Top 10 tips to grow your business on Instagram

Ever wondered how to build a social media presence for your business on Instagram? Here are some of Instagram’s most powerful features to help you boost your brand on this fastly growing platform.

1. Know your audience

By understanding the demographic of your target audience this will help you to create a direct marketing strategy, using your profile to increase brand awareness and engagement applying a voice for the business that speaks to them in a way they understand, developing a sense of community and rapport, giving the audience a feeling of involvement and building relationships and brand loyalty

2. Consistency

Although it is important to vary content, (which we will cover in tip 4 below) having an aesthetically pleasing profile is imperative to design a professional grid of high quality imagery that on first glance entices further exploration and curiosity, yet maintaining the business brand identity

3.  Types of content

By utilising the different content mediums on Instagram this will keep the audience experience fresh and exciting. This includes stories, posts, post sharing, video content, graphics, quotes, photographs, etc., (some of which we will cover in the tips below). Mixing content so as not to become boring and repetitive keeps your followers wanting to see more of what you will post next and this anticipation can be used to create exciting and on-going engagement

4.  Instagram stories

This feature provides a snapshot of a post that is only visible on the profile for a maximum of 24 hours, then being deleted unless shared as a highlight or shared on your profile. More personal content or lower quality imagery can work well on this feature. The use of other features as mentioned in tip 6 create the opportunity in stories to obtain instant feedback through direct conversational replies, the use of polls, questions etc. Any popular or important information shared can be saved to highlights on your profile, categorised so that viewers can return to review and revisit the content within relevant and defined areas of topic or subject

5.  Filters

Various effects can make the original post more visually pleasing, adding creative and stimulating or attention-grabbing properties. When identifying an attractive effect on another profile, by tapping the top left of the story post this allows you to save and send the effect used to your personal story settings so that it can be utilised at a later date

6.  Features

The poll, question box, quiz, location tags and gif features attract user engagement and instant feedback which helps to gain a better understanding of your audience. These features can be found when swiping to the right on your feed home page when creating either a video or picture story. The filters appear at the bottom of the screen, with the tags, gifs, poll and quiz options available to select within the icons at the top right of the screen.

7.  Save tab

Located at the bottom right of every post, the save tab allows you to save and create collections of other users posts to be collected as inspiration and reference. This is also good for trying to be consistent with posts if you do not have content of your own, although credit should be given to the original creator

8.  Post sharing

When you wish to share a post from another profile this can be done by tapping the arrow/send icon below the post picture to send to either a person or profile from within your ‘following’ list, or you can share publicly by sharing to your own profile story for everyone to see

9.  Post times

Instagram has a feature on a business profile that enables viewing of insights by tapping on the ‘insights’ tab that is visible on your profile page. The insights provide you with information on your prime times to post and details on the audience demographic. This will be different for each business and therefore it is imperative that you understand your engagement statistics to know what posts get the most likes and attract more followers, giving you an opportunity to improve the overall figures on your profile

10.  IGTV – Instagram Television

For video content longer than 1 minute in duration there is an IGTV option, which enables users to choose whether to continue to watch the footage. This allows you to share more detailed and in-depth content such as tutorials, story time, etc. When uploading a video onto your feed instead of a photograph or still content if the video is more than 1 minute long the option to choose IGTV will appear automatically. When utilising this feature ensure that the content within the first minute is engaging enough to promote continued interaction

Hopefully these tips will help you to understand and build your business profile on Instagram successfully, using these tips to design, develop and deliver professional content that engages your target audience and heightens your business profile.

If you have a business registered under 42 months within the Liverpool City Region - we can support you! get in touch on enterprisehub@thewo.org.uk