7 Tips To Use Instagram in Your Small Business Marketing

Instagram, once the red-headed stepchild of the social media world, has now turned into a runaway beer truck, exceeding 700 million users in early 2017. Small businesses are now adopting the social media platform as a primary method of generating revenue. Today, Instagram boasts over 1 million advertisers.

So if everyone else is on Instagram, why isn’t your business? Not leveraging Instagram for your small business is a lost opportunity, and should be remedied immediately! The potential Instagram provides from a marketing perspective is enormous! So let’s get started.

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Here are a few tips on marketing and gaining a following:

Use Those #hashtags

Six Tips To Grow Your Instagram Followers

As Instagram continues its meteoric rise in both monthly user base and saturation metrics, it makes sense for small businesses to get on board. Statistics show that engagement rate on Instagram is much higher than either Facebook or Twitter. Not making Instagram a part of your marketing campaign is a mistake your business cannot afford to make.

With that in mind, here are a few strategies on how to grow your Instagram following:

Post Daily

Get into a regular flow when posting to Instagram, but don’t inundate your followers with content. A few times a day is probably the ideal number. Quality content combined with consistency will do more to drive up your number of followers than flooding their feeds will.

Share on a regular basis so you can discover what works best for you and your business. Provide creative, engaging content, and you’ll be rewarded with not only more supporters, but followers that are interested in your content.

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Promote User Content

Market Your Small Business With An Instagram Photo Contest

An Instagram photo contest is a great way to promote your small business while having some fun. A photo contest can lead to new followers while your company is giving back to the Instagram community.

But running an Instagram photo contest isn’t always easy, and can be a bit confusing. Here is a short guide on getting the most out of a photo contest, should you choose to do so.

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Target Your Market

Define your target market before kicking off your photo contest. A contest for families who enjoy camping is going to look a lot different than couples who look for new and exciting places to visit in the city. Determine who you intend to engage with, and gear your contest toward them.

Team Up

Finding a partner for your Instagram photo contest can be a benefit for both businesses. Not only can you gain more followers through this method, but you’ll also receive additional exposure. Most of these types of partnerships require participants to be followers of both accounts before they can enter. Keep things simple though. There’s no need to team up with more than one business per contest.

Avoid Confusion

How To Grow Your Small Business Using Instagram

Small Business marketing using Instagram

Instagram is an online mobile application that is used for sharing photos and videos. Instagram is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter and has fast become a very popular social media tool. Instagram was originally developed so that people could apply different filters to photographs that they had taken on their mobile phones and would allow them to easily upload and share these photos with friends (or account followers) using the Instagram application. More recently video was introduced to Instagram it can now be uploaded, but Instagram video clips are limited to between 3 to 15 seconds long.

Why are businesses turning to Instagram?

• There are more than 300 million Instagram users worldwide.
• Approximately 70 million photos are uploaded per day.
• The account is 'free' to set up so there are low barriers to entry.
• It is a medium that allows for easy sharing of content 24 hours a day.
• What sort of success have businesses achieved using Instagram?
• Businesses such as Levis, L'oreal and hundreds of others have been able to use the tool to:
• To increase awareness of their products and services.
• To increase brand recognition.
• To showcase their community and pro bono work to inspire and attract prospective customers to engage with their product, service or brand.
• Run successful promotions, competitions and giveaways.

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The Rise Of Instagram And What It Can Do For Your Business

Why use Instagram?

Since 2010, Instagram has proved itself to be the fastest growing social media platform around! It has a user base of around 300 million and that is set to rise further. So why is this seemingly simple app growing so quickly? Well it all comes down to creativity really, Instagram have found new ways of sharing content across its platform and making users experience more seamless. For example, Instagram stories were launched to rival Snapchat, allowing for users to provide disappearing pictures or videos.

Sounds simple right? Well that's because it is. Instagram now has more sway over all its users who may have been using Snapchat in tandem to its own app, reducing the need to use both and stream lining these users to its own services.

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This aggressive tactic has paid off as Instagram has surpassed Snapchat in users. Instagram stories also encourage more sharing of content and giving it a chat element to its app, allowing it to compete with all the other direct messaging platforms. Innovation like this is the reason for Instagram's sudden growth.

What's all the fuss about Instagram?