Are you still resisting using social media as a marketing, sales or service channel for your business?
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of businesses that haven’t explored using social media to reach new and existing customers. And, most of the businesses that are using social media seem to prefer Facebook and Twitter without even considering other options.
Yes, both Facebook and Twitter have large audiences; and both offer great methods for communicating with your target market. However, Instagram is a great option for reaching potential and existing customers, too.
Why should you consider using Instagram for marketing?
Instagram’s popularity has soared ahead of Twitter and many other social platforms. Second to Facebook in popularity, Instagram recently excelled in a brand engagement study. According to the study, brand engagement was about 58 times greater on IG than Facebook.
There are about 300 million people who use Instagram everyday with almost 100 million photos being posted each day. Not good at math? That’s about 215,000 per minute. Of course, these numbers include international users, but 77-million of those users are in the United States.
Perhaps the most compelling argument to put a company’s brand in front of Instagram audiences is that IG’s feed is unfiltered.
Therefore, everyone who looks at a hashtag conversation will see all posts with that hashtag. You may or may not be aware that Facebook uses algorithms that greatly limit the exposure of business page posts – meaning that only a small portion of your page’s followers ever even see your content. And, after some major algorithm changes in late 2017, business pages on FB see less interaction than ever, unless you want to pay for it.
Additionally, like Twitter, Instagram allows your business IG account to interact directly with other IG accounts. In other words, you can interact with any public profiles on the platform. This ability to interact gives you the opportunity to build relationships and make connections with users and industry influencers who might be interested in your products or services.
As you can see, on Instagram your content has the potential to get in front of a lot more people.
Instagram allows you to communicate with your audience in a very visual manner.
Because of this, Instagram might not seem like the easiest platform for all businesses to utilize. However, if you or someone on your staff is good with photos or video then you can really use that to your advantage on IG. But, if you don’t think you have a way to create great content for Instagram, keep reading because we are going to give you some pointers!
How can your business leverage the IG platform?
The numbers prove that Instagram is being used by a huge amount of people so there are good odds that some of your potential and existing customers are IG users. These numbers also reveal that brand engagement is actually more likely on IG than any other social platform.
But, how do you make Instagram work for your business?
The best way for your business to use Instagram is to simply start by creating an account.
- Familiarize yourself with the platform first. Instagram provides some insight on how to use the platform here and this website offers a more detailed beginner’s guide.
- Next, research your competition or businesses in similar industries to get some ideas about how your business can effectively utilize the platform.
- Finally, make a plan for how you’re going to use your new IG account.
- What goals do you have for the account? Do you want to sell products? Perhaps you want to educate potential and existing customers about your services? Maybe you’d like to develop a personality for your brand? Or, maybe a mixture of all these approaches? Define your objectives.
- How many times per day or week are you going to post?
- Who will be responsible for creating the content and what content fits into your objectives?
- Is paid advertising on Instagram a good method for achieving your objectives or can you just add content to your account and let it spread organically?
These are just a few things to consider before deploying your new business Instagram account.
How can you generate content for Instagram if you don’t know how to edit graphics or make videos?
Fortunately, you don’t need to be an expert graphic designer or branding expert to create beautiful IG graphics. There are many web-based tools available to help you create absolutely stunning graphics and videos.
For creating simple image posts, we recommend Stencil because it’s affordable and very easy to use. They provide everything from templates, to images to quotes. All you have to do is drag and drop to customize the templates and create awesome looking images.
The tool even has a feature that allows you to text your finished graphics to yourself so that you can then easily upload them to IG from your phone. Or, if you prefer to work from your computer just use a social media dashboard that works with Instagram.
Want to create videos? Use a solution like Animaker to quickly create awesome videos to represent your brand. These are just two examples of the many solutions available for creating great content for IG.
Need help getting started on Instagram?
ClickFirst Marketing will be happy to assist you. Click the banner below to contact us and get more information about Instagram can be used as a powerful marketing and communication tool for your business.
