Instagram boasts of over 700 million monthly active users – that’s double the monthly active users on Twitter and over 3 times as many users as on Whatsapp. Gain New Followers Instagram is very much important for any brand, celebrities’ and business.
While you could just share text and a few images on all other social networks and still make those platforms work for your business, Instagram demands visual content – photos, videos, graphics, images, and more. That’s also precisely why Instagram might not be a good fit for your business if you can’t extend your content creation into visual. But since Instagram is big and is baked directly into Facebook’s portfolio of products, it makes sense to be on Instagram and grow your presence there regardless of your business type or whether or not your business renders itself as a natural fit for images.
Your Due Diligence Matters
When you want to make Instagram work for you, try to milk the most out of the platform. A large part of doing this right is to do your due diligence. For instance, be sure to fill out and complete your profile 100%. Post that, add the location (especially if your business is local). Location tagging alone makes your content more relevant and engaging by about 79%.
Right from the start, get into the habit of using hashtags (those are big on Instagram) – you use general tags to help people discover your content and you also use branded tags pertinent to your business. By using hashtags alone, you’ll boost your content engagement by 12.6%.
Share continuously. Not in Spurts
As it is true for any social network, strive to share your visual content continuously by scheduling your updates as much as possible. The only way to rise above is to be consistent at what you do. This applies to the content you share on Instagram. Most businesses make the mistake of uploading images or content a couple of times and leave it at that.
Doing content updates in spurts never helps (this is also true for all content across social, your blog posts, guest blogging efforts, and pretty much anything you do on digital marketing).
Use a combination of Images & Videos
Some of the most popular videos on Instagram are anywhere from 30 seconds to 60 seconds. The video is most effective at getting higher engagement rates with your followers on Instagram.
While products automatically make for great video shots and angles, even service businesses now have ways to create short videos to help explain services a lot better than what images and text can do. What goes on Instagram can also go on Facebook and this double exposure gets you all the juice you need. Just make sure that your video assets don’t have to depend on sound or audio of any kind since over 85% of videos are watched without audio.
Images are the staple but videos get two times more engagement. Using both images and videos gives you a good chance for visibility and engagement.
Use Various Formats available
With Instagram, you have regular image-based or video-based updates that you would normally default to while sharing content. However, there are a ton more options for you. Consider Instagram Stories which boasts to 250 million active users – a format unique to Instagram which didn’t even exist a few years ago. It will help for Gain New Followers Instagram very easily.
For the images themselves, Instagram lets you post portrait style photos and also landscape styled ones. Try various formats, image sizes (as specified by Instagram), and content mix varieties to see which of those variants work best.
Time Your Content Sharing
On Instagram, timing is everything. While you strive to be as regular as possible with your sharing schedule, it’s found that audiences engage better on weekdays than on weekends. Also depending on where you are, there are specific stats that surfaced as far as the United States is concerned:
Mondays are better than the rest of the days. Posting your content at 3 PM doesn’t help much, and 9 PM happens to be the best time to post.
The results will differ but you’ll realize what kind of timing works for you “after” you start publishing and when you have your eye out for analytics to help determine the best posting schedule that works for your business.
How does your Instagram activity look like?
Let’s help your business get social! We can help create, manage and execute a creative social media marketing plan that will provide the best content and results for your company using all social media platforms.