If you want to have social credibility on Instagram, follow these essential Instagram marketing tips and tricks.
Do you want to start an online business and promote it on Instagram?
Do you want to become an influencer?
While promoting yourself or your brand on social media may sound easy, it’s proven to be quite challenging when you are just beginning because no one knows who you are.
How should you get started? Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Essential List of Instagram Marketing Tips
1. Carefully optimize your account for Instagram Marketing
Whether you plan to use an Instagram account to support your business or use it for personal purposes, you need to take some time to think about your profile picture, your name, and bio.
These are the first things that potential followers and customers find out about you, and you need to use them to make the best impression! Your profile picture and bio have to be relevant to your business and capture your brand identity.
Remember to use the bio to introduce your brand to your target customer group, write about its benefits and advantages over its competitors. You only have 150 words to reach out to your prospective customer and make the best out of it.
Why should they follow you and what should they expect?
Think about these questions when you are your profile.
2. Offer quality content and consistent aesthetic
Even if the products or services that you offer are in demand, no one is going to trust your credibility unless they see high-quality in your Instagram content. Make sure that the photos you take are aesthetically appealing and edited in taste.
Don’t use too much filter!
People don’t like it when pictures look fake, especially, on business accounts, because they want to see what a real product looks like. You can use various apps or even Instagram to edit your photos but make it look as natural as possible. In addition to this, try to use consistent styling. Your account is one unit and should emphasize your brand’s aesthetics.
3. Consistency
One of the most important Instagram marketing tips (or social medial tips in general) is to remain consistent with your output.
Consistency is always significant, especially when it comes to social media. You can’t expect to have thousands of followers if you post one or two pictures every other week. You don’t get any new followers and risk losing those followers that you worked hard to get.
So, post consistently because that’s what your followers expect and want from you.
If you schedule your posts in advance, it gives you more time to focus on editing the content, coming up with captions and hashtags that are all vital to increasing your popularity on Instagram. So, instead of posting randomly and decreasing the quality of your content, make a schedule.
4. Analyze your followers
If you don’t define your target audience, you wouldn’t know where to start while planning your branding and marketing strategy. Find out their age, occupation, income, gender, interests, why would they purchase your product or service, etc.
Once you know who you are trying to reach, you can offer appropriate content for them. When you have already increased your reach and gained a fair set of followers, you can use Instagram analytic tools to analyze your followers.
They will help you find out the gender and age distribution of your followers, their locations, what day of the week they are most active, etc. You will also see which of your post had the highest engagement and will conclude what type of posts impress your followers the most. As a result, you can deliver even more relevant content than before.
5. Engage with your followers
Another crucial Instagram marketing tip is to foster engagement by engaging with your followers.
Engagement with your followers is essential for building strong customer relationships. You must be a user of other social media platforms for personal purposes. Thinks about what catches your attention and what leaves you satisfied as a customer. You will immediately dislike a brand or an influencer who doesn’t even acknowledge their followers, right?
Communication with your followers is the key to success!
Try to reply to some of their comments, thank them if they write you a positive comment. Even if one of your customers or someone else writes a negative review, make them feel appreciated for their feedback and say that you will consider it.
6. Pay for followers in the beginning (controversial)
Note from Hacker Noon Editors: This Instagram marketing tip is controversial and not all marketers agree with it. Some people even refer to it as a grey-hat or black-hat marketing tactic. Please do more research before even considering this tactic.
Instagram already has so many successful online businesses and influencers that it’s quite challenging to stand out, especially in the beginning. You are just starting, and the only people who know about you are your family and friends.
The fewer followers you have, the less trustworthy you might look to prospective customers. That’s why some people pay for Instagram followers to make their account look like it has high social credibility. When people see an account with a thousand or three thousand followers, and they like the content shared, they are more likely to hit the follow button and be curious about your brand.
7. Live streams
Apart from comments, interactive features enable you to communicate with your followers through live streams. Live streams are an excellent way to engage with people in real-time, and the last part makes the whole experience quite interesting and exciting.
Live streams are especially beneficial if you are trying to establish yourself as an influence because let’s face it – people enjoy watching or hearing about other people’s lives. During streaming, you can talk about yourself, workout routine, diet, clothes, anything that might interest your followers. In addition to this, you can answer their questions.
When you start streaming, your followers get a notification, and there’s quite a high chance that it will catch their attention. It’s another excellent way to remind your followers of your existence once in a while.
If you are trying to create engagement for your online business, you can also use live streams for your advantage. For example, if you own an online clothes store, you can show people what your products look like in real life, talk about their quality, etc.
Make your followers feel important!
While you are streaming, don’t forget to stop talking about yourself or your brand several times and ask your followers some questions. You can ask them how their day was, whether or not they have purchased your product lately, and what is their opinion about them.
8. Use relevant hashtags (a crucial Instagram marketing tip)
One of the most obvious Instagram marketing tips is to improve your hashtag game!
Using hashtags on Instagram is one of the most effective ways to extend your social reach and build a strong and loyal community. First of all, if you are an influencer, only use hashtags that are relevant to your lifestyle, and in the case of businesses relevant, to what you do. For example, if you are a personal trainer, you can use the following hashtags: #personaltrainer, #healthylifestyle, #fit, #healthy, etc.
Since you have already defined your target audience, try to find hashtags, they are more likely to search and use several of them per post so the chances of a new user finding your content are higher.
Also, avoid following hashtags: #followforfollow, #likeforlike, #followme, etc.
Their effect is temporary, and people who follow you are only interested in you following them back, not your product or service thus you can’t reach your target customers this way. On the other hand, after using these hashtags, you won’t look like a serious online business to people who already follow you.
9. Collaborations
Collaborating with another brand could help you reach out to more people and grow your following faster than you could alone. So, reach out to local businesses that you think share your brand’s story or aesthetics and plan your next steps together. After some time, you will be able to pick a business for collaboration that fits your style best and whose followers might be interested in you.
10. Use Stories
Instagram Stories have to be one of the best additions to social media platforms in the 21st century. Using Stories can help you boost your reach because, in quite many cases, they result in direct messages.
As already mentioned, consistency in your Instagram style is very important. So, if you have any photo or video that doesn’t quite follow the aesthetics of your Instagram account, post them on Story.
Besides, you can use Instagram Story to make announcements, let your followers know that you have a new post, and many others. While uploading a story, use relevant hashtags so that people who don’t follow might also be exposed to it.
11. Contests
After you manage to achieve a bit of success as a business but still want to target a larger audience, hold Instagram contests. One of the most efficient tools is asking people to follow you and comment on your photo or a video by taking one, two, or three friends to enter into the contest.
Tagged friends will see your account, some of them will follow you and tag even more friends in the comments. It’s an excellent way to show your followers how invested you are by offering prizes and also attracting new followers.
Make announcing a contest appealing and colorful!
You want people to know that you are having a contest, and it won’t happen if you post one photo with a small caption.
Final Thoughts on our List of Instagram Marketing Tips
I hope you found our list of marketing tips for Instagram useful. Every brand and business is different and will require a different approach to every social media platform.
Do more research and start implementing some of the tips we listed above and you should be on your way to 10,000 followers and beyond!