Social media and content marketing is one of the most important marketing tools a business can use in today’s business environment. Not only is instagram free to use, but it’s also where you can find your target audience – people on Instagram look for accounts of their interest to follow, which might include anything from beauty influencers to information about the latest your adult novel releases.
Putting out content on Instagram means that you have the opportunity to both give your audience the information they need, and also get the word out about your own business. It gives you the chance to position yourself as a real expert, to connect with your audience, to show them that you know what you’re doing, and to interact with them. You can find out what they want, what they don’t, and if there’s anything they would like to see from your business.
Given the unlimited advantages to a social media marketing strategy, it’s no surprise that millions of content creators and businesses are all trying to get the attention of their consumers. It can be hard to get noticed sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. Keep reading to find out ways to get noticed on Instagram and make your photos stand out.
Pump Out Flawless Content
If you’re running a professional business and want to position yourself as an expert, there’s no room for half baked content that anyone could have created. Casual photos and poorly planned Instagram feeds will only make you look non-serious and casual, which usually isn’t the look many are going for.
You need to know how to edit photos and digitally remove certain flaws from them. For example, you need to learn how to remove glare from photo, how to fix blurry photos, and much more. Many online businesses hire a social media manager whose whole job is to create and curate content for their social media feeds and to make sure everything is flawless.
In order to compete with those people, you need to bring your “A” game and be very thoughtful about the things you’re putting out there.
Use a Business Account
There are features in a business account that aren’t really accessible to users who are trying to get by with personal accounts. Some of those features include
- Post insights
- Instagram ads
- Instagram shopping
- The option to include call-to-action and contact buttons on your profile
- Primary and secondary messaging in your inbox
These features are all incredibly useful and designed specially to help businesses grow on the platform, and it would be a waste not to use them.
Access Instagram Insights
Instagram insights help you see which ones of your posts are working and what kind of content isn’t. While the number of likes and comments you get on your posts can be a pretty good indicator of that, insights tell you how many times your posts were shared, how many accounts found your page because of a particular post, and how successful your hashtags are.
This can help you eventually improve your posts and tailor your content to make sure you’re putting out what people like to see. For example, if your Instagram page is being discovered a thousand times a week and you only gained twenty followers that day, you may need to see where your Instagram feed is lacking. Insights can also help you figure out what kind of content it is that’s shared more often. Putting out more content like that can help you gain more views and followers.
Insights also work for your Instagram stories, letting you know how many people liked them, how many people swiped to skip all of your stories on the first photo on there, and how many watched it till the end. This, too, can help you improve the content you put out since Instagram stories are gaining more and more popularity these days.
Know What You Want
If you’re looking into creating an Instagram account for your business or are just now thinking about getting more serious about social media marketing, you need to consider what you want out of your Instagram account first. There are a number of ways in which businesses use their accounts
- To position themselves as industry experts
- To sell products from the app
- To provide knowledge and value to their audience
- To improve their brand image and connect with their customers
- To get more sales
- To market themselves
Many business accounts aim to do more than one thing at a time, but having clear cut goals and a concrete vision helps you make better use of the app and get better results.
Vary the Types of Content on the Page
There are multiple kinds of posts you can make on Instagram, and you should always post more than one type on your feed. This makes your feed look interesting and keeps it from being monotonous and boring.
You can include behind the scene shots of orders being packed and sent out, introduce the company staff, post stories and photos of other people who are interacting with your brand and talking about it online, ask questions and do polls, post how-to videos about our products, and much more.
As long as you keep your social media marketing goals in mind while creating content, you should vary it as much as you can to avoid your followers getting bored of you.
Post Regular Content
People will only follow you if they think it’s useful for them, and it won’t do you any good to be followed but then be forgotten about. Make sure that you post regular content so that you can stay in people’s feeds and on their mind. Even if you don’t regularly post on the grid, you should be posting on your stories.
You can do polls, ask questions and answer them, and much more even if you’re out of ideas.
Make a Good First Impression
The timeless saying “the first impression is the last impression” couldn’t be more true when it comes to social media content. Users are constantly bombarded with a wide range of content, which means that they don’t pay too much attention to anything that doesn’t instantly catch their eye. If you want people to scroll through your feed or follow you once they find your page, you need to think about making the right first impression.
This is why it’s super important to choose the right profile picture. For most businesses, the most obvious option is their business logo, but make sure whatever you choose is clear and easily recognizable even in the small size profile pictures are displayed with on Instagram.
The profile picture, however, won’t do much good if you don’t have a visually compelling Instagram feed that people stay to look through.
Once you have a future follower’s attention, the hard part is over, and chances are they’ll follow you if they’re interested in what you have to offer.
Know Your Audience
This takes us to the next point in this discussion – you need to be very selective about the kind of content you put out. There’s a popular saying among marketers that reads “if you’re talking to everyone you’re talking to no one”. This is to stress that if you’re not targeting your advertising attempts towards a particular audience, no one will pay attention to your content at all.
Do some market research about the kind of people who would be interested in your product, and tailor your content to match their interests and needs.
Buyer personas and customer profiles are a great way to help you focus your marketing efforts, but they’re not always a requirement, and not every business uses them.
Use Instagram Captions
Instagram is usually a visual medium, but Instagram captions are a great way to grow your business and your reach. The pesky thing about Instagram is that even if you have a thousand followers, your posts might not reach all of them. But if more and more people interact with a certain post of yours, the Instagram algorithm will deem it useful and show it to more people.
Along with the number of likes, views, and comments a post is getting, Instagram also notes how much time people are spending on a single post. This is where Instagram captions come into play.
Long, detailed, and useful captions can keep people hovering over your posts for longer, which in turn can improve how your page is doing on the app. Accounts like those of National Geographic are a perfect example of this kind of thing, but you don’t really have to take this step unless you can match their level of storytelling.
Engage With Other Accounts
Your profile needs to get noticed by others, and you can make this happen by interacting with other accounts on the app. Follow other accounts in the same niche as yours and reply to the comments on your own posts.
If someone else is tagging you in their post or story, see if you can interact with any of the comments there. You can even post it on your own story or feed with your own two cents.
Not only does this make sense from a technical point of view, but it also makes sense when you think about your audience and what they think about you.
Any and all interactions will make your business seem more real in your followers’ eyes, which only helps you in the long run.
Use Hashtags
When people don’t know what kinds of profiles to follow but they know they’re interested in something, they follow hashtags for that topic. Using related hashtags for your posts will help make your posts visible to all those people, which in turn helps your visibility and your reach.
Most people suggest using anywhere between 5 to 9 hashtags on your posts. Be careful about the hashtags you use though – using ones for events and viral topics can help you gain visibility, but if you start to blindly use popular hashtags without considering if the content of your posts is relevant or not, your visibility and your reputation on the app will only go down.
Set up Shop
If you’re not using a business account, you’re missing out on this relatively new feature by Instagram. Instagram shop allows business profiles to set up their own shop within the app, and people can even access a shop tab on the explore page where they can look through products for sale from accounts they might be interested in or have already interacted with.
Not only will this feature help people find you when they’re looking for the products you sell, but it’ll also help you convert more likes and followers into actual sales and make more money – which is the ultimate goal for your business.
Work With Inflencers
Working with a social media influencer on Instagram can expose your brand to a whole new audience that will probably be interested in the products or services you have to offer. It’ll also help build credibility with your clients, because Instagram influencers are trusted by their audience. According to a research into this by CivicScience, almost half of the people using Instagram have spent money on one product or another because an influencer recommended it.
Partnering up with an influencer will help you get noticed fairly quickly, and help you position yourself as an expert in your niche.
Use Instagram Ads
Sometimes when you need to get noticed faster, you can justify spending money on Instagram ads. You can choose the audience based on age, location, gender, language, and interests. You’ll have an option of choosing what call-to-action button you include with the promoted post, and you can have viewers either go directly to your profile, send you a direct message, or go to your website.
If you use these ads wisely, you can gain a lot of followers in a very short amount of time.
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