Top Ways for Businesses and Brands to Boost Their Instagram Reach
Like all other facets of life, social media has had quite an impact on businesses and brands.
From local enterprises to international business corporations, social media tools have helped increase brand awareness and have enabled these businesses to create a niche audience for themselves. You can successfully market your business without hard sales pitches and spending a whopping sum of money on advertising. This way a business owner can get terrific returns by making little investment, and that is exactly what we call “the power of social media.”
Instagram is one such social media platform that has overtaken Facebook and Snapchat to become the most popular social media platform of all time.
Research shows that almost 200 million users visit at least one business profile in a day and Instagram has a potential advertising reach of 849.3 million users. This is precisely why businesses need a solid online presence on this platform to flourish and succeed in the current time.
The question is - how can you increase your Instagram footprint and increase the profitability of your business? Well, here are the top ways for brands and businesses to boost their Instagram reach:
- Optimized business account
An Instagram business account should be nothing like your personal handle; rather it must be created from a business and marketing standpoint. As a business owner, you must show less of you and more of your product, thereby, optimizing your professional online presence and increasing audience engagement.
From writing a kickass bio to following a theme, you must create your account around Instagram business requirements. You must include a clickable link in your Instagram bio to your website or target shop. This way you can generate direct organic traffic for your website and the audience will automatically reach where you want them to.
Another aspect of creating a business Instagram account is following a definitive theme for pictures, stories, video content, as well as your display picture. The content must not come out to be too promotional, rather it must highlight the positive aspects of your business.
- Create a catchy theme
“Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder” is a phrase that holds complete truth in the case of an Instagram profile. Your posts must resonate with the viewers while also being aesthetically pleasing and attractive.
As we all know a bland, uneventful Instagram business account will do you no good, rather it could negatively impact your online presence.
Here’s a fact for you - the like button on Instagram is pressed on an average of 4.2 billion times a day, which means that billions of people are engaging with Instagram daily.
If you're smart enough, you can create an amazing Instagram account that is relevant, quirky, and relatable.
Moreover, studies show that 60% of the top brands and businesses on Instagram use the same theme and layout for every post.
You can create an appealing Instagram business account by following a color palette, creating a distinct style, writing interesting captions, and posting consistently. Your posts should be personalized, and professionally shot or created so that the audience has a unique experience every time they open their account.
- Use Instagram ads
The advertisement feature on Instagram is a blessing for business owners who are looking to promote their enterprise. You can control the budget for these ads and the carousel feature on Instagram enables you to showcase one or more sponsored ads to your audience.
Instagram ads allow businesses to reach their target audience effectively. In the past, only users following your account could see your updates and posts, but with the introductions of sponsored posts and stories, your content can reach your target audience easily. By using engaging content for ads that appeal to a vast demographic of your audience, you can even use your top posts as sponsored content.
Besides this, Instagram stories are a great way of creating sponsored content, as per research 300 million people use the stories feature daily. Instagram gives you the option of deep integration with Facebook, which helps businesses to reach a wider audience base.
- Value quality over quantity
Social media is all about posting the best quality content rather than putting up a lot of unnecessary content. Even though it is important to post consistently, you must make sure you do not over post or try too hard. Quality content always has a better chance of eliciting positive responses from your audience and improving engagement. Hence, posting one amazing photo or video is better than adding multiple mediocre ones.
While it is important for brands to be active, their aim must not be to overcrowd their followers’ feed which to be honest, can be pretty irritable. There’s no set number as to how many posts one should publish on instagram daily; the thing that matters is consistently posting quality content.
Compromising on the quality of content can be detrimental to the success of your business and draw followers away from your profile. Therefore, it is in your best interest to constantly enhance the quality of your Instagram content.
- Interact with your audience
No matter what business you are a part of, you must make it a point to interact with your audience and give your venture a much needed personalized touch. Responding to comments and messages, reposting stories, going live, and hosting giveaways are a few ways through which you can establish a rapport with your followers.
An enterprise can employ various effective techniques and practices such as personalised chat bots, hosting giveaways, reposting stories, and even giving shoutouts. This way a bond of trust is created between the target audience and the business owners. Proactive interaction with your audience leads to increased engagement, thus, positively impacting your business. As a business owner who wishes to grow locally, you must make sure you create a loyal fan base, and this can be achieved through effective interaction with your audience.
- Experiment with video content
Over time, the video content on Instagram has evolved with various new features being added now and then. Over 5 million videos were posted within 24 hours of the video feature being added on Instagram, and ever since, Instagram businesses have fully exploited this feature in their favor. Just recently the reels feature was added, where users can upload short video clips of 30 seconds, and now reels are ruling Instagram. Video content is known to generate great response and engagement, and research shows that three times more comments are generated through sponsored Instagram videos as compared to pictures.
In today’s day and age, where digital media has revolutionized the way we live and work, it is important to keep up with the ongoing trends. Instagram is an insanely powerful platform that has turned things around for many businesses and brands. Today Instagram has grown beyond aesthetic pictures and travel itineraries, it has become a place where businesses can flourish and increase their digital footprint.
If entrepreneurs and businesses use Instagram the right way, it could be a great strategy to promote brand identity and increase your target audience.
The tips mentioned above can work great to take your instagram following higher. All you have to do is to implement these tips and wait for the results.
Author Bio
Vartika Kashyap is the CMO at ProofHub. Her articles are inspired by office situations and work-related events. She likes to write about productivity, team building, work culture, leadership, entrepreneurship among others and contributing to a better workplace is what makes her click.