the website might be the link to your homepage or any other place with a valuable info that you want people to land on.
It is advisable to implement also CTA (call to action) depending on some current promotion, contest or ad you are running. Revisiting the Bio section of Instagram, from time to time, is a good idea for the purpose of adjusting its content for the current needs. Make the whole users experience more fun by adding emojis to your description. They are great attention grabbers.
CREATE OUTSTANDING IMAGES
One of the main ingredients for Instagram Success Recipe is posting the beautiful and meaningful images. The other two ingredients are hashtags and text. We will talk about them later in this blog post.
Having the great photo is crucial. Create your photo on recognizable manner. Your brand element (brand colors, logo or watermark) should be on every image created. Let the picture speak for itself. The users should be able to recognize your brand by just looking at the photo. Develop a uniquely recognizable style and make people coming back for more. You don’t need to be a professional designer to create great visuals. There are many available and easy to use tools to help you get creative.
Maybe you are wondering where to find these beautiful photos, to begin with. The stock photo sites are the great places to start. Our suggestion to check out, are the following:
- Librestock ( it is the search for 43 photo sites; Free)
- Unsplash (beautiful photos; Free)
- Stocksy ( stunning photos; Paid)
- Shutterstock ( wonderful photos, worth the money; Paid)
All these images from the above-mentioned sites are taken by professional photographers and are a good base to start in creating your Instagram image. First of all, the images should be set up in 1080pxX1080px. It is 1:1 ratio (square size pictures) recognizable as Instagram style.
As mentioned previously, you should add your logo or watermark in order to brand the image. Adding some meaningful text on it would be a good idea too. It is not necessary though because a well-created photo speaks for itself and tells your brand story. If you decide to add some text there are various good mobile and desktop apps available:
- Designfeed (for desktop and mobile; variety of ready templates that you may tweak with beautiful fonts to choose from; company’s logo; sharing to other social networks)
- Relay ( easy to use ready templates; upload your basic images and company’s logo; desktop only; automatically resize the picture for desirable social platform)
- Typorama (quick and easy to use mobile only app; beautiful fonts; images saved directly to your phone)
- Adobe Post( fast and easy to use; Free mobile app)
- Word Swag (IOS only, interesting, beautiful fonts with a choice of large color palette)
- PicsArt ( perfect for collage creation; easy to use drag n drop templates)
- Lumyer (very cool effects to choose from that makes your photo looks like cinemagraph)
- Ripl (luxury app for designing cool GIFS; free and paid version)
HASHTAGS ON INSTAGRAM
Hashtags enable your photos to get an excellent visibility. While writing an eye-catching caption of an image you may implement your hashtags there. Post with at least one hashtag has 12.6 times more engagement. Make sure not to overload it and place the hashtags in such a manner to ruin the user's experience while reading the description of the image. You may position the rest of the hashtags at the first comment below the picture. Anything from one to thirty hashtags will work well on Instagram. The most efficient are applying a “golden middle Rule” of up to 15 hashtags per post.
Before starting “hashtagging,” make some keyword research. Use the keywords (hashtags) relevant to your business. Besides the highly searched hashtags, use the ones with a little lower search volume as well. Sometimes as proven, those keywords get more engagement. These are all industry hashtags above mentioned. Our suggestion is to create your own brand hashtag and use it continuously in every post as well. By the time passing, your brand hashtag will gain a remarkable search volume. The third type you may use along with previous ones is “fun hashtags.” They are not industry oriented and are the more general hashtags that will open you up to the new audience that might like and engage with your work.
DEVELOP A POSTING STRATEGY
Through the things, you post you represent your company. The images as we previously said should be branded and pass the spirit of the business to the user. Post the content that is interesting, informative, inspiring or educational. Now, with a new feature called Instagram Stories, you may upload, for example, a “how to” video or some short customer’s testimonial that is ideal for building a social proof. Don’t forget to implement a call to action on your video.
Consistency in posting is another key of success on Instagram. Make sure to post at least once a day and engage with your audience by replying back to their comments. From our experience, we suggest uploading new images three to four times a day. Don’t flood your stream with too many photos at once, though. The best practices show that you should upload your images a couple of hours apart at the time your audience is more likely to be on Instagram.
DEVELOP A MARKETING STRATEGY
To help your Instagram account succeed apply well-thought marketing strategy as well. First of all, cross- promote your Instagram account on other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.) Let the audience on other platforms know that you are on Instagram and invite them to see what you have to show there.
Secondly, place the Instagram widget on your blog or website for the people who visit those sites to be easily redirected to your Instagram page.
Share your photos occasionally to Facebook and Twitter. While sharing on other platforms, you need to tweak the image caption a little bit and adjust it to the particular platform (Facebook doesn’t require hashtags at all, while Twitter works best with one to two relevant hashtags.
Another place that you can raise awareness of your Instagram account is on e-mail signature space. Put the link to Instagram and other social media accounts so people can contact you that way if they prefer.
Last but not least is the offline promotion of Instagram Account. Any promotional material that you own might be the great place to introduce your Instagram account (business cards, your products’ packages, flyers, etc.)
CONCLUSION
Instagram has arrived to stay! As it is a platform with the highest post visibility and engagement rate you should take advantage of the moment till they change the algorithm. Right now you can still manage the visibility organically but as the platform grows the algorithms will change to a great extent in favor of paid advertising. With this scenario, you are already familiar with on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social platforms. Applying a wise marketing and posting strategy, your business can highly benefit from Instagram.
Have fun and present your company in the best light!
