Article by Emma Gosper, Digital Business Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
Using Instagram to its full potential for your Business
Instagram has 600 million worldwide users every day. So, it’s clear that it is becoming the leading social media platform – with so many users, it’s easy to get lost amongst the crowd. Let’s cover some ways we can get the most out of the platform to benefit our Instagram presence.
- Utilise Business Tools: if you haven’t switched over to a business profile, you’re missing out on seeing insights, advertising, direction options and more.
- Encourage Interaction: By encouraging your followers to interact with you by commenting or liking your posts, you are more likely to appear on their news feeds, which is fantastic when it comes to algorithm changes.
- Stories: Whilst the posts on your feed are being seen by less, there’s an opportunity to jump back in front of users by uploading unlimited posts to your story.
- Story Highlights: Further to posting to your story, utilise the highlight option to create mini photo albums below your bio – be creative and customise them. When users visit your page they can quickly access what they are looking for without having to scroll through your entire feed.
- Multiple photo posts: Upload a photo to your feed and select multiple images for users to swipe to see more, like a photo album. This is great for uploading several similar images in the one post, rather than uploading several posts and flooding your feed.
- Tag: Tag brands, friends, customers and more in the ‘Tag People’ option to appear in the tagged photo’s section of that brand or persons page. This makes you visible to people looking at tagged photos and will encourage people to find you.
- Hashtag: Some people are afraid to use hashtags but when done correctly they can be effective. Don’t be too broad, but don’t be too specific either. Try hash tagging what you think people will search for, as so many people are now using Instagram to find suppliers.
- IGTV: Instagram’s newest feature – upload longer format videos to your platform to communicate a message or introduce a new product or service.