Business cannot survive without social media. The use of Facebook and Instagram for any businesses—large or small—improves the brand, engages customers, and increases customer loyalty. Instagram, in particular, is a very good platform to market your business and increase brand awareness. Since its conception, it has grown massively with over one billion active users in September last year. In terms of small businesses, it is also the most business-friendly social media platform.
Videos are at the forefront of Instagram. You can have a video made by a production agency in London or another city. You can make one yourself, too, although professionally-produced videos always hit the right spot and send the right message.
Using Hashtags
Together with Facebook and Twitter, the popularity of your profile page on Instagram relies heavily on your use of the proper hashtags. It allows potential customers to find your post based only on the hashtags that you used. But you cannot be vague and generic with the hashtags. If you want this to work, you have to be very specific to target your audience. To find the appropriate hashtags, research what your competition uses. You can also use quite several keyword tools to find the best hashtags for your posts and Instagram stories.
Check Instagram’s Paid Advertising
Instagram’s paid advertising is much like Facebook in the sense that you can target specific demographics through your posts. Although you can curate good content and hope that your target market will see the posts, that does not always happen. Instead, yours could be relegated to just another post and people won’t find it or look for it.
Paid advertising allows Instagram to do the work for you. Set the target demographics or upload an email list that will make the platform see what kind of audience you are targeting.
Post During Optimal Time
Post only when you think your audience is online. You need to understand your audience’s social media behaviour. When do they go online? What do they do when they open their phones? To start having a good grasp of your audience, you need to understand what kind of market your products is targeting. Only then can you predict what their behaviour will be.
If your customers are stay-at-home moms, this might mean that they are online during the afternoons when either their newborns are sleeping or their toddlers are off to school or better yet, napping. This is the best time to reach them because they’ll be able to check their phones.
If your market is urban dwellers, it might be best to reach them during the early hours in the morning when they are stuck in traffic inside a train or bus. It is probably that they are checking their phones and browsing social media. You can also try to reach them in the evening when they’ve just had dinner and their day is finally drawing to a close.
Instagram is a great platform to improve your business and raise awareness about your brand. But like many social media platforms, you need to spend time on it and make an effort to create well-thought-out content. It cannot work on its own. Much of its impact on the audience is based on how willing you are to invest in it.
