Instagram has emerged as a leading social media platform for small and medium businesses. More than 25 million Instagram business accounts exist for driving more sales and converting even more customers.
Businesses are investing millions of dollars every year on Instagram marketing, and they are getting more than 200 million visitors daily from the platform.
Using Instagram for business is proving to be extremely beneficial for small and medium businesses. According to survey, 78% of people will identify your brand as a ‘popular brand’ if you have an Instagram business account.
For a business owner or marketer, one of your top agendas for online marketing should be figuring out how to use Instagram for business? Having an Instagram business account helps in brand discovery, brand building, driving traffic, and boosting sales.
Out of the 1 billion active Instagrammers, 500 million use it on a daily basis. More than 200 million follow an Instagram business profile every day. These enormous numbers are the reason why brands are keen to utilize Instagram for business growth purposes.
If you want to jump on the bandwagon and learn how to use Instagram for business, you have reached the perfect place.
Now, in this article, we’ll give away the top 7 tips on Instagram business, how to use Instagram for business, how to make a perfect Instagram business account, how to plan and execute an effective Instagram content strategy, and everything there is to know about marketing Instagram.
Top 7 Tips On How To Use Instagram For Business:
- Create A Winning Instagram Business Account
- Plan & Implement A Great Instagram Content Strategy
- Make Sure That You Post Consistently
- Captions and Hashtags
- Utilize IGTV to its Full Potential
- Instagram Stories for Business
- Pay Attention to Your Color Palette
Let us explain these seven tips so that you understand each and every last bit of it.
Top 7 Tips on How To Utilise Instagram For Business
1. Create A Winning Instagram Business Account
Creating an Instagram business account is the first step towards using this social media giant for your business marketing needs.
In order to convert a personal account into a business account, you need to follow these steps:
- Go to account settings
- Click on ‘Account’
- Click on ‘Switch to Professional Account’
- Choose ‘Business’
- Insert business details such as category and business contact information
- Click on ‘Done’
With a business account’s help, you can use marketing Instagram features such as business analytics, Instagram insights, and add a phone business phone number.
Once you are done creating an Instagram business account, the next most crucial thing to work on is a killer profile bio.
So, how do we create a killer Instagram business profile bio?
The first thing a visitor notices on your account is the bio. You can fit up to 150 characters in the bio section. However, DO NOT make it clumsy with a lot of words and unnecessary information. Keep it presentable, catchy, and short.
You can insert just one link in your Instagram account, and that is in the bio. You should change the link frequently instead of using a static link in the bio. Since there is just one space for a clickable link, you need to utilize it to its full potential.
Blend the tone of your bio with a creative, cheeky, and professional narrative. Use multiple hashtags that go with your business’s scope of work. Use a couple of emojis to make your bio colorful, friendly, and catchy. Insert line breaks to make your bio easy on the eyes.
2. Plan & Implement A Great Instagram Content Strategy
Instagram has more than 1 billion active Instagram users as of January 2020 who consume content like never before. Instagram’s content spectrum revolves around images, IGTV, short reels, and stories.
When it comes down to engagement, images uploaded on Instagram have a 23% higher engagement rate than those on Facebook. Brands are investing more money in Instagram marketing than Facebook. This trend is here to stay, and you better get used to all the nuances of marketing Instagram.
For a reliable marketing Instagram plan, you need an even solid Instagram content strategy. Let’s find out how to use Instagram for business through content marketing:
Build a content theme
The first step to make an Instagram content strategy is building a theme or pillar for your content. Every business, small or big, has a diverse type of content that it can share on a social media platform.
However, if you start sharing different content types without any strategy or a blueprint, you will be just shooting in the dark.
Come up with a decisive plan to map the content according to their types and schedule the systematic uploads of different content types.
Some examples of different content types are Behind The Scenes, Product Demo, Employee Interaction, Customer Testimonials, User Generated Content, Work Culture in Your Company, and similar others.
Once you categorize your content materials according to these themes, start systematically uploading them. After a couple of weeks, check out the Instagram analytics and filter out the content types that are not performing well. Notch up the kind of content that is getting better engagements.
Instagram is all about visual content
You should hire a professional photo editor if you really want to get some serious engagement through Instagram. Instagram is a visual content social platform. You need catchy & colorful images and short & cheeky videos to leverage the full potential of marketing Instagram.
3. Make Sure That You Post Consistently
Once you get a decent number of followers on your Instagram profile, they will start expecting regular posts from you. You would want them to keep engaged with your brand’s content with regular updates in the form of stories, photos, and videos.
Also, make sure that you do not spam your Instagram business account with status updates and photos. If you do so, you’ll notice a huge loss in followers as people do not want to see similar content all the time.
Keep your content relevant, informational, and entertaining. Depending on your brand’s content structure, schedule your content in advance. For higher engagement, you should schedule your content according to your industry’s optimal posting time. The best time would be on Wednesday at 11 a.m. for all better engagement on Instagram photos and stories.
Apart from this, you need to figure out the best timing for your own target audience. For this, you need to run several tests for the first few days. Your audience could be in completely different time zones than you. With the help of Instagram Insights, you can get this valuable information. Based on the optimal timings, create a content calendar, and schedule your brand’s content on Instagram.
Read Also: Best Time To Post on Facebook
4. Captions and Hashtags
Even though Instagram revolves around visual content, you should never ignore the importance of captions and hashtags. To make your visual content meaningful and give your followers a context, captions and hashtags play a vital role. A meaningful and catchy caption is one of the answers to how to use Instagram for business.
You need to match all of your captions and hashtags to the brand’s voice of your company. If you have used emojis in the past, you should continue using them. Similarly, the usage of hashtags should be streamlined in your captions and stories.
Hashtags help other people to find your content, and eventually, your business. People can not search your content through captions, but they can do so using relevant hashtags. Hashtags are the most helpful tools to increase the visibility of your content. It would be even better to build your own brand’s hashtag and popularise it using a solid Instagram content strategy.
5. Utilize IGTV to its Full Potential
Instagram IGTV allows users to upload long videos on the platform. You can create funny, entertaining, and informational videos for up to one-hour long duration. If you ask how to use Instagram for business, IGTV will be one of the top answers.
There are many benefits of the IGTV feature in marketing Instagram. It gives you enough space to create and share long-form informational brand videos. You can even create quirky short videos using this feature.
Your followers will automatically get notifications if you post something in your Instagram business’s IGTV section. To increase your IGTV videos’ visibility, you can introduce one-minute extended previews and push them on your followers’ newsfeed.
Users across the Instagram platform can engage with your IGTV videos and comment on them. It increases brand engagement, and the user-generated content helps build the brand’s social proof for natural engagement.
6. Instagram Stories for Business
Instagram stories have become one of the most engagement-centric features of the Instagram business. It is being used by more than 400 million people every day. Various brands and businesses create One-third of most-viewed Instagram stories.
With Instagram stories’ help, you can create content that stays up in your profile for 24 hours and disappear after that. You can put up stories like ‘behind-the-scenes’ and short promotional videos that do not have to be as high in quality as your regular brand posts.
You can record short videos related to a product launch or an immediate advancement in your business and upload them as your stories. You can even use different filters like hashtag filters and location filters inside the stories.
If your stories are engaging enough, they can even appear on Instagram’s ‘Explore’ section. Once they appear on the ‘Explore’ section, your content’s visibility will increase dynamically as millions of people will view them.
7. Pay Attention to Your Color Palette
To give your Instagram business account’s feed a nice and cool touch of consistency, you should always adhere to a specific color palette. It provides your posts a familiar, smooth, and wholesome feeling.
You can create a distinct and unique style for your brand on Instagram by paying attention to color palettes. Your follower should instantly recognize your posts even before seeing your brand’s name. Colors play a significant role in the psyche of a customer.
Conclusion
Now that you have finished the article, we hope that you understand the basics of how to use Instagram for business. These were the seven most crucial steps to help your brand make new followers and retain old customers.
If you want us to help you increase your local Malaysian business’s online presence, you can contact us and visit the website of One Search Pro and check out our work.
