Guest blog by SmartEtailing
Earlier this year, Instagram announced they’d surpassed over 300 million users. More than 70 million photos and videos are shared, generating over 2.5 million “likes”…every day. For many businesses, this social media channel is overlooked in favor of Facebook or Pinterest, but with numbers like that, it’s easy to see why engaging fans, customers—even the brands you work with—is an important part of your marketing and branding strategy.
To help you make the most of this powerful communication channel, we’ve assembled this list of “best practice” tips, drawing inspiration from some of the most successful pro Instagrammers.
Get set up properly to start building your channel.
When setting up your account, start by connecting with Facebook to pull in your friends. At the same time, send out requests to employees, sponsored riders and teams, and partners—basically anyone your business has a positive relationship with—to mention your business in their own posts and use hashtags that are relevant or important to a marketing campaign running. It’s also a good idea to come up with a unique tagline and put it in your profile. For example instead of just using #joesbikes make it a little more memorable and zingy—almost a micro-slogan—like #joesbikesrock or #joesbikeslove.
Engage your community.
Instagram isn’t a one way channel for promoting your business. When posting an image on your channel, ask questions in your caption and respond to comments. Interact with your followers by liking and commenting on their posts. The results will pay dividends—both in terms of rewarding your followers by acknowledging them, as well as increasing your visibility to their network.
Use hashtags to build your community.
Hashtags are an effective and necessary tactic to use in your Instagram marketing. Knowing the interests of your community and the tags they’re using should influence the hashtags you use on your own posts. But don’t just hashtag #randomly. Look at what your audience is doing with their hashtags to learn new ways of reaching them. At the same time, #don’t #overuse #hashtags. Just because Instagram doesn’t limit the number of #hashtags you use on a post doesn’t mean you should use two dozen of them. Limit the number of hashtags on a given post to between 3-10 total…
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