Growing and Optimizing Your Instagram Business Account
Over time, a lot of social media marketers have come out with a lot of different strategies that help in growing business profile and engaging audience. However, in most cases, most don’t work out, only a very few. Most methods have some very prominent similarities which numerous marketers are using. In those cases, it’s important to create an Instagram profile that effectively captures the attention of your target audience. You need to engage your audience to keep up your brand actively. By giving attention to the tips outlined below, you can optimize an Instagram profile to build a brand, grow your followers, and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Create an Instagram Business Account
If you are building a profile for your business, then the best thing you want to do is getting a business account. Over 20 million businesses are using Instagram Business accounts. It provides users with analytics related to post performance and follower growth, which is not feasible with a personal account. Business accounts are developed to section tabs such as office location and hours, email, and phone separate from the traditional Instagram bio. The contact button can send a message via Instagram direct message, email, or SMS to your brand representatives.
Instagram Business account provides, marketers, and brands with great flexibility when it comes to creating an effective social media presence on Instagram. You can boost your post with paid promotion to reach a wider audience. If you have an existing Instagram accounts, you can easily switch to a Business account with just a few taps.
Using a Profile Photo That Reflects Your Branding
You need a quality Instagram photo that reflects your business. Often time, it is best to use your business logo. The photo must be of high quality and must be enticing to your audiences. A logo helps you stay visually consistent across all of your channels. If you don’t have a logo or you prefer to use your picture, you need to choose a picture of yourself that communicates who you are and what you do.
Posting Quality and Trending Contents
One of the best ways to engage an active audience is to keep posting quality images and contents that attract people’s attention and make them want to share. Offering great design and value is very important, and your post must be reflecting your brand. You can save yourself from costs and design stress by using apps like Canva, InDesign, and WordSwag to create your posts. The apps are flexible to use, and they make your posts completely professional at no cost. Also, you need to learn to post regularly. The algorithms favor accounts that post regularly. It is important to increase the amount of content you publish on Instagram daily to reach more audience. One image or two a day is not enough; there are so many contents you can post. There are so many people who are posting more and improved content, and if you can’t keep up, yours will possibly just get lost in people’s Insta feeds.
• Proper Use of Hashtags Hashtags is regarded as a “search” tool that helps viewers find topics, discussions, and ideas they’re interested in. You need to put some time in and research the most popular hashtags in your niche, and then compile them together for use in Instagram when posting. Attaching hashtags while posting allows your content to be found easier from people who don’t already follow you. And they may follow you from there if they found your posts interesting. Instagram allows a maximum of 30 hashtags total per post.
Follow Targeted Users
Another essential step in growing your profile successfully is to research and follow targeted users. You can follow as many as 50 users an hour else anything more than that rate might result to sanction. However, you can start with a dozen or two a day. You can follow based on some factors such as competitors, interests, and audience. You need to study accounts that not only cater to the same audience, but that also gets lots of engagement on their posts. Having loads of followers, tens of thousands, that didn’t care about you, your business, or what you post doesn’t make any sense. It might look good to have so many followers, but it’s much better to have fewer, but engaged ones that will always like and comments on your pictures. It is vital to do away with a mindset of some marketers that belief having a large number of followers is compulsory to have a fully optimized Instagram profile. Though the number of followers a brand shows how credible it is. Research shows that follower quality is more important than quantity. In some cases, some of the profile that has the least followers drive the most traffic, while profile with plenty of followers barely gets any traffic. Yet, Instagram, as opposed to Facebook and Twitter, still thrives on engagement. Therefore, you should focus on strategies that engages the audience rather than boosting the numbers of followers. A strategy you can use is to find top competitors who have over 50k followers and plenty of engagement on their posts. Once you’ve found at least ten accounts, you can start following their followers and don’t exceed the follower’s hourly rate.
Be Active and Engage
Being active and engaging your followers is one of the best ways to keep them up to interact with your brand. While you are posting content, you also need to engage by liking their comments, replying their messages, making comments, and likes. This is the best way to reach new people and get targeted users to follow you and engage with you back. You need to set aside few minutes daily to engage your audience. Leave comments, respond to every comment you get on your content, like images and videos, and so on. This will help you get more followers. If you come across any profile that fit with your audience, reach out to them by liking their content and leaving comments. This could lead to a follow-back from a genuinely interested and engaged user. Furthermore, you can make use of tools like post notification and other Instagram notifications to catch up with your followers. Showing different profiles your brand is always available is a great way to improve your brand reach and increase engagement.
