What was once just a home for sharing photos with friends, Instagram has now morphed into a serious social networking site with great potential for businesses of any size and nature. While Facebook may be the obvious site to be promoting your business, Instagram provides your company with a whole new platform to utilise, and a visual experience for your clients and customers. But how exactly can you get the most out of its 1 billion daily active users?

We’ve put together four, simple but effective tips to ensure that you’re utilising Instagram to the best of its ability:

Make use of Live Videos

2016 saw the launch of the Live Video on Instagram and despite providing businesses with many opportunities for growth and engagement, over two years later we are yet to see a great number of brands utilising the feature.

How can you add live videos to your social media strategy while it’s still relatively up and coming?

• Before you do anything, create a buzz! Provide people with an incentive to watch, whether it be an exclusive discount being announced in the video or a sneak preview of a new product, the bigger the buzz, the more people will tune in.

• As well as aiming for a high number of views, aim for a lot of engagement within the video. This increases the chance of your live video reaching the explore page, which ultimately amounts to an increase of traffic to your profile due to a higher volume of users being shown your profile and your content.
• Inject personality into the video, this is your brands time to shine while you have potential consumers right there at the other end of the phone, plan exactly what key messages you want to get across and how you want your brand to be viewed by these users. The best and most interesting videos are product announcements, company behind the scenes, reviews and updates!

Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way of increasing your business’s visibility within the platform and can also create a talking point while promoting engagement from your brand’s advocates.

• Firstly, you can create a brand hashtag. Encouraging your customers to repost images of products you sell using the hashtag not only promotes engagement with the consumer but also creates brand advocates. We recommend having a constant brand hashtag (eg. #weareFUTCOM) and a specific campaign hashtag (eg. #FUTCOMinsights).
• Using hashtags on your posts increases the number of people you will reach, therefore, ensuring you are using relevant hashtags will help to reach relevant users… equating to potential customers. Keep hashtags relevant, not too broad but not too niche. There are plenty of websites out there where you can see what the best hashtags are for your business.
• You don’t need to go overboard! Studies have shown that 11 hashtags are a good amount to use, while avoiding spam such as ‘#followforfollow’ ‘#likeforlike’. Instagram doesn’t like these and will potentially decrease your reach if found spamming and ‘fishing for likes’.

Engaging with your followers

Engaging with your followers online is a crucial part of building a social media presence, but it can be difficult to know exactly how to create an engaged audience to begin with.

• You must acknowledge your followers, by making potential customers feel valued it will add to the trust they have in the brand and therefore increase the likelihood of making a purchase.
• Ask questions in your caption, for example, “What are your favourite products from our new season collection?” will encourage replies on your posts.
• There’s also a technical aspect about this too. If Facebook sees two profiles engaging with each other for example liking each others photos or engaging a direct message, they will increase the visibility and more likely to put your profile at the top of that user’s feed.

Create the perfect bio

With just 150 characters to sell your company to potential new followers how do you decide what does and doesn’t make the cut?

• Your Instagram bio is the first thing users are greeted with when visiting your page, it should reflect your company, as well as your goals for the network.
• You should ensure that your bio convey’s what your business does, indicates how a customer can find you, showcases the companies personality and prompts the customer to take an action.
• Don’t forget, you can use hashtags in your bio! This may make it easier for your customers to find you if your account is not verified.

By following our four steps to getting the most out of your business Instagram you should be well equipped to take on the platform and to allow your business to reach a whole new demographic and audience. In turn, you should eventually see an increase in traffic and revenue. What have you got to lose?

For more information about how you can amplify your Instagram activity, get in touch with our team at info@futcom.co.uk.

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