20 Tips to Grow Audience on Instagram for business
1. Write a killer bioYour bio deserves a lot of love as it’s likely to be one of the first things people see when they click on your profile. It will also play a key role in the actions someone decides to take once they’ve landed on your profile. It could entice them to follow you, scroll through some more of your content or even click the link back to your website. So A great Instagram bio should:
- Explain a bit about you/your brand
- What you/your brand do
- Appeal to your target audience
- Use your brand tone and voice to help connect with community
On Instagram you can share a clickable link is your bio. This is super valuable real estate. Most Instagram accounts tend to use this link to drive traffic back to their homepage. Others link their Instagram profile to campaign-specific landing pages or individual pieces of content. Many brands also update their link regularly to drive traffic to their latest pieces of content.
3. Create an Instagram Business profile
Instagram has officially announced the launch of its tools for business users, including new business profiles, analytics and the ability to create ads from posts directly within the app.When converting to a Business profile, you’ll be able to include additional information about your business on your profile. For example, you’ll be able to add a phone number, an email address and your business’s physical address.
4. Use a recognizable profile image
When it comes to choosing a profile picture, it’s important for people to instantly recognize it when they visit your Instagram profile. For most businesses, this means choosing one of the following options: Logo, Logomark (the logo, minus any words), Mascot. Find the best way to represent your brand here.
5. Set goals
Instagram is a powerful marketing channel. If you’re going to invest your time and money in Instagram for business, you need to ask: “What do we want to achieve?” Here are some common goals that brands, teams, and individuals tend to choose for their Instagram presence:
- Showcase your products or services
- Build your community
- Increase awareness of your brand
- Showcase your company culture and values
- Advertise to potential customers
- Increase brand loyalty
- Share company news and updates
Captions are a chance to enhance your content further and there are plenty of ways brands use them. Some choose to treat captions as a place for sharing stories and micro-blogging. Others use them to add a short, snappy headline to a post. Still others use captions to ask questions and encourage replies.
7. Post consistently
Consistency and publishing frequency can help your audience learn when to expect new content from you, and keeping a consistent schedule makes sure you maximize engagement without hitting any lulls or stretches without updates. Any Instagram strategy should clearly outline a target post frequency to help keep you on track.
8. Analyze your most successful posts
It is important to keep an eye on what’s working and what’s not on Instagram and one of the best ways to do this is by taking a dive into your Instagram analytics to check on things like:
- Which posts are getting the most likes
- How the number of posts you share can influence your engagement
- Your most commented on content
9. Respond to comments
Responding to comments is a great way to build a strong community on Instagram. If someone takes the time to share their thoughts with you, it’s important to respond back to them and show that you’re listening. Listening and responding to your audience can be a great way to encourage positive word of mouth.
10. Use Instagram Ads
Instagram has been working with brands to optimize its advertising platform, and the results so far seem great. Across more than 400 campaigns measured globally with Nielsen Brand Effect, ad recall from sponsored posts on Instagram was 2.8x higher than Nielsen’s norms for online advertising. With various ad formats available, from photo and video ads to carousel ads that allow brands to tell a deeper story and provide a link for people to learn more.
11. Share quotes that speak to your audience
Quotes are incredibly popular on Instagram and can drive a lot of engagement. Quotes can also be a great way to re-enforce your brand vision, values and what you stand for; also use quotes to great effect on their Instagram by sharing wonderful, hand-drawn quotes from their team on the platform:
12. Run contests and giveaways
Contests are a great way to increase engagement and build evangelism among your audience on Instagram. When done properly and effectively, contests can have many benefits for brands:
- Increased awareness
- Build a stronger community and create brand evangelists
- Incentivize following, engagement
Three simple contests you can run on Instagram
- Photo sharing contest.
- Comments contents.
- Likes contest.
You can join the discussion by creating something relevant to the story and your brand to maximize on the excitement. When it comes to jumping on trending stories, though, it’s essential to think about how this story relates to your brand and whether joining the conversation is a good fit with your strategy.
14. Use Instagram Stories
This feature that lets users post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. Instagram Stories are empowering us marketers to tell better and deeper stories about our brands. Whereas you may only post one or two images or videos to your Instagram feed per day, stories enable us to go behind the scenes and share more real-time, less-polished content.
15. Experiment with user generated content
User generated content refers to any form of content created by contributors; come in many forms such as pictures, videos, and tweets. Where possible, try to encourage your community to share memorable moments and experiences they have with your brand across Instagram and ask permission to repost some of the best content to your own channels.
16. Try Stories takeovers with other brands
A takeover is a collaboration where you and another Instagram user or brand appear on each other’s channel and share content to Stories. Takeovers essentially work much like a guest post on your blog or a cool guest joining your podcast.
17. Use Boomerang
Instagram’s Boomerang app takes a series of photos and creates a GIF-like image. However, there’s one subtle, but super important difference between Boomerang and a GIF. A GIF loops a video over and over again. Whereas a Boomerang, plays a video forward, and then backwards, and then loops that continuously.
18. Showcase your products creatively
Instagram gives you an amazing platform to showcase your product or service in creative ways. Such as Take followers behind the scenes Instagram is brilliant for behind the scenes content and sharing the human side of your business. This can give your followers an exclusive peek into life at your company and make them feel a part of your brand.
19. Try reading Instagram for Business Resources
The Instagram for Business blog The Instagram for Business blog is a great place to see how businesses of all sizes around the world are using Instagram and get the latest news from Instagram.
20. Follow inspirational artists and designers
Everyone needs some creative inspiration from time to time. Follow insanely accomplished artists and designers to stay ahead of the curve and inspired day-after-day.
