The Black Tie Guide to Instagram
Instagram has a way of captivating audiences like no other social medium to date. It’s basically a digital scrapbook that allows anyone and everyone to peek at your brand. Beyond using Instagram to share pictures of your lunch or your latest vacation, it is a great space to showcase your business. Using this platform to engage your audience and gain new customers is essential for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy; however, many companies aren’t quite sure how to take advantage of Instagram. Considering the 800 million Instagram users all over the world, that’s a problem. Like every social app, there is a fine line between engaging and annoying. By following a few best practices, your Instagram feed can actually help build your brand instead of boring your audience or worse, bruising your reputation.
What Do I Post?
Instagram is an opportunity for you to communicate your brand. When deciding what to post, it’s important to make sure that it accurately represents who you are as a company. Post products, results of your services, employees, and days in the life at the office. We live in a world where pictures tell a more effective story. Before people buy your product or drive to your location, they check you out on social media. What do you want people to know about you when they are still lingering in that decision making process? This is your chance to win them over!
Pro Tip: Instagram is loaded with editing features for enhancement. Give them a shot! The filters and editing tools are easy to use and can transform an ordinary picture into an extraordinary one.
How Often Do I Post?
Once each day is enough. This is where you walk a fine line between engaging and annoying. Posting too much can overrun your audience’s feed with your business and lead to a quick unfollow. If you have a lot of photos to share, create a content calendar. Schedule your posts out so you never miss a day but please don’t bombard your followers.
What Should Go in a Caption?
Your audience followed your account to get to know you, tell them who you are. There is no need to over-explain what’s going on in a photo or video. Think about your caption like an elevator conversation. You want it to be pleasant and to the point. Keep it general enough that if someone outside of your industry takes a look, they understand what you’re trying to say but avoid dumbing it down too much and sounding condescending.
#HowDoIWorkHashtags?
Hashtags are how you expand your audience in Instagram. It’s good to add about five RELEVANT hashtags to every post to help people find you. Think about what you want to be found for and what your audience is looking for, make those your hashtags. Branded hashtags are great, as are “umbrella” hashtags that cover big-picture concepts. For example, if you happen to post a photo of your office pup, #dogsofinstagram is a great “umbrella” hashtag to use. Then you can get more specific, #officedogsofinstagram. Careful to not add too many though! If you overload your post with hashtags, your post will lose authenticity and seem spammy.
Pro Tip: One of Instagram’s newest features enables users to follow hashtags. This exciting new development places your content on feeds of users who don’t follow your page and yet another chance to expand your audience.
We hope that these best practices are helpful for you in creating an Instagram presence for your company. This widely popular social media platform is growing exponentially and if you’ve got a product or service that deserves sharing, it’s important that you get on Instagram… yesterday.