In the course of recent years, Instagram has seen exponential growth – from one million users in December 2010 to more than one billion in 2020.
Everyone seems to be in Instagram, and businesses are more and more aware of its potential, as there are now more than 25 million companies with a business Instagram profile.
Regardless if you’re just getting started or you simply need to refine your existing strategy, we’ll provide you with everything you should know about Instagram for businesses.
Set up a business Instagram account
You might already have a personal Instagram account for your brand with a following and content, in this case you just need to convert it into a business account in your settings, and you’ll simply have access to all the features you need.
However, if you’re brand new to Instagram you can sign up to it by just downloading the app and entering your business email (admin) or you can simply sign up with Facebook if you already have a page there. Next you have to choose your username and password and switch the account to business from the settings.
You should remember that you can change your username at any time in the settings so if you change your mind about it you can easily update it.
Optimizing Your Instagram Account
Profile pictures are the first impression a visitor is going to have about your business, that’s why you should keep it simple with your logo or a familiar image that’s consistent with your branding. Just remember that the images are cropped into a circle, so you might want to leave some room around the edges.
Your Instagram bio is an important piece of your profile, with it the visitor would make acquaintance with you, so you should tell them about your business and why they should follow you. You can also use the bio to promote a hashtag or linking your website to get visitors. Just remember to shorthen any URL you decide to put in your bio with a tool like Bitly or Linktr.ee to keep it tidy.
Story highlights are also a good feature that will allow to keep and display expired stories which you believe present the business well and it helps you showcase key elements of your brand.
Business accounts on Instagram have some features that personal account doesn’t, so you need to take full advantage of them.
- Category: This option will show up under your name and will inform people of what you do.
- Contact information: You should include your email address, phone number and if you have a physical location, you’ll be able to also add your address. This may help followers and potential clients easily contact you with the press of a button.
- Call-to-action buttons: By adding these, you give your clients and followers a likely chance to interact with you and make that first step.
Develop your marketing strategy
Target audience
Before you start worrying about what you should post, you need to figure out who will receive them.
Defining your target audience is one of the most important steps of a good marketing strategy, you can assess that by determining who your clients are and checking analytics on other social media if you’re already an established business, otherwise you may do some research on competitors and other tools like surveys to establish a clear image of you audience.
Knowing your audience will help you later on when creating content as you would have a better idea what they like and enjoy.
Goal
Next up you should focus on a clear and direct goal as having one will keep you on track throughout your Instagram journey.
At first you can set up an objective based on metrics like followers, likes and comments, but you should focus more on real business objectives like showcasing your products, advertising to potential customers and sharing news and updates about your company.
Schedule
To keep your followers engaged and aware of your brand then regular posting is a must but you should not go overboard and overwhelm them.
There are various analyses done to get the perfect posting time-frame but there isn’t a single answer as results vary from different type of businesses, so you might want to do your research. One of the main factors that will help you choose a time slot is understanding when your audience is online which you can access using Instagram insights.
All there is left to do is create your posting schedule and stay on top of it by having some content ready in advance by using a tool like Later.
Posting
Posts
With your business profile optimized and your marketing strategy in mind you can start tackling the next big mountain and figure out what to post.
You should choose a theme and follow it so your profile doesn’t look messy, people enjoy a consistent visual look. Also, it will allow your followers to easily spot your post in their feeds as it will stand out as the brand theme.
Next you should think about what to showcase, for example if you are a shoes line then you obviously showcase the shoes, same goes for a restaurant and their food… For services you might want to introduce your offices and employees to your followers with some behind the scenes content. You might also opt for educational content that will work for almost all types of businesses.
For the pictures you should try to post the greatest photos you can take, even if you’re not a professional photographer you can still take high quality pictures with only your phone by exploiting the natural lights, focusing on the important elements and playing with different angles.
For the final touch before posting, you should edit your photos to give them that consistent feel that your profile portraits and makes the post feel original and stand out more, for this you can use a tool like Canva.
As for the videos, you can upload up to 1 min in length and same as the pictures you can choose what to showcase depending on your business. You should keep in mind that by default videos in Instagram don’t play any sounds, so to acquire the attention of people scrolling their feeds you should make the first few second interesting and easily understood without any sound.
Stories
One of the most popular features of Instagram are their stories which are posts that vanish after 24 hours.
Compared to the 95 million normal posts, there are more than 400 million account that post to their stories every day. One of the reason stories are so successful is because they are usually unfiltered and authentic content which people relate to more.
For that reason, they create an amazing opportunity to connect on a better level with your audience and help them relate more to your brand.
Captions
Even with a great picture you shouldn’t neglect the captions as they will help you connect more with your followers by telling your story. Same with the pictures you should develop a consistent and clear brand voice.
First you should consider the length of your caption, Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters which is quite a bit, but when scrolling, followers would only be able to see the first couple of lines o the caption before they click the button to show more. For this reason, you should always keep the most important part of your caption at the start. However, it doesn’t mean writing long content is bad as it can help you with storytelling.
Remember to always encourage your followers to interact with the post, this can be achieved by asking a question. And don’t forget that you can always direct your audience to your bio link.
Hashtags
Especially with a brand-new account, it’s very hard to get noticed as there are over 95 million pictures shared every day, for that reason hashtags are very important.
You can get your hashtags by thinking about relating keywords to your business and post, and you can find more hashtags by using the search tool and typing a hashtag. There are also many sets of ready hashtags for you to use.
Businesses also create their own hashtag when they showcase products or events and popularize it by encouraging their followers to use it.
Ads
Advertising can help you take shortcuts and reach your goals faster; they perform well since they appear on the feed just like any post.
To run ads on Instagram you should use the Facebook ad program, and you can pick an objective for your ad from simple views to conversion and purchases in your store.
Analyzing results
After following all these steps, you should regularly check your current state and compare with the goal you set at the beginning. To do that you should check the analytics of posts, ads, stories… It can be overwhelming to track all those numbers, so you can use some tools help you stay on top of them.
If unfortunately, you’re not reaching your projected target you can always switch strategies and try other ways to connect with your audience and find the best strategy for your business.