How to Use Instagram for Business: Pro Tips to Grow Your Audience

Instagram for Small Business: How to Grow in 2023 and Beyond

Social media networks are playing a significant role in growing a business or an organization. In the current scenario the social media marketing usage rate is growing exponentially from time to time.

Social media marketing (10%) stands on the 4th place in the most effective digital marketing techniques used by marketers around the world as of 2018. According to the statistics the Social media marketing usage rate in the United States in 2013 is 86.2% and it is expected to reach 91% at the end of 2022.

Are you making use of any social media network to connect with the audience for growing business?

If yes, which social media network you are focusing more? Most of the answers you will hear is Instagram?

It is the new & effective way of social media marketing in recent times to promote your brand to target the right audience. Instagram is a platform which has seen a meteoric rise and consistent growth for business on Instagram.

Let’s have a look at the top leading brands of Instagram based on the number of followers as of December 2020:

When Instagram landed in the market, no one has shown interest on this platform. Soon, everyone realized the capacity of the platform and started to run after it.

I said the above statement after doing a little research about Instagram marketing still, if you are not convinced with my comment.

Just have a look at the below incredible stats:

1 Billion Active users every month.
More than 500 million active users use stories every day.
80% of people follow an Instagram business profile.
2 Million Monthly advertisers.
25 Million Business profiles.

Instagram will add 26.9 Million users in between 2016-2020, according to the emarketr.com.

Now, most of the companies are running behind Instagram to find success. However, most of the business are not unable to use the right strategies & tips to succeed on Instagram.

After reaching and consulting experts about the Instagram business marketing tips. I feel these Pro tips are the most effective ways will help you in growing your business and also in moving the right direction.

Let’s dive in for knowing the top six ways to use Instagram to grow & promote your brand:

Promote your brand through stories:

As you know, more than 500 million stories are appearing in the Instagram every day, so start promoting your brand via story posting. After the commencement of the stories, the number of user engagement increased exponentially.

Most of the people are aware of Instagram stories, if not continue reading.

Instagram stories are the combination of multiple pictures and videos into a story, which will long be lost still 24 hours. Make sure that you post the stories which are innovative and attractive to grab customer attention and some time these stories go viral.

Be Consistent in Posting:

The next thing you need to concentrate on Instagram marketing is to be consistent in displaying the content, whether it is photo or video. This trick will work very well in this social media network as well as on others too.

Find the right time that works well with your users so that you can post based on that time. It will increase customer number as well as their retention.

Influencer Marketing with the help of Influencers:

In recent times, influencer marketing is one of the right & best ways to increase your followers on Instagram. Influencers are the people who have an excellent following in the social media platforms with the most engagement. It is better to choose the right influencer for your marketing.

Before influencer marketing came into existence, we used to opt stars and sports to promote your brand, but the time has changed the complete scenario.

It also made work easy for brands to reach and user influencer with the affordable amount. The first thing you need to do is list out the top influencers in your concerned industry based on their engagement volume not based on their followers.

Contact them with the right approach. Seriously this will work because it’s a proven trick for many brands.

Read more: How Much Does it Cost to Develop Mobile Wallet App like PayTM

Use hashtags:

The next trick to growing your business on Instagram with the correct usage of hashtags. If you observe any social media network, they will play a significant role to attract the right audiences.

It is a simple trick which works very well because most of the people are searching based on hashtags. If you use the right & a massive number of hashtags for an image and video, it will reach a large number of people, and it also leads to an increase in the number of followers.

Find out what’s working well:

It is the last but one trick that works very well for Instagram to grow your business.

Just posting regular content in the business account is not enough; you need to analyze & find out which post is working well? Which hashtags are working fine? Which got the most engagement?

In the market, you can find many Instagram reporting tools which will give all the information on a single dashboard.

Based on your research and findings, you can prepare your future marketing strategies. The more generously you use those reporting tools that much you can improve or grow your business.

Respond to comments:

It is the last trick which can be used to improve your business. Customer will be satisfied when he gets proper service after buying a product/service from the service provider.

If you want to increase or expand your business with the help of Instagram, then start responding to the comments posted by the customers. If you are still not aware of this trick, then start using.

Make sure you give a reply to all the comments regularly and also try to follow them back. It improves the business as well as the interaction between customer and user.

Decide why you want to use Instagram for business

When using any marketing channel, it is important to have goals that you want to achieve. Instagram is no different. If you’re going to invest your time and money in Instagram marketing, ask yourself, “What do we want to achieve?”

Common Instagram business goals include:

increase brand awareness;
build community;
Demonstrate company culture and values; And
Sell products and services.

Write down your goals and monitor them constantly. Think of your written goals as a formal gut check. This encourages you and your team to be more intentional with your Instagram content because you can always refer back and make sure everything you share meets those goals.

Optimize your Instagram Profile

If you’re using Instagram for business, consider your profile your homepage. You get 150 characters, a link, and some action buttons to win over potential customers—so make sure your profile makes a good impression.

You have to make sure to switch to an Instagram business profile from normal profile. Instagram Business account will offer more features compared to normal profile that allows you to expand your business profile, track content performance, and sell anything on your Instagram.

Next, write a killer Instagram bio. Your profile should include:

A quick description of what your company does;
your category/industry (shopping and retail, business service, restaurant, etc.);
A tone that reflects your brand’s personality;
Add contact information (like number, email ID, address, etc.); And
A link.

The only place you can share a clickable link in the Instagram app is in your bio. You can keep a static link or change often the link to reflect current content to your home page. However, link-in-bio tools like Buffer’s Start Page can help you use a link more strategically by turning a single link into a catalog of resources.

Instagram business accounts also have access to Action Buttons—additional clickable buttons for specific calls to action like Book Now, Contact, Shop View, etc. Action buttons are a great way to get more links to your profile and make it easier for your fans. To communicate with you.

Lastly, don’t forget to consider your grid. When people visit your profile, they’ll see your recent posts in a grid format. Avoid sharing same posts back-to-back on daily basis or weekly basis, so your grid always looks attractive.

Read more: How Much Does it Cost to Develop Taxi Booking App like OLA

Schedule or Post consistently for your target audience

Sticking to a regular posting schedule will help you show up on your target audience’s timelines. Instagram strives to show each person the content they enjoy the most, so it finds content that is recent and relevant to each person’s interests.

Instagram’s algorithm uses machine learning to constantly study each person’s activity and customize their timeline accordingly. People don’t like what they don’t see—posting regularly will help you appear in people’s feeds and give them more opportunities to engage with you. The more they interact with your content, the more likely they’ll see it in their Instagram feed.

You can stay on top of your content by scheduling posts in batches so your account never goes dark if you’re busy. Plus, the schedule makes it easy to experiment with posting times. While there is no best time to post on Instagram, there can be optimal times to post to reach your largest audience on Instagram. With Buffer you can set preferred time slots, so all you have to do is add content to your queue and posts will automatically be placed into the next available slot.

Then, you can check back to see if posts slotted in at a certain time get higher engagement rates than others.

Leverage Hashtags to reach your New Audiences

Hashtags are a uniform way to categorize content across many social media platforms. Hashtags allow Instagrammers to discover content and follow accounts. Track Maven’s research found that posts with 11 hashtags get the most engagement.

But hashtags can be difficult to organize, group, and save—many people save groups on their phones, ready to copy and paste into each post before publishing.

Experiment with different content types on Instagram

Instagram is more than photos. The platform now has a large range of content types, including:

Video
Coils
Stories
IGTV

And if you want to increase your reach and engagement on the platform, sharing a mix of content types is key.

“The algorithm looks at interest and works hard to show the different content types that people interact with the most. So, if a person likes and comments on Instagram reels more often than other post types, they’re likely to see more reels on their Instagram.”

Each type of content has benefits and everyone has their own preferences on Instagram – some like Reels, while others don’t use the feed and only check out Insta Stories. So if you want to maximize your reach and engagement, using different content types is a good strategy.

Geotag your Instagram Posts

When you post from your small business’s physical location, add the location name to the Insta post. If you haven’t done this while posting before, you can scroll to previous posts and edit them.

What does geo-tagging do? Instagram collects all posts tagged in that location, sorting them into top and most recent. Your brand photos live among customers’ photos. “View Info” towards the top most links about information that tagged business. All of these increase your brand awareness and help customers research your business. Don’t know what to order at a nearest restaurant where you live? Browse the latest pics and see what people recommend.

Use headlines to showcase what your business is all about

Instagram’s Stories Highlights feature gives you the opportunity to share more about your company or your brand. Highlights extend the life of your stories by displaying them on your profile after they would normally disappear, and can help you curate those stories as an easy source of evergreen content. As they display on your grid, start with the basics, such as:

About: Just a few posts on your values, hours and brand
Locations or highlights for each location: If you have multiple locations, talk about each one and share photos from them
Customer Reviews or Posts: Repost from Customer Feed posts or create a graphic highlighting reviews from elsewhere.
FAQs: Share information that customers often request. This will save you time when responding to customers as you can redirect them to this highlight
Product/Service Features: Highlight overall one or each product or service. Some things you just can’t fit into one post. Here you can go deeper into the details.

And now that you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to get even more creative. A good place to start is what content you’re already creating in your feed. Are you doing a series on each staff member? Save it all to highlight. Maybe you’re an event planner. Go behind the scenes in your process to demonstrate what you do for a client. Have fun with your highlights.

Conclusion:

These are the best ways to use Instagram effectively to grow your business, and the tips are helpful for both small as well as large organizations to have an active presence on Instagram.

A brand name will not create in one night, and we need to work very hard to gain more followers and to improve the business.

Start practicing the above tips to grow organically and you will also find how much it is capable off.

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