How Businesses Can Get More Engagement on Instagram
Instagram is definitely the place for pictures. So if your business is a photography studio you should have joined Instagram long back! But, Instagram is not just about who has the best photography it is an awesome way to showcase your brand, tell your story and interact with potential customers.
So why the Instagram platform?
According to stats – Instagram has over 300 million daily active users, and the monthly new follower growth rate on the average account is about 16%. Instagram pulls in over $595 million dollars in mobile ad revenues and engagement rates are 58x higher than Facebook and 120x higher than Twitter. Getting your business on Instagram is a no brainer.
Using social media will help you grow your email list.
Drive more customers into your website when you use your bio link. The benefit of growing your social media followers can also help you grow your email list using your eMail Networks eMail Marketing Suite. Simply send your users to a landing page where you can capture their contact details. Make sure that when you collect contact data or new subscriber data you always verify it to make sure it is real. You can use a real time email verification tool like XVerify to quickly approve or reject incoming email data so that you avoid dreadful hard bounces and improve your deliverability.
Captivate consumers with beautiful photography.
The secret is you don’t have to be a photographer, you can put beautiful stock photography that coordinates with your brand on your Instagram which will attract followers. Another thing that instagrammers love is motivational messages over top a background image. For one of my personal favorites I enjoy using the wordswag APP to create attractive photos.
Other Apps Great for Photo Editing:
Boomerang – Instagram’s app for creating animated Gifs from your Camera
Over – An app for putting graphics over images contains over 10k graphics, fonts and images
Afterlight – Quick straight forward editing of images such as filters, cropping, framing, textures.
Captions allow you to tell your story and you get a lot more space than Twitter allows.
Instagram don’t make it easy for link sharing, as you can only place one hyper link in your profile bio, but when it comes to letting you caption your images they don’t limit you like Twitter does. I use to think no one is here to read these captions, they just want to look at images. But I was wrong, dead wrong. People are reading those captions and responding to what you have to say.
Make your captions Whitty, funny, motivational, creative, invoke emotions, or simply ask your followers a question. The captions are there to allow you to share your special moments so this way you can stand out from the competition by adding something unique.
@Mentions aka Shoutout
Make people feel special by giving them a special message that you are paying attention to them.
This will draw their attention to that post. If you see another post that you think one of your followers would also enjoy you can tag them over there as well.
Hash Tagging
The cool thing about being on the Instagram platform is that you can go buck wild with hashtags, it’s just not recommended. The idea is to do your hashtag research and find out which ones are going to be the best fit for the image you are publishing. As a rule of thumb it is a good idea to keep your hashtags to less than 15 per image.
When doing hashtag research and you come across a tag that may not be the most popular it can still be just as valuable. Keep in mind that popular hashtags will push your image down fast, while hashtags that are not as popular will be more likely to display your photo longer when looking at recent posts for that tag.
Comment Comment Comment
Instagram is a platform for communication, and that’s exactly what it wants to you to do. You should comment on your follower’s photos. When you comment on their photo it tells that you have interest in them and will help them keep your brand in mind.
Let them know what you think, and they will be likely to reciprocate. When other users see that you are also getting comments on your photos it will inspire them to join the conversation as well.
Don’t forget you can also comment and ask users to take some action such as clicking on the link in your bio, but if you want them to do that then you should be offering something of value. For example, offering them a discount code or telling them about a current promotion and asking them to click the link in your bio.
Direct Messaging
Direct messaging is amazing. Being able to engage in a one on one conversation with someone is priceless. In the Instagram community you can message anyone, if they don’t like what you are saying or find you offensive they can block you but most messages get engagement. You can even create groups to have a discussion.
Keep your users engaged by asking them questions in group chat. Other people will chime in and that will build up a conversation.
Bring Users into Your Site
Promote, the link in your bio. Remind users to click the BIO link and have it coordinate with something that you are posting about. As you drive new users into your site don’t forget to capture their contact data. If you are not driving the users into a landing page where you collect their details then you are missing a window of opportunity.
Start taking action today
If you don’t already have an Instagram account I challenge you to set one up this week. As a business it is a good idea that you post about 7-10 images per week and make sure you have a strong call to action. Strategically set up your bio so that it lands on a lead capture page so you can draw those interested into your email list. As your number of followers increase so should your post engagements, but make sure you carve out time to like, comment and message others on the platform.
Contact our sales team today at (866) 271-5908 to learn more about email marketing best practices including email list verification.