According to Forbes, Instagram has over 2 billion active users today. And the app is used daily by about 500 million people worldwide. It is rightfully one of the most popular social networks and at the same time a convenient communication platform. And, of course, an effective advertising platform.
Our topic today is Instagram promotion. We will tell you why it is an indispensable tool for business, how to generate interesting and selling texts and videos for the social network, and what paid and free services should be used to achieve results. There will be a lot of interesting things!
Why Instagram promotion is important for modern business
We can name at least 5 main reasons why Instagram promotion is the right decision for a modern business:
- Instagram has a huge and active audience. As we said, it is more than two billion people. No matter what business you work in, we are sure that your target audience is present on this social network. In most cases (with rare exceptions), this is exactly the case.
- Instagram is a powerful visual platform. Here you can showcase your products and services, share reviews and customer feedback, advertise your product in a bright, stylish and visual way. Today, visuals are the basis of marketing, remember this.
- In Instagram, you can very easily and quite accurately set up targeted advertising. The developers made sure that even a person without experience could quickly set up and launch an advertising campaign directly in the application. The process is maximally automated and will definitely not cause any difficulties even for a beginner.
- Such promotion often turns out to be more profitable than using other promotion formats. One of the reasons for this is the ability to set your own budget so as not to go beyond it and get the maximum possible result for the money invested.
- Convenient built-in analytics tools. Here we have one of the best analytics platforms among all popular social networks.
Tips for Starting a Business on Instagram
Perhaps the first and most important piece of advice is to make sure that your potential clients are here. Because if this is not the case, then no promotion will simply yield results. But in the vast majority of cases, the target audience is still on the social network. All that remains is to register and switch to a business profile.
How to register and create a profile on Instagram
Registering a profile is a simple process. It consists of five simple steps:
- Download the app from the App Store or Google Play Store.
- Open the app and click “Register”.
- Enter your email or phone number and create a strong password.
- Select a profile name.
- Complete your profile by adding a profile picture, bio, website link, etc.
Make sure your profile picture and bio represent your brand and clearly communicate what your business does.
Please note that a regular profile is created upon registration. We will tell you how to convert it to a business account below.
An Overview of the Different Types of Instagram Profiles
At the moment, the site offers three types of profiles:
- A personal account is a basic profile type intended for regular users who do not sell anything.
- A business account is a profile of a company or brand that provides additional tools.
- Author account – a profile of a famous person. For example, a blogger, musician, writer, politician, etc. It also provides convenient analytics tools.
Obviously, to increase brand awareness or a certain type of product/service, it is worth choosing a business type. This can be done in less than a minute.
How to Switch from Personal to Business Account on Instagram
To transform your personal profile into a business, just follow a few simple steps:
- Launch the application and go to your profile page.
- In the upper right part of the screen, tap the three bars and select Settings and privacy.
- Scroll down the menu that opens and find the “Account type and tools” item.
- Click “Upgrade to a professional account” or “Create a new professional account” if you want to create a separate business profile.
- Review the information, select your business category and click done.
The transition is instant. After these simple manipulations, you get access to all the social network tools. And you can start working. Naturally, in the future you can also return to your personal profile.
Tips for Designing Your Instagram Business Profile to Attract Your Audience
Let’s be honest, Instagram is not particularly rich in design tools. You cannot create a truly unique profile – your options are very limited. Despite this, we still advise you to approach the issue of design with all responsibility. Because the correct promotion of this social network begins with design.
How to choose a profile name
Your profile name should reflect your brand and be easy to remember. If you don’t have a brand name yet, come up with one that is clear, relatable, and memorable. If possible, use keywords that describe your company or product in your name.
Don’t try to put as much information as possible into the name. Be concise. The shorter and easier to remember the profile name, the better. We also do not recommend using special characters and numbers in the name – they make it difficult to find your page.
How to choose a profile photo
The profile photo is probably the most noticeable and eye-catching element of the page. Therefore, it is necessary to choose a photo that is visually appealing and at the same time easy to read. The brand logo would be ideal. But you can also use another image that is associated with your brand and easily recognizable among many others.
How to create a profile header
Your profile title is the first thing customers will see when they visit your account, so it’s important to make a strong first impression. In the header, try to highlight your brand’s personality, talk about the strengths of your offer, and describe what exactly you do.
Here you can use not only text, but also all sorts of emoji. But you need to be careful with them and not use too many. Excessive emojis create the impression of a brand being frivolous. Although in some cases this is only a plus.
How to add a link to your website
On Instagram, you can add one link to your profile. Most likely, it will be your website – this is the best option if you want to increase traffic and attract more customers.
It is very important that the page the link leads to is optimized for conversions. If a person follows the link, they should be able to easily perform the target action – read the information of interest, contact the manager, place an order, and so on.
How to use corporate identity
Use your brand identity in your profile to emphasize the seriousness and authority of your brand. Use your brand colors, fonts, logo, etc. All of this helps you stand out, make your company more recognizable, reflect your core values, etc.
Of course, developing a corporate identity from scratch on your own is very difficult and time-consuming. Therefore, the best solution is to contact a designer who will take on this work.
Basic principles of business account management
Technically, it’s not much different from personal management. You basically have the same tools, the same opportunities, and the same limitations. However, we still want to share with you some basic rules:
- Create your brand identity – its visual style. Thanks to it, all your future content will be somehow connected by a single style, will become recognizable and more visually attractive.
- Always focus on the visual. Instagram is a “visual” platform. Here, visitors see images and videos first, and then text.
- Be consistent. Post new posts, Stories, and Reels regularly. Consistency and consistency are important components of success.
- Don’t forget to use hashtags. They help increase your reach and attract more target audience. But don’t use hashtag generators and don’t copy typical hashtags like #likeforlike, #likeme and the like. They are useless, only harmful.
- Try to interact with your audience more. Motivate them to be active in the comments, conduct tests and surveys, organize voting, etc. The more activities, the better.
- Experiment with formats. Don’t limit yourself to just posts in the main feed and stories. Try Reels, live broadcasts. All this helps make brand development on social networks more effective.
And, of course, don’t forget to track analytics so that you can adjust your strategy if necessary and achieve better results with less investment. Page promotion without analysis can be completely counterproductive.
How to Create Content for Promotion
At the very beginning of the article, we said that Instagram is a visual platform. And it is on the creation of high-quality visuals that special emphasis should be placed. But not only on it!
We invite you to consider the main formats, as well as read some recommendations from our specialists that will help make the promotion of your brand more effective.
Publications in the main feed
Posts in the main feed are one of the foundations of your account. Unlike stories, they do not disappear after 24 hours, but remain on your profile forever (unless you delete or hide them yourself, of course).
Try to use high-quality original photos, images, and videos. If necessary, publish carousel posts with several images or videos (up to 10). But the main image/video should be the most important and most attractive. Otherwise, users simply won’t scroll the carousel further.
There are different opinions on how many posts you should make per day. But if you are serious, we recommend publishing at least 1-2 posts daily.
Reels
Reels are short videos that are great for showcasing your brand’s personality and creativity. According to the platform, Reels with overlay text have 40% higher engagement rates than videos without text. When creating Reels, be sure to use text, music, and hashtags to increase your visibility.
The advantage of Reels is that they can get into recommendations, which means that they can be seen by a huge number of people in the future. The algorithms do not work as well as in TikTok yet, but still not bad. After all, video content is already coming out on top, displacing photos.
Stories
Stories are an indispensable tool for interacting with subscribers. According to the social network, about 500 million people publish and view stories every day.
Publish not just photos and videos, but also text, links, polls, etc. This way you can further engage your audience and encourage them to interact.
Don’t forget that stories can be added to highlights on the page, dividing them into different categories. This is an extremely convenient tool for several reasons. Firstly, you can structure your stories and save them directly on your page. Secondly, you can place relevant information in highlights: prices for goods or services, reviews, customer feedback, answers to frequently asked questions, and much more.
Geolocation
This is not the most obvious, but quite an effective promotion tool in this social network. According to the social network itself, posts with a location tag receive 79% more responses than posts without it. In addition, location tags can help attract local customers to your business.
If your company works, for example, throughout Ukraine, you can use the geolocation of different cities to attract people from the regions. This is not prohibited.
There is also another “local” practice of using geolocation. For example, a restaurant account uses geotags of other popular public places in the city in its publications in order to lure part of their audience to itself. Technically, this is also not prohibited and is not punished in any way by the social network. Therefore, the use of such a method, as they say, remains on your conscience.
Hashtags and navigation
Hashtags are a nice free tool that, while they won’t get you many leads, can still be quite useful.
We recommend creating several unique branded hashtags that are related only to your brand. This is convenient for search. In addition, we recommend creating several navigation hashtags to make it easy to navigate between your publications.
Now we use the appropriate hashtags in our posts. And users, by clicking on a certain hashtag, will immediately see a list of publications in which it is already used, and can immediately read them. This is a kind of filter on your page, which can be very useful not only for subscribers, but also for you.
We do not recommend using hashtag generators and copying various collections into your publications. Often they only clutter up your posts, but do not bring any practical benefit. In addition, do not forget that the volume of text in a publication is limited to 2200 characters with spaces. Dozens of hashtags will only “bite off” part of this volume and make your main text heavier to perceive.
Promotion strategies
As much as we would like to, we cannot provide you with a universal strategy that will work for absolutely any brand and business. However, we are ready to share a short list of the most important components of any strategy.
- Create quality and interesting content
Content is the foundation of everything. If it is not unique, interesting and useful for your subscribers, then there will be no interest in you either.
Make a plan and make sure that it has the following ratio of publications: 40% informative, 40% entertaining and 20% selling. Naturally, the ratio may vary slightly, but make sure that you do not have an excess of advertising texts. They only cause irritation.
- Publish Stories regularly
Many brands underestimate the importance of stories and focus all their efforts on posts in the feed. In vain! Now the depth of viewing stories is becoming even greater than the main posts. In addition, they are more functional in many ways. In them, you can conduct polls, post links, organize voting and quizzes, etc. Take advantage of this!
- Use user-generated content
User-generated content (UGC) is content created by your followers and customers. By encouraging its creation and sharing it on your account, you can increase engagement and promote your business to a wider audience. You can also use UGC to showcase how people use your products or services.
Examples of user-generated content: reposts of subscribers’ stories, publication of their reviews and feedback, etc.
- Launch targeted advertising
We will go into more detail on this issue later in the article. Here we will just say that targeted advertising is a very convenient, effective and quite inexpensive tool for attracting leads. Use it!
Free Instagram Promotion Methods
Growing your business on social media can be completely free. But keep in mind that this process requires your involvement and activity.
We will list several popular free promotion methods and at the same time share some useful tips.
- Hashtags. As we said before, hashtags can be a useful tool. Some say they don’t work anymore. That’s only partly true. They can still generate leads if you use relevant hashtags, don’t spam them, and follow the tips above.
- Regular publications. Your posts, Stories and Reels are not only an engagement tool, but also a kind of signal to the algorithm that your account is “live” and active. Accordingly, the social network will more actively recommend your profile to other users.
- Interact with your audience. Your account shouldn’t exist in a “vacuum”. Communicate with your subscribers, organize various activities, conduct surveys and polls, etc.
- Collaborate with other accounts. You can organize various collaborations with other brands to attract their followers as well. The main rule here is not to collaborate with direct competitors. Otherwise, promotion can have the opposite effect – your people will go to them.
- Optimize your profile. Experiment with photos and content, use new design solutions, surprise your subscribers and attract their attention. But do not do this too often, and do it without too radical changes. Otherwise, they will simply stop recognizing you, and it will be more difficult for them to find you in search.
That is, the main rule of free promotion is to be active! If you publish only a couple of posts and stories a week, do not interact with subscribers in any way and run an account, as they say, “for show”, this will not bring any results.
Paid promotion methods
Free promotion has one serious drawback – it is usually quite slow. And at the very beginning of promotion, when you have a new and practically empty profile, its efficiency by default will be quite low. Therefore, in most cases it is worth combining it with paid methods. We will talk about them further.
How to use targeted advertising
Targeted advertising is essentially the only official advertising tool. And quite effective if done correctly.
Targeting allows you to show your ads to people who meet the specified parameters: gender, age, geolocation, interests, behavior, etc. You can launch an advertising campaign directly in the Instagram app or use the Facebook advertising account. The first option is simpler and faster, but the second gives you more tools and settings. The choice is yours.
Targeted advertising also allows you to use a variety of formats: photos, videos, carousels, and ads in stories, etc.
How to Use Influencer Advertising on Instagram
Increasing brand or product awareness through bloggers is not a new format. But it is still very popular. It is a great opportunity to reach a large number of people at once, make a statement, and highlight the advantages of your brand, product or service.
The main rule of cooperation with bloggers is a thorough analysis of their subscribers. It is very important that the influencer’s subscribers include as many of your potential clients as possible. Only in this case will the advertising work.
Also, don’t chase bloggers with millions of followers. Advertising with them can cost thousands of dollars, and the return on such investments is far from always sufficient. To begin with, we recommend paying attention to bloggers with several thousand followers. You can often order advertising from them by barter or at a very low price. And their audience is usually even more loyal and active than that of millionaires.
How to Use Giveaway and Sponsorship
Giveaways and sponsorships are a popular way to increase engagement. You can run a giveaway or contest that requires users to follow your page, tag their friends, or share your post for a chance to win a prize. This can help increase your follower count and reach a wider audience, although some followers will likely unfollow you later.
However, be careful! The algorithm does not like such activities. If you abuse them, you may well end up in the shadow ban for some time. And this is very harmful for the business and the profile itself.
How to Protect Your Instagram Account from Hacks
It would be extremely frustrating if your account was hacked and you had no way to regain access to it.
As practice shows, it is much easier to prevent a problem than to fix it later. Therefore, follow our recommendations:
- Use a strong and unique password. It should contain at least 10 characters, including uppercase and lowercase Latin letters, numbers and special characters. In general, we recommend using a password generator and manager.
- Enable two-factor authentication. Ideally, via a phone number. This will significantly increase the security of your account.
- Beware of phishing. Do not click on suspicious links and never give out confidential information to unknown sources (websites, services or people).
- Update the app and your device regularly. Updates not only mean new features, but also new security tools. So make sure both the Instagram app and your phone/tablet operating system are up to date.
And remember that a popular profile with a large and active audience is a very tasty morsel for attackers. They may try to gain access to your account. If you do not take protective measures in advance, it may be too late in the future.
How to track statistics
The app itself provides pretty comprehensive statistics. And it’s pretty easy to access:
- Switch to a business account if you haven’t done so before. You will immediately have access to the analytical information in your profile. But if you had a personal account before, you won’t be able to get data for the previous period.
- To view statistics for a single post, click the “View Statistics” button below it. This will show you the number of impressions, reach, and engagement.
- View general information about your account. To do this, go to your profile, click on the three lines in the upper right corner and click the “Statistics” button. Here you can see the number of profile visits, the number of subscribers, a list of the most popular publications and much more.
Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to Instagram’s built-in analytics tools. For more options and insights, you can use third-party analytics services like Hootsuite, Iconosquare, Sprout Social, and others. They provide much more information, but are often paid. So the choice is yours.
Useful Telegram Bots
Not everyone knows, but Instagram promotion can be made a little more effective and easier if you use Telegram bots. There are quite a few of them – both completely meaningless and very useful.
We have compiled a list of 5 popular Telegram bots for you that we can safely recommend:
- @voicybot is a bot that uses wit.ai and Google Speech speech recognition engines to turn your audio recordings into text. Just dictate to it, for example, the text of your next post, and it will give you the text. Copy and use! It’s as simple as it gets.
- @instasavegrambot is a useful telegram bot that allows you to download photos, videos, and even texts from your or someone else’s Instagram account. A very functional tool.
- @SaveAsBot is another bot for downloading from Instagram. But unlike the previous one, it can also download content from Pinterest and TikTok. If you actively work with these platforms, the bot can be very useful.
- @LandingPageInstagramBot is a bot that divides your image into 9 squares, after which you can upload them one by one to your profile and get a large image on your page. Not a bad way to attract the attention of the audience, but do not overuse it.
- @izibot is a bot that can also download from Instagram profiles. Plus it works with YouTube and Pinterest, which can also be very useful.
In general, you can find a huge number of interesting and useful bots in Telegram, which makes it easier and more convenient to develop a page. But we ask you to carefully approach the choice of such bots because, through them, ill-wishers can gain access to your account. Do not send any login data, your bank card details, or any other confidential information to any bots. Remember about digital security!
Conclusions
So, we have looked at the main methods of account promotion, including both free and paid strategies, as well as some useful life hacks. We hope that this information was helpful and will enable you to make your promotion even more effective. However, remember that social media marketing is a complex and comprehensive process that requires a serious approach and a clear understanding of how to achieve results. If you’re unsure about developing your Instagram account on your own, we strongly recommend to partner with social media marketing services. Let the professionals handle it for you!
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