In today’s internet age, stats state that more than 100 Crore people use Instagram every month, and approximately 90% of them follow accounts of at least one brand/business. This means that having a presence on Instagram has no become a necessity rather than just an extra-thing.
Instagram is the most preferred place for thousands and millions of netizens to share their updates, photos, videos, and stories every single hour. In just a decade, Instagram has “evolutioned” from a basic photo-sharing social media app to a hub of continuous business activity.
Now investing on Instagram for marketing purposes is incredibly beneficial and worthwhile. You as a business owner or a marketer get to market your products and services to a large targeted and engaged audience. Marketing on Instagram is inexpensive than most traditional forms of paid advertising.
Businesses on Instagram can initiate fundraisers in live broadcasts, open shops from their profiles and allow people to reserve tables directly from their accounts. Frequent updates in latest business tools, features and tips in Instagram have pretty much become a routine.
But building a strong presence of your business on Instagram can be a daunting task, especially if you have only used it for personal use. So in this blog of Sampark Infoways, we’re going to have a look at tips on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram.
Table of Contents
1. Identify your goals!
That’s the first step of any actionable process. You decide beforehand why you want to use a particular tool/product/service and what do you want to achieve from it.
Similarly, when it comes to using any marketing medium, it’s essential to identify the goals you want to realize. Instagram is no different. If you’re thinking to invest your money & time in building a strong presence on Instagram, ask, “What do I want to achieve?”
After giving it a thought you may arrive at some common Instagram business goals including- Boosting brand awareness, selling products and services, building your community, generating more leads, showcasing company culture and values, showcase customer testimonials etc.
Being the first tip of Instagram for business, you must identify your goals and consistently monitor them. Think of your identified goals as a formalized gut check. It motivates you and your business to be more intentional with your Instagram content because you can always refer back and ensure everything you share serves those goals.
2. Configure your profile
One of the most crucial tips on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram. Once you have decided your goals, you need to optimize your Instagram properly.
On Instagram, your profile is like your website’s homepage and here you get 150 characters, one link, and a few action buttons to win over potential customers. You need to ensure your profile makes a good impression over your audience.
As a starter step, switch to an Instagram business profile. Switching to a business account offers additional features that help you to expand your profile, track posts’ performance, and sell on Instagram.
As for the next step, type an amazing killer Instagram bio. It should include – a brief description of what your business does, your type of industry (Information technology, Design, Art, Shopping & Retail, Restaurant, etc.).
A business pitch with a tone that shows off your brand’s personality and contact details including phone number, email, address, etc. and your website’s link.
Link in your bio is the only place on Instagram where you can share a clickable link to users so this is an important space which you can leverage to your benefit. Either keep a fixed link to your website’s homepage or consistently replace it with the link of current content.
With Instagram for business you also gain access to Action Buttons—extra clickable buttons for specific calls to action such as Follow, Message, Contact, View Shop, etc. These action buttons are a great way to get more links into your profile and make it easier for your followers to interact with you.
Also Read: Why Social Media is an Absolute Must for Business Branding
Brand your Profile
Another essential tip on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram is Branding. Branding helps your followers recognize your business’ distinctiveness. Color scheme, tone of voice, special content series etc. help make your profile appealing and connect with your audience.
You can take a look at our Sampark Infoways’ Instagram Page and have a look at how we’ve kept our visual elements distinct.
Among the essentials of branding your Instagram profile is using a unique and recognizable profile image.
Your profile picture is crucial for people to quickly recognize your brand when they hop over your Instagram profile. Most businesses generally choose one of the following options- Entire Logo with name, Logo mark – logo except any words, or Mascot if your brand has any.
While selecting one from the options above, you must think about what will help users who visit your profile recognize your brand the quickest. There’s nothing hard and fast here that you have to choose the aforementioned option; you can choose whatever you feel like your audience will recognize better.
Also Read: How to create Social media content calendar
3. Focus on Value!
A crucial tip on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram. To put it in blunt terms, people out there on Instagram aren’t your relatives or friends that would follow your business for free.
Long gone are the days, when businesses used to survive by using mediocre salesy content. Buy this now! Never before offer! Sale, Sale, Sale… and the list goes till infinity.
Make sure you don’t do that with your followers, if they want to buy your product/service- they will! You don’t need to hammer them with aggressive and hard promotional messages.
Instead try to provide them value. Users will only follow you or listen to you if they get any value in the form of Learning, Information or Entertainment.
They follow you because they are getting advice or laughs for free. But being a business, you can’t always post memes or funny content on profile.
In such a case, focus on offering knowledge related to your domain through Images, Carousels, Videos, IGTVs, Reels, Stories etc. to your followers.
E.g. if you run a design agency, you can post informative content like ‘Principles of UI-UX, tips to become a better graphic designer’. This will ensure that they enjoy looking at your content and share it with their friends, families and colleagues as well.
Whatever your business is, think of yourself as a content company and roll out free but quality content for your followers.
4. Post regularly
Maintaining a consistent posting schedule will help you appear in your target audience’s feed. Instagram’ algorithms tries to show each user the content he/she is most likely to enjoy, so it inspects for content that is recent and relevant to each user’s interests.
Instagram utilizes machine learning to consistently study each person’s activity and personalizes their timeline accordingly.
People cannot like what they do not see and this is why posting regularly helps your content show up in your followers’ feeds and offer them increased chances to engage with you. The more they engage with your content, the more times they’ll watch it in their Instagram timeline.
Posting regularly can sometimes be mundane and as humans, we often forget to do things on punctual times. As a solution you can utilize many social media management platforms like Sprout social, Hootsuite, etc. to schedule posts in advance.
This way your account never becomes inactive if in case you get busy. Also, scheduling posts allows you to experiment with time as well. You can schedule your content to be posted on ideal times to reach maximum of your audience.
These tools also allow you to monitor and check whether your recent posts have achieved higher engagement rates than previous ones.
5. Utilize Hashtags
Hashtags help users of social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter explore and discover their favorite content and accounts to follow.
Hashtags also help creators categorize their content and drive higher engagements through them. There are various websites and tools on the internet that offer you best performing hashtags according to the theme of your post.
6. Leverage the potential of different types of Post
An important tip on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram is using all of its features appropriately. Instagram is now a holistic platform where users can post varied forms of content. The types of content, counting the recently added are –
- Image Posts – Normal images
- Carousels- Series of images best used for narration
- Feed Videos (60 sec) – Normal videos of 60 sec limit
- IGTV – Long length videos whose length can reach upto 15 mins if uploaded from mobile and 60 mins when uploaded from desktop.
- Reels – Short 15 sec videos
- IG Stories – Appears in the top bar of the Instagram feed, these are photos and videos that disappear after 24 hours.
- Story Highlights – A bar that appears below a profile’s bio, it houses stories that the user wants to showcase.
- Instagram Live – A feature that helps an user goes live.
- AR Filters – New feature that adds an overlay effect on your face in real time.
- Branded GIFs – This feature helps users make Branded gifs and make it available for rest of users.
- Guides – A new feature that helps users curate their best of similar themed posts into series.
7. Engaging with your followers
As the last tip on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram – engage with your community. As we mentioned above, Instagram is not a place for nonstop sales pitch. Instagram is a social media platform, so users as well as businesses must learn to socialize.
If a user shares his/her thoughts with you, it’s crucial to respond them and show that you’re listening. Replying to comments and Direct Messages is an amazing way to build a strong community on Instagram.
Interaction prompting features are also a great way to encourage engagement to your business. You can experiment and play around with interactive stickers in Instagram Stories like polls, questions, or sliding scale rankings.
In case of posts, utilize your caption to ask questions and call people to share their opinions in the comments.
User-generated content is any form of content created by a follower or contributor for your brand. This is an amazing way to offer your followers some love and motivate more people to engage with you.
Persuade your followers to share exciting moments and experiences they had with your brand across Instagram and ask them to repost some of the best content to your own profile.
Concluding Thoughts
Now that you’ve got an overview of the tips on building a strong presence of your business on Instagram, you can try and experiment with these practices and configure the best set according to your needs.
If you’re looking for an agency to manage your social media profiles and create innovative content for it, contact Sampark Infoways to get benefit our industry-standard digital and social media marketing services.
