Instagram provides businesses with a great chance to target customers that match their ideal buyer profile and get their items in front of potential consumers, since 83% of Instagram users report finding new products and services through the site.
Here are eight tried-and-true methods for expanding your Instagram following and exposing your items to a larger, more engaged audience. All of these suggestions are easy to put into practise; you can try them out and observe what happens right away.
You should tweak and perfect your profile.
Your Instagram profile for business should be a concise and accurate reflection of your company, the problems you solve, and the customers you serve, just like your website’s home page should be.
You’re allowed one link and 150 characters to introduce your company and its products or services on Instagram. Typically, this will be a link to your website or a specific product page.
Publish Content Regularly and Often
If you aren’t updating often and giving your fans something new to look at, you will struggle to gain more followers on Instagram. If you don’t publish anything to Instagram for a while, your followers and potential followers won’t see it since Instagram gives preference to presenting people material that is both new and relevant to their interests.
You may save yourself time and focus on other aspects of your business by using a social media service that allows you to plan your posts in bulk.
Try Out Trending Hashtags
You may reach people who might be interested in what you have to say by strategically using hashtags in your social media postings. Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post, but you should choose a diverse set of popular and less popular hashtags to get the most engagement.
You may increase the appeal of your captions by creating a tale, which works especially well when you’re attempting to get people to learn more about a product. A marketing firm that wants to sell its digital marketing certification programme to its clientele might use the caption of a social media post to share the success story of one of its former students.
Interact with your audience and participate in the local scene
It’s a sign of respect and appreciation for your audience if you take the time to reply to their comments and messages. Two certain methods of attracting new followers and stirring up interest in your posts are:
Contesting via likes, follows, and tags
Posting a “refer a friend for a discount” message where existing clients get a discount or free month’s membership if they tell a friend about your business is an easy approach to bring in additional consumers.
Distributing Work Created by Users
What we call “user-generated content” is anything that is produced by users rather than companies. Providing information like this to your audience is a great way to boost your brand’s credibility and earn their confidence.
Incentives like discounts on the goods you’re trying to sell might be used to entice your audience to contribute user-generated content.
User-generated content has several advantages for companies, but word of mouth marketing is the most effective since new customers are more inclined to believe the opinions of individuals they already follow than those of a brand they have never heard of.
Share a wide variety of content
Instagram has changed a lot as a service over the past several years. Videos, reels, stories, and IGTV posts are all great ways to interact with and expand your audience, yet photographs remain the most popular kind of content on the network.
Instagram’s algorithm also gives different sorts of content greater weight based on a user’s preferences and typical interactions. Therefore, if a user often views and interacts with videos, Instagram will prioritise showing them videos in their feed.
Engage Minimal-Majority Influencers
If you’re just getting started on Instagram or your company is still in its infancy, you probably won’t have the resources to collaborate with influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Micro-influencers are a form of influencer that is more easily accessible to lesser-known firms. A subgroup of influencers, micro-influencers often have less than one hundred thousand fans or subscribers. However, the chances of a small company collaborating with a huge Instagram influencer are relatively remote, therefore it may make more sense to seek out influencers with lesser followings to promote your brand.
Markerly conducted a study on Instagram engagement and discovered that the likes and comments an influencer receives from their audience tend to drop as their following grows.
The research also showed that, contrary to expectations, smaller accounts may actually have higher engagement rates.
Join Forces With Competing Labels
Brand collaborations can take the form of cross-promotional posts, where one company promotes another’s products, or product features, where both companies showcase one other’s goods.
Sponsored content, number eight
While it’s excellent to expand your following through organic posts, paying for sponsored posts with larger accounts in your field is a certain way to reach a whole new set of consumers. The strategy of paying for sponsored posts has a lot in common with the practise of dealing with micro-influencers, which we have already discussed.