Social media might have started as a means of connecting with friends and acquaintances and maintaining relationships with family, but it’s grown into something far bigger than that. It enables fans to connect with their sports teams, like-minded people around their hobbies and interests, and brands to connect with their consumers. Instagram is one of the largest social media platforms available, with over 2 billion monthly active users.
This enormous user base means that for any business, being on Instagram is a key way of engaging with current customers and attracting new ones. But what’s the optimal means of using Instagram to build customer relationships? It involves more than just having an account and using it to share images and videos, but it’s not rocket science, either. Here are ten vital tips for any business looking to use Instagram and how Motion Array can help you make the most of social media.
Summary
Top 10 tips
1. Define your brand identity
Your brand is how your customers perceive, recognize, and identify with your company. A strong brand identity is an important part of any business’s marketing strategy. Your identity includes brand colors, logos, and more, and your branding on Instagram should be consistent with how your company presents itself to the world.
To help you stay consistent, you can use templates like Motion Array’s Instagram templates to create a professional look. Motion Array has hundreds of fantastic templates that enable you to create engaging material that’s brand-aligned with just a few clicks. Templates are a great way to:
- Design discounts, promos, and sales content.
- Create thank you messages for your followers and customers.
- Match your Instagram posts with other branded material.
- Post using a consistent theme so your account is intentionally cohesive.
2. Leverage Instagram Stories and Reels
Reels are short-form videos to which you can add music, closed captions, titles, and even filters and effects. You can augment them with captions, hashtags, and tags; other Instagram users can also comment on them. This makes them great for accessibility, but according to SocialInsider, they also enjoy an incredibly high reach rate (30%) and the highest engagement rates on Instagram (1.23%). Instagram’s algorithms are programmed to promote Reels, making them an important part of your Instagram scheduling.
Ideas for Reels content include:
- How-to videos
- Before-and-after videos
- User-generated content
- Product showcases.
Stories last just 24 hours. You can use them to post videos and images that you’ve augmented with stickers, questions, polls, filters, and effects. Being short-lived makes Stories perfect for:
- Time-limited promotions, for example, discount codes or special offers
- Letting your customers know about your daily specials
- Polling your clients or customers or seeking their reactions to ideas or products
- Sharing behind-the-scenes content from your place of work
- Building suspense to an announcement or product release with count-downs
- Creating more fun content, for example, April Fools’ jokes.
3. Utilize hashtags strategically
Hashtags are a fantastic tool for finding the content you like and helping people find yours. However, there are some rules to using hashtags, and you must pay close attention to the tags you are using for your content:
- You can use around 10 hashtags but don’t overdo it.
- Ensure your hashtags are relevant to your content – don’t just use them because they are trending.
- Research your hashtags – many charities promote their work, and you shouldn’t use a cause to get more followers.
- Create a brand hashtag for your business or content so that people can join in the conversations you start.
4. Engage your audience
Follow-up is essential in business; you should set aside time to respond to your followers.
- Use social listening tools like Sprout Social to keep tabs on your content across multiple platforms.
- Add personality to your brand by engaging with the comments on your posts. Take time to DM your followers when there is a need for longer communication.
- Always reply to comments and DMs, even just to say thanks for commenting.
5. Collaborate with influencers and brands
Collaborating with an influencer or other brands that are aligned with your mission and vision is a potentially very successful promotional strategy. If an influencer has a huge following, it can put your product or company in front of thousands of potential clients or customers with one video. The return on investment for influencer marketing is regarded as positive, but for it to work best, you need to be sure you’re engaging with the right influencer for your brand.
6. Use scheduling tools
While an Instagram Business account has a scheduling function, it is somewhat limited. Scheduling tools like Hootsuite, CoSchedule, and Later are fantastic ways to manage your social media accounts without having to be glued to your screen.
- Save time by creating your posts in batches and scheduling them to publish later.
- Use post-time optimizing tools to ensure that you’re sharing content when it will benefit from the most engagement.
- If an old post, photo, or video has not received many views, consider publishing it again later.
- Divide your long-form content into shorter vox pops and trailers to create a buzz around your videos or blogs.
- Mix your content between shared interests, selling, and about us posts.
- Keep an eye on your post schedule and be flexible when publishing your content.
7. Use the Instagram shopping feature
If you have an Instagram Business account, you can set up a shop on Instagram. You can establish a shopfront, arrange your products into collections, create product detail pages, and enable people to make purchases directly within the Instagram app. You can also create product tags that link back to your shop. These make it easy to promote your products within your posts and Reels or for other people to use them and direct people to your goods and services.
8. Analyze and adjust content based on insights
Monitoring the impact and effectiveness of your content is key to the success of your social media strategy. Just turning out posts without knowing if they are reaching the right audience and engaging with them isn’t a productive approach. Instagram Business accounts enable you to track your performance to see what works and what doesn’t with your audience. The types of insights your Instagram Business account will show you include:
- Reach: how many individual accounts have seen a specific post
- Engagement rate: what percentage of a post’s viewers have commented on, liked, or shared it
- Traffic: the number of people who click on stickers in your Stories, react to your calls to action, or follow through to your website
- Growth: how many followers you have gained or lost over a given period of time.
9. Invest in Instagram Ads
If you have an advertising budget, you might want to consider spending it on advertising on Instagram. You can create videos, images, or carousels promoting your products or services that will be inserted into people’s feeds and stories. You can also explore pages as organic content, albeit with a ‘sponsored’ label. With Instagram ads reaching most of its users every month–which is 2 billion people–that’s a huge potential market.
The pricing structure for Instagram ads works on an auction principle. How much an advert costs will vary depending on factors that include the market you are targeting when you want your ads to appear, how competitive your industry is, and how long you run your campaign. You can set a maximum bid for your ads to ensure that you don’t exceed your budget, but Meta recommends allowing $5 a day per ad.
If you do decide to pursue Instagram ads, be sure to craft and manage your campaign carefully. You want it to reach the right audience to ensure that your money is going to good use. Just as with your posts, it’s important to track and analyze your ads’ performance to ensure that you’re spending your money in the right places and in the right way.
10. Keep up with trends
Finally, remember to keep yourself abreast of Instagram trends. You want to be sure that you’re using Instagram so that your customers, present or potential, will relate to you and engage with your content.
Wrapping up
When you take the plunge and put your business on Instagram, always keep two specific factors at the forefront of your strategy: your brand and your audience. You are using Instagram to engage with your customers, which means that you need to communicate what your business does and stands for in a way that they will appreciate. Be consistent, stay on the front foot, monitor and engage, and use Motion Array to help you. With hundreds of social media templates and video and photo assets at your fingertips, you can quickly and easily create compelling content that consistently speaks your brand’s language.
