Engaging Your Audience on Instagram
On Instagram, the name of the game is hashtag tagging and visually enticing images. One of the most popular and widespread social media platforms used today, Instagram is used as a photo publishing tool for individual users and organizations. The most challenging aspect of Instagram for small businesses is mastering the format of imagery and hashtag. This article provides a how-to explanation on utilizing that format on Instagram as a marketing tool and your small business can benefit from it.
Unlike other social media platforms—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter—Instagram uses imagery and hashtag as a way to garner the attention of online users. Hashtag (#brandedinnovation, #SEO) enables users to browse photo content that interests them and through this, they can share the content with their friends and followers. Before you can build your audience on Instagram, you must first come up with quality content that will successfully market to your audience.
CONTENT
Uploading a photo of your logo or product won’t work. This social media platform is entirely visual medium; therefore, your content must be visually attractive and interesting. Creating content that is “out of the box” will often lead to the best result because contents that make users think and feel will be more engaging than content that don’t have a positive reaction.An effective strategy for growing businesses to expose themselves on Instagram is by making their company more transparent. Uploading photos of the inner workings of their business to users or behind-the-scenes action to users will make the brand more personable and approachable.
You can virtually cover anything relevant to your business through Instagram, this would include:
-New products, old products, and future products
-Calls to action (CTAs)
-Customer reviews
-Behind-the-scenes look at the company.
Similar to Vine, Instagram enabled video uploading and users are allowed to post 15 second clips of recorded content. This is a great marketing tool for growing businesses to share their products and provide more creative new contents. You can utilize this video feature as a way to engae with your audience and show them your products/service in action. Another feature that Instagram enables you to do is share your content with other social media platform such as Facebook and Twitter.
OPTIMIZATION
It takes much more than just amazing quality content; you will need to optimize your photo tagging and audience interaction by making it known. The hashtags on Instagram is the door where users will find your content. Getting clever with your tags can introduce your products to entirely new audiences because users may already be following those tags that you set or created.
Instagram photo contests are a common way small businesses can evoke tangible response from users. How this works is that users can take picture with the company products and have a certain hashtag in order to enter. The prizes are often free products, giveaways, memberships. This enables users to have more of an incentive to interact and enter. These contests are effective since users will have to post their contest entry photo to their own profile and therefore introducing your business to everyone that are connected with them.
Instagram is a great platform for promotions and customer features as well as photo contests. Through this way, your customers and audience can be encourage to tag your company in photos, as long as there’s an incentive such as promo codes or special offers only available on Instagram. This type of marketing is a cominbation of high quality content with audience interaction.
With social media marketing, it’s important to learn ways to generate interest in your business through your audience Build buzz with virtual word-of-mouth and don’t be overtly “sales-y.” Instagram is a sharing platform so be productive with this social media through combining high quality content with incentives for sharing.
For more detailed information on engaging your audience on Instagram, visit this blog
