How to Get Your Business Noticed on Instagram

Are you using Instagram as a marketing tool for your business?

Do you want to improve on your Instagram marketing techniques?

Instagram is a great way for businesses to tell a visual story about their brand. As it’s quickly becoming a social media power tool, more and more businesses are using Instagram to grow their business in an online setting.

There are over 130 million active users on Instagram each month and there are approximately 1 billion photos being liked every day (wishpond). The potential to reach millions should not be ignored.

Follow these 5 Instagram marketing tips below and your business could be on its way to viral marketing success.

1. Build Your Community with Hashtags
Hashtags are a major component of Instagram. It’s a key strategy to increase your brand visibility on Instagram. Be sure to include brand specific hashtags (with your business name), general hashtags related to your business, and trending hashtags (by using Instagram’s Explore feature to find posts related to trending hashtags). Remember that trending hashtags are time-sensitive, so be sure to include trending tags that are relevant to your business to aid discovery.

2. Relate to Your Followers Interests
You’ll want to always consider your target audience’s mindset. Think about why your target audience is on Instagram. Spend some time reviewing your Activity “Following” tab to see what your followers are “liking.” For example, let’s say you sell financial consulting services and you’ve established that your customers are a fan of travel. So why not post some vacation photos in the Caribbean with a catchy description reading “Wouldn’t you love to take a family vacation down South? You can if you start making better financial decisions! Call us today for a free consultation.” Keep in mind you always want stay relevant to what you’re selling.

3. Post Frequently, But Don’t Overdo It
Over posting on Instagram is frowned upon and may result in lost followers. Nobody wants their newsfeeds overpowered by one Instagram user. You don’t need to post multiple times a day on Instagram. We suggest posting at most once per day. Test out different posting times to discover the most effective time of day to post.

4. Share High Quality Photos
If you’re a professional business then any image you share on Instagram should be of the highest quality. As all photos shared on Instagram must be square in dimension, a big time saver it to shoot square photos. Look at your settings on your digital camera and/or smartphone and size to square. This will save time on cropping the image and will ensure that essential elements will not be cropped out of the image when it’s time to post.

5. Engage With Users
The more active you are on Instagram, the more exposure your business will receive. Start by searching for relevant hashtags, liking posts, and leaving comments. You can also #regram images and give post credit to the original user. Always remember that engagement is a two-way street: if you expect people to engage with your business, then people will expect you to engage with them as well.

Tell us your best Instagram marketing tips in the comments below.

4 Recent Changes To Instagram – What You Need To Know

Our favourite social media platform, Instagram, has been aggressively releasing new features and tools the past few months. In this blog post I’ll explain four recent changes to Instagram that you need to know about.

Think of the creative ways you can put these changes to work for your business. How will these creative features help you build your brand’s awareness, increase engagement with clients and bring more leads to your business?

1) Instagram Now Allows Landscape Images and Video

Square dimensions does not have to be the norm anymore. Whether you have a great landscape picture you want to share without having to crop or you have some amazing widescreen video, you now have the ability to share it in it’s original form directly to Instagram. 

Note: to get this new feature you have to update your Instagram app – so do that first.

Now, when choosing a photo or video, you can tap the format icon to adjust the orientation to portrait or landscape instead of square. Once you share the photo, the full-sized version of it will appear in your feed.

Instagram LandscapeInstagram Landscape

2) Threaded Messages and Improvements to Instagram Direct

About a year ago Instagram added a feature called Instagram Direct which enabled users to send photo or video messages to contacts privately. Instagram has launched improvements to Instagram Direct including threaded messages and sending content from your feed as a Direct message.

Threaded messages make it easier to go back and forth with the people you talk to the most. Similar to how your text messages work in a thread, now your direct posts follow a threaded format.

The other change to Instagram Direct is that you will now find an arrow next to the like and comment icons under every post. Tap it to send that post to a friend or group as a message using Instagram Direct. It will appear as part of your conversation, and you can tap the photo or video to see and like the original post. You can also send hashtag pages and location pages by tapping the arrow icon in the top right-hand corner. This feature is similar to the common @username way of sending a direct message to your friends and contacts, but with Instagram Direct, it’s sent privately – just between you and those you send to.

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3) Look Out For Instagram Ads

Instagram has officially launched ads management via the Facebook Power Editor. It’s not yet available to everyone.

To see whether or not you have access to Instagram ads:

1. Go to Power Editor and click the Manage Ads tab at the top of the page.

2. Click on the left side of the page and click Create Campaign.

3. Click on the dropdown next to Objective and hover over Clicks to Website. If you see New Create ads for Instagram, then you should be able to start creating Instagram ads in Power Editor. If you don’t see this option, know that they’re rolling out Instagram ads slowly.

4) Instagram Allows Scheduled Posts with Third Party Apps

You can now use third party apps such as Hootsuite and Latergram to schedule your Instagram posts. These tools are not fully automated solutions like with other platforms, however, it makes it convenient to have your posts pre-scheduled and ready to go when it’s time to publish.

With Hootsuite, for example, you must use push notifications to publish your scheduled posts. You have the option to Send Now, Schedule, or Autoschedule your Instagram posts via Hootsuite. At the time you chose to publish, you’ll receive a push notification via Hootsuite. Once you’re ready to publish, you will tap Open in Instagram, paste your caption (that’s automatically copied in Hootsuite), and tap to share the image.

Have you tried scheduling your Instagram posts with a third party app?

Again, if you haven’t yet, you will need to update your Instagram App to take advantage of most of the updates mentioned in this article.

Let me know what you think of these features. Have you put these tools to use for your brand? Has scheduling saved you time and headaches? Are you ready to advertise within Instagram?