Hi Boox Popular Magazine 2024
Instagram is a social media platform for sharing pictures, that was launched in 2010 as an iPhone app. It didn’t take much time for it to gain popularity among social media users and to become available on other devices such as android as well. Some data from 2019 say that this was the year Instagram reached 1 billion active users. As it also happened with social media like Facebook and Twitter, it wasn’t long until business owners found a way to use it for their benefit.
Now, it is hard to find someone not having an Instagram account. Since it has been transforming and enriching content (and still is), to be able to successfully promote your brand you have to stay updated on the tools it offers that may help you use it in your brand’s advantage. In the further text, we will share some useful tips on how to successfully promote your brand on Instagram.
Have your Instagram account open and optimized
First thing’s first, you want to create a business account. So, when opening the account, you can either choose to open the business account, or to turn your private account into business/brand. Turning an already existing account to a business account might give you a small advantage when it comes to followers. Those who already clicked follow on your profile will stay. But make sure you also change settings from private to public.
Another option is, if your brand is already on Facebook, to connect your Facebook page to your Instagram account. This will also connect the content of both pages.
Optimizing your account should take some strategic thinking since it will give the first impression to the viewers. It’s a great opportunity to turn the viewers into customers, so be as creative as possible in writing the bio story, located just below the profile photo.
Bio link, just below your bio story, is the only link that allows you to promote your brand outside of Instagram. When you ask someone, they will probably tell you it is also the only clickable link on your profile. However, there are some tips and tricks you can use to share more clickable links on your account, and they are fantastically explained on Sharemyinsights blog.
Instagram features
As a platform, Instagram offers lots of interesting tools that can attract customers and followers. We will mention the most useful.
Insta stories are more dynamic compared to other content. They are located at the top of your news feed and are also appearing on your follower’s news feed top, but for a limited duration of time (unlike the photos you post regularly on your profile).
Get creative with them and design them however you feel like with all the stickers, filters, and other add-ons available for personalization of your story. You can also combine the type of material you publish on stories, from photos to videos.
They are a great way to initiate some interaction with your customers, by posting polls and quizzes on them, asking for feedback, posting adds with purchase links, publishing your achievements, and so on.
Highlights are meant for permanently displaying stories you choose, on your profile. It is usually the content you want to draw special attention to. They keep the same format as stories.
If you have a collection of products from your brand you want to display permanently, or sort your products into categories (male/female, shoes, t-shirts, etc.), so they are neatly displayed on top of your profile. If you have tutorials related to the usage of your brand you can display tutorials both in the photo and video format, recipes. Photos and videos from the events your brand was highlighted. Provide details of your brand’s shipping, whatever you feel is important to showcase on your profile.
IGTV also offers publishing videos. As opposed to stories, it allows you to post longer videos, depending on the type of the profile, up to 60 minutes in length. Unlike Facebook Live, it also allows different video layout, horizontal and vertical, without having to install additional screen rotating applications.
To add an IGTV tool to your profile, click the IGTV logo in the top right corner of your feed. Click the “gear” icon, then “create a channel”. It gives you countless opportunities to promote your brand. It’s a possibility to run your shows online, organize Q&A sessions, and interviews. Set your creative energy free.
A short preview of your video can also be added (limited length of 1 minute), on your feed.
Insta live is also a video tool. If you have been using Facebook Live, you will notice some similarities. The videos you stream live will show on your stories feed. It also gives you the possibility to add stickers, use different filters, and add-ons to make it more fun. Easy to manage, you can use it to stream live from different locations and events, important for the brand you own.
Viewers are engaged in the live sessions.
Hashtags are a great way to make your post visible to a wider audience. By placing hashtags in your posts your content/brand is being categorized and discoverable. They are also clickable, so anyone who clicks on the hashtag will get a search result, with a page with all the posts on Instagram showing the same hashtag. So, be very wise in using this powerful promoting tool to expand your audience. However, there is a limit on how many hashtags you can include in your post. Photo posts, the regular ones, can include up to thirty hashtags, stories take up to ten. But overflooding your post with hashtags might not be a good idea. The optimum is to use approximately 11 hashtags per post.
Considering Instagram as a tool for promoting your brand will surely be a fun experience. It is way simpler than Facebook and gives you countless options for creativity.
In case you don’t find it amusing, or simply cannot find time to manage the brand account yourself, you can always hire someone to do it for you. It is a great way to make sure you keep up with Instagram 2024 marketing plan.
