3 Tips to Leveraging Instagram For Your Business

Instagram is the fastest growing social network in the world and it’s easy to see why. We’re moving further and further away from reading to absorb our information - we want it as quickly as possible and visual. With over 700 million active users around the world, Instagram is the present and future of social media.

With Facebook as the new go-to for business information, Instagram is just as integral in the success as your business. 71% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service from a company with an active, robust social media presence. Since Instagram is the new normal, here are some tips on the best way to leverage the photo-sharing site for your business.

Hashtags

How Many You Can Use

Posting Contrary to popular belief, hashtags serve a huge purpose in gaining followers and increasing engagement. Instagram currently allows up to 30 hashtags per post, and the best way to utilize the usage is by researching hashtags relevant to your business. Be sure not to use super-generic hashtags though, that won’t help your engagement. You’ll get lost in the shuffle and the hashtags will be useless.

My tip for you is to include an even amount of larger hashtags (30,000 - 50,000) and smaller (5,000-15,000) to be sure that you’re getting a solid amount of engagement. Be sure that you use the same hashtags for every post though for continuity.

Post As Comment

Hashtags are crucial to the growth of your Instagram, it’s also critical that you post them as a comment under your photo! It’s neater, and it allows for a cleaner caption. Since you can link your Facebook and Instagram, you don’t want hashtags showing up in your Facebook caption as they don’t have the same effect.

Convert to Business Profile

The best thing you can do to take your social media game to the next level, is converting your Instagram profile to a business profile. All you have to do is link your Instagram to your Facebook Business Page through the app. Once it’s verified you’ll be able to share content simultaneously on both platforms while keeping track of statistics and analytics on your account.

Utilizing Stories

Using Instagram stories is the new quick form of communicating through social media. Since its inception, IG stories have slowly but surely taken over Snapchat. It’s easier to access and allows for you to almost do 2 things at once. Instagram stories are a great way to share behind-the-scenes footage of you and your company while also upping engagement.

A great benefit of Instagram stories, is the ability to upload later. Unlike Snapchat, when you upload something from your camera roll, your story isn’t disrupted with different formatting. So if you happen to be collecting content and want to create a visual story, you can create everything outside of the app and upload to your story whenever you’d like.

The benefits of Instagram for business are countless. From analyzing statistics and posting times, to leveraging the power of hashtags to boost engagement, the opportunities for your business within Instagram are endless.