Introduction.
To do marketing on Instagram, you will need a business account. The first thing you want to do is download the Instagram app on your mobile phone. Sign in with your personal Meta account. In my article about Meta, we covered the importance of having a Meta account. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do so here.
Create Your Business Account.
Once you’re inside Instagram with your Meta account, you can add up to 5 business accounts. You’ll find the option to add an account under settings. Sign in and to create the account, use your business email and phone number. After this, Instagram will prompt you to add your name and password. Your name will be the business name! An important next step is to go under Settings and switch your account to a business account. This will enable you to advertise on Instagram and access Insights, etc. Another crucial step is to choose a page and link it to Meta. Meta has owned Instagram since 2012, and integration is necessary to promote on Instagram. Now, you should have your account set up.
So, you have your account and are ready to start. Great! As a next step, let’s look at other profiles, preferably from someone in our niche, before filling out our profile. To do so, go to the search area and type in your business to get search results. You will see many profiles showing up. You may want to look particularly at People’s accounts and examine a person’s account. See how many followers they have and how they layout their profile. The content they bring out is important. If that person is getting engagement, then you can create similar content. Build a clear idea of how to do well and what kind of content you want to bring out.
PROFILE PICTURE.
Review the accounts of top influencers as an example of what kind of picture they use for their account. For your own profile, you probably want to use a photo of yourself. Keep in mind to have a clear background so that your photo is easier to recognize. Wear appropriate clothes that match your business. Crop the picture so that you are not too distant. Now, let’s look at business accounts. Most businesses only have their logo on their profile picture. They use no more than two colors, keeping it simple. Even the photos that successful companies post are clean and clear. If you want to use text in the profile picture, reconsider if it is necessary. Text often appears unrecognizable, and you want a clearly visible picture on your profile.
Bio.
Optimize your Instagram bio and add call-to-action buttons to your profile. In your bio, you can definitely add a link as a call to action. It can be a link to your website, a link to purchase your product, or to download an app, etc. But when you do so, show the benefit for people to click through, and don’t just tell them to click on this link to buy more of your product, etc. Now, think again, what will the person get when they follow the link? To create attention, you can also use emojis corresponding to your message. Add call-to-action buttons to your profile. A few handy ones can be a call button, an email button, or a direction button for people to find your local business, for example. If you have an e-commerce store, you can use a shop button as a call-to-action rather than getting directions to your location.
Content.
To create content for your Instagram, you can use Canva. I would recommend doing this on your computer. Canva offers an app to download on your mobile device as well, but I personally feel more comfortable working with Canva on the computer. Search on Canva, for example, for quotes. Choose a quote that you like for your business and then adjust the template. Change the image, change the text, resize the text if necessary, position the text. Share the content; you can publish the content instantly on Instagram through Canva.
Instagram Hack – Upload From Your Computer.
Uploading content on Instagram from your computer is possible! To do so, go and open your Instagram account on your computer as normal. What you want to do next is to inspect the website. If you use Chrome, go to Tools. Then choose Developer Tools. Or simply do a right click while you are on the Instagram page and select the option Inspect Element. Minimize the website to the size of a mobile device screen. Refresh the website, and there you go. A plus sign will appear just as on your mobile phone, allowing you to upload pictures from your computer!
Repost On Instagram App.
Repost pictures from another account. This is a great way to connect with someone from your audience or someone who is doing something similar to you and you want to share it with your audience. Make connections to other people on Instagram. Download the app “Repost on Instagram” on your phone. This app will give you additional features to help you, for example, write a caption while reposting someone’s content. The app makes the process much easier. Download it and test it out.
Strategy Of How To Get Followers.
How do you get Instagram followers for social proof? If you buy followers, these followers will be useless for you. They won’t engage with your content. Plus, buying followers will later mess up your Google Analytics results. Google Analytics should give you a clear indication of the age and location of your audience. Buying followers will cause problems understanding your audience or make it problematic to retarget your audience through a Meta Ad, etc.
How to get followers for free? Look at the big Instagram accounts that have the audience you want. Take a deeper look into the comments of the posts. Go ahead and follow the people who have engaged with the content. Those people will get a notification that you follow them. Most likely, they will be curious; they want to see who you are, and their curiosity will force them to look at your profile. If you have a good bio, a nice profile picture, great content that is relevant to them, they will be interested in you and follow you back. Another variation to get followers is to engage with them in the comment section. Do this every single day, go on different profile accounts that have the audience you want, and spend time engaging with them. Social Media is about engagement, connecting to people. So do it, and you will build up your account. Plus, you will get highly engaged followers, and also in the process, you will understand what is the content that attracts so many people. Now go, use that strategy, and get your first followers!
Hashtags.
Use hashtags to increase your visibility. It is possible to follow hashtags! When you use a specific hashtag that represents your business, for example, #beauty or #car, your content will be visible to the people who follow the hashtag beauty or the hashtag car. To specify what hashtags you want to use, go and search for that specific hashtag, for example, the hashtag #beauty. See the top posts under this hashtag, get a better insight by looking through the content. You will also get related hashtags to #beauty. Those are #beautiful, #gorgeous, etc. Another way to find hashtags that are appropriate for your business is again to look at other top businesses in your niche. See what hashtags they are using. Before using the hashtag, see how competitive that hashtag is. If there is a high volume of posts, it will be more competitive for you to be visible under that hashtag. You may want to mix that highly competitive hashtag with some that are in a small niche to make sure your content will reach people. Use in total about 20 hashtags. Get inspired by Top 100 Hashtags.
Instagram Stories.
A benefit of stories is that you can include a link that people can follow. But to use this great feature, you need to have over 10,000 followers. Then you can use stories with an included link to pre-sell your product, suggest people follow an account, or encourage people to listen to your podcast if existing. A link within your story is also a very effective way because you include a lot of call-to-action buttons for your audience. Good to know is that stories are viewable for only 24 hours! To see someone else’s story, click on the account’s profile picture. If someone has a story uploaded, there will be a ring around the profile picture, and it will open up the stories. Because of the short and limited time frame of 24 hours, a story is good to share something like a “behind-the-scenes” video or pictures you would like to share but are of low quality and wouldn’t be generally suitable to post. Those Instagram stories of top influencers are usually uploaded quite naturally, meaning with not much photoshop. Being authentic appeals to the viewer as well. If you don’t like stories for your account, you really don’t need to use this feature, but it is an option out there and can be an opportunity to increase your followers.
Mention Influencer.
If you are a business that just started and wants to grow, you may want to use this strategy of mentioning influencers. To do so, first, identify top accounts in your niche and say something good about them. Create a success story in alignment with the product of that company and hashtag the company. Get their attention, and they might repost your content on their profile. It is a win-win situation.
Instagram Spam.
Use the settings section to limit permission on who can comment on your posts to reduce spam.
Instagram Analytics.
Go to the Insights section to see the number of impressions (that means how many times your post has been seen), number reached (means how many accounts your post has reached), number of clicks on your call-to-action button, etc. Data is important to see how you can improve your strategies on marketing your product and business.
