3 Steps for Effective Instagram Marketing
Instagram is increasing in popularity among brands as a powerful social marketing tool. People today enjoy being visually stimulated, which makes a social network that is solely based on image sharing so effective.
When you use social media to share images that relate to your business, you will forge stronger relationships with your current fans and customers plus broaden your reach to find new ones. Not only can you share pictures of your products and the people who work hard to keep your business running (even if it’s just you and your pet ferret!), but you can encourage your customers to submit their own pictures of your products being put to use.
It is easy to lose track of time when you log in to your social media accounts. This is especially true with Instagram, where you can easily lose an hour just scanning through the wide variety of images in your stream.
Spending time online is important for your business, but if it’s not productive time, then it is simply time wasted. Wasted time does not help bring in new sales. This is why you need to have daily goals for each of your social network activity like when you log on to Instagram.
Before you start your day, know how much time you want to allot to social media and each individual network. Stick with that time limit so that you can be sure you are getting the most important tasks done in your time frame and don’t allow yourself to get sucked in to the rabbit hole that is the Internet.
Each time you log on to Instagram, make sure you are doing these three things to maintain a high level of efficiency to grow your brand presence:
Add to the number of people you follow
Give yourself about 10-15 minutes each day to start looking for Instagram users in your target market. You can do this by looking at who is following your competitors. Find people who are more engaging with the brands they follow since they are more likely to engage with you as well. Are they leaving comments and liking photos often?
Since social media is all about give and take, make sure that you are following a good number of other people and businesses and bloggers. Do your own fair share of liking and commenting as well.
Share your own content
Take 10 minutes a day to add new unique content to your own Instagram account. People want to see that you have a good amount of interesting content for them to look at if they are going to follow you. If they look at your stream and only see two pictures and nothing new added in the last month or more, they aren’t going to see a reason to become a follower.
If you don’t have any unique content to share, set up a time each day to simply focus on taking pictures to share. It can be shots of your products, your office, employees, etc. If it relates to your brand and business, take an interesting shot of it and edit it to your liking and share.
Be interactive
It’s no surprise that when you have a social media account, people expect you to be, well, social. Don’t simply sign up for an account and then wait for people to start following you.
To be successful in your Instagram marketing, you need to be actively engaging. Reply to comments left on your images, even if it’s a simple thank you. Ask questions and encourage a dialog with your followers.
Visit your followers’ streams and those of the people that you are following and like images and leave comments. Showing that you will be interactive with other users will go a long way in building your own brand’s following.
Instagram will be around for a long time. To be the most effective, you need to be ready to spend time with your account and be productive with that time.
Is your business using Instagram to market your brand? How is it going?
