10 Instagram marketing hacks (snackable tips)
I practically know the name of Kaley Cuoco’s pet rabbits, horses, and dogs. I know exactly where Hubspot attended their marketing conferences and if Hootsuite had an office party yesterday. The distance between a common man and the corporates, celebrities, and other individuals is blurring out to a large extent because of social media platforms.
Instagram in particular, that started out in 2010 took the world by storm with a lofty number of user registrations within 2 months of its inception. Not long before (2011) Facebook realized the potential of it and acquired the app. What began as posting photos on this channel, soon took a quick evolution to become a medium for profitable business strategies.
Kid you not, people learn about a lot of products or services only through Instagram advertising. If you’re not leveraging this goldmine for your business, you are losing out on a lot of subscriptions for your business. Also, if you have got a business account already, that’s not it.
Here are some amazing hacks to grow your business through effective Instagram marketing.
10 Instagram marketing hacks: Snackable Tips.
Instagram allows 150 character limit to give a quick brief about who you are and what you do, and what you want your visitors to do. Stick to the character limit, skip the emojis and write a crisp copy to include a CTA as well. This goes apart from including your website URL.
Here’s a nice and crisp bio from Starbucks. It is crisp, compelling, and captivating.
2. Take advantage of stories
Stories are in a 24-hour format and disappear on a time lapse. This helps you to create interesting time-sensitive posts using a lot of stickers and you can also tag influencers or other accounts in case you are collaborating. You can always save these stories and use them again. You don’t have to think a lot about the aesthetics as it is not in your profile and need not match your theme.
Also, there’s a higher probability it has more views, quickly as it does not get buried in the news feed. Also, users have this tendency to check out the stories first (mostly all of them).
What’s greater? You can post videos as well!
Here, H&M has a nice allotment of their stories stacked category-wise.
3. Use user-generated content
The trend is such that, users tag the official handles of brands with interesting hashtags like #ootd (outfit of the day) or other hashtags to mention the product they are using. The user content is so precious as they are advocates of your brand without you asking for it. Posting such type of content builds authenticity to your brand and boosts conversions.
4. Follow a theme
This tip is cliche for a reason. The importance of this hack cannot be stressed enough. Making a statement for your brand with the help of aesthetics (colors, themes, filters, and style) makes you visible and quickly identifiable among the plethora of other photos in the news feed. With simple routine additions to all your photos, you become more recognizable.
Chances are, you will get more engagements by withholding of an identity.
If you scroll through the uber handle, you can see they have beautiful stock images with a car in the background.
5. Create daily hashtags
You never know what people like and decide to take it viral. Create hashtags or use popular ones like #mondaymotivation to be more visible. You can also create new ones and hook viewer attention to look forward to your content each day.
You remember how viral this hashtag went? #alsicebucketchallenge?
6. Pick the right time
According to research from CoSchedule, the best times to post are between 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, as well as 2:00 AM. It is very important to know when your audience is active and not to over post as this would annoy the users. Interrupting their news feed with just your content will encourage unfollows. Also, Mondays and Thursdays are the best days to do this.
7. Partner with influencers
Influencers are the people who could be advocates for your brand. They belong to your industry and have already won the trust of the target audience of yours. Planning sensible collaborations with them, and making them advocates for your brand through posting of stories/photos/videos or going live talking about your brand can all contribute towards increasing engagements and eventually conversions.
8. Use Instagram analytics
Instagram has built-in analytics for the business that helps you uncover insights giving you expanded details of reach, impressions, and general engagement. It is like a simple dashboard that gives you a quick understanding of how your post works and customize your content accordingly.
9. Use IGTV
IGTV videos can only be viewed on mobile devices using the Instagram or IGTV app. You can post vertical form videos on your channel. Product reviews and tutorials or interviews is the kind of content you can generate on IGTV.
10. Be consistent
Instagram follow and other engagement algorithms are favorable only if you are consistent. You have to post regularly and not overdo it also. As much as you get good engagement in the initial period with periodic posting, you will lose them all if you are not consistent. Have a social media calendar and post creative content, regularly.
Some eye-popping insta stats:
- 1 billion people use Instagram.
- 80% of users are outside the U.S.
- 39% women, 30% men, for U.S. Instagrammers.
- 59% of U.S. users are under 30.
- 72% of teens use Instagram, every day.
- There are 25 million business profiles on Instagram
- 50% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and 60% say they’ve learned of a product or service through the platform.
Wrapping up
Instagram has 800+ million users and more signing up each day. It is currently the best platform for photo sharing and a lot of businesses have already taken advantage of the business opportunities in it. With such a large audience from around the globe, spending a major chunk of their time scrolling their Instagram news feeds, you must certainly be there with your business accounts to capitalize upon that.
Business accounts give you plenty of analytics and you will be surprised to see a ton of engagements soon as you implement these hacks that I shared with you today. Do implement these, and let me know in the comments below how awesome your Instagram marketing works for you.
Originally published at digitaldyno.wordpress.com on January 13, 2019.
