How To Use Instagram For Your Business

Instagram, the photo-sharing social media platform that anyone who’s everyone is on. This popular app has become the most successful of them all. However, you still might be wondering how you can use it for your business. What have you got to take photos of? Why would anyone want to look at them? How can you make it interesting and make it work for you? Well, no matter what business it is that you have, you can make it work for you, from posting inspirational quotes, photos of your staff and things that go on in the office, pictures of food or your new cafe branding or snaps of your latest work and the process behind it. The first thing is to get started, to make an account and then go from there. As such a popular platform now, you really should consider getting your business on there and not just because it’s so popular, but because you can use it to gather valuable insights on your customers, you can use it to sell products, find new customers and build brand awareness. You may as well make the most of the tools Instagram has to offer and here’s how to get started:

Setting Up Your Account

To make a success of Instagram, you need to start with your profile. Your profile photo should be your company logo so people can easily identify your brand. For your account name, use your business name, identical to your brand’s other social profiles. Then you have your username which should also be your business name, but note that your username cannot have any spaces. Next, you have your website, which will be the only clickable URL on your Instagram page. Either use your website or link to your latest promotional page. And finally, you have your bio, where you can either describe what your business does, hype up your website or put your brand’s slogan here – or all of the above.

Make Use Of Your Own Customers

If your clients and customers are already on Instagram, then you need to connect with them and start engaging with them on there. First of all, this is an easy way to get followers as they already know you. Then you could also use your customers in your posts. Talk about your customers and clients, use them in your photos, tag them and use them to show people the work you do and how good it is. It’s a really good way also to incentivize followers to tag you in their photos as this does the double duty of showing off your products and signalling yourself as a brand that listens to its customers. Also, supporting your followers creates a sense of brand loyalty and the more you can show off your satisfied customers, the better.

Publish Goal-Driven Content

Ask yourself: why are you using Instagram for business in the first place? And not just because you’ve been told it’s popular and a must for business. But really, what do you want to achieve from it? Is it more sales? Brand awareness? To show people a different side to your company? Whatever the answer is will directly influence your content strategy. And with so much diversity in terms of what you can post, you could choose any goal for what you use Instagram for. Are you trying your hand at social selling? Or do you have some amazing product photos that you’re desperate to show off?

Use Instagram Insights

Instagram is so useful for your business because of the insights it gives you about the people following and interacting with your account. These include impressions, which is how many times your content was viewed; Reach, which is the total number of unique accounts that viewed a piece of content; Website clicks which is how many clicks the link in your business profile has received; Follower activity which means how often your followers are on Instagram daily; video views which is how often your video content has been viewed and saves, which is how many people have saved your posts. Insights also include demographic information, so you can see where your followers come from, their age, and their gender. This gives you plenty of information about your Instagram audience. 

Use A Listening Tool

A really useful way to use Instagram for your business is to use it alongside a social listening tool which can show you conversations happening on social media. It will tell you what people say about your brand or your industry on Instagram. If you want to get more Instagram followers and people to know more about your business, then you need to know what makes them tick. Monitor Instagram for keywords that matter to you and find out what Instagram users respond to so that you can produce content that people love too.