April 23: 2014: Instagram is an excellent medium for sharing your company’s information with the web. Its combination of aesthetics and social networking allows photos and ads to be shared across multiple platforms. Posts can be synchronized among networks such as Twitter, Facebook and the blogging platform Tumblr using Instagram’s “share” tool, making it easier to market yourself in creative ways.
Adding Hard Links
The clean layout of Instagram allows for creativity when developing ads. Photo-heavy ads with easy, shorter links provide more hits to a site. A workaround on Instagram for hyperlinks is to use the “location” feature to share your direct URL to your product. The power of Instagram is the speed at which consumers take in images; this makes it extremely important to consider the appearance of each image you post. Posts have to catch the eye of Instagram users as they scroll through. It’s also important to have the name or logo of your business on each image. Sometimes users find photos through the “explore” feature or while viewing hashtags, and the name of the product should really be somewhere on the picture. The logo can even become the centerpiece of the post. Users are definitely more excited by unique posts, making it important to have a large database of imagery.
Posting Times
Instagram also relies heavily on the timing of your post. “Downtime” hours provide a lot of likes and shares. Normally these times include lunch time, dinner, or even before they go to bed (when the average person checks their phone). In the same manner as Twitter, customer interaction is really easy through the use of hashtags. Using hashtags that are trendy and memorable can help make your page more popular. Using a hashtag that is in widespread use and trending allows for a larger audience to find your post. It also attracts the millennial crowd, which places importance on being up-to-date with online trends.
Tactics for Engagement
Many of the popular tags use alliteration (#tbt = ThrowbackThursday, #fbf= FlashbackFriday, etc.) or humor to make them easier to remember. Not only will your account use these hashtags, but interested customers that follow you may pick up these hashtags if they are interesting enough. This could bring new users to your site. By posting and featuring at least once or twice daily, you can keep followers interested and constantly checking your site. Also by interacting with the average user, you can gain trust and support in your followers. In a way similar to Twitter, self-promotion is an important factor in gaining interested users. By interacting with users and customers, you can gain a very loyal following. It’s key to interact with popular pages that agreed to promote you. Pages enjoy being featured because they gain followers, and they’re usually happy to tag your product in return. Many fashion bloggers and Instagrammers have people that check their page daily and trust their opinion. It’s also key to check tags that apply to your company. By just liking posts that use tags that relate to your page, it could spark interest in a potential follower.
Increase Your Followers
The more followers you gain, the more your presence will attract even more followers. It’s important on Instagram to be perceived as a popular and active page. The number of likes on a post can directly affect the number of people that view it. An ideal situation would be for your post to make it to the “explore” page, which is Instagram’s featured photos page that shows pictures that are the most interesting and have the most likes. It’s important to have an eye for your demographic and to be creative with tagging. It’s important that users perceive your page as relevant and interactive, which makes customers out of followers. All in all, the hits on your website will be directly affected by your Instagram following.
Creativity Leads to Customer Acquisition
Instagram can be instrumental to client acquisition for a business. A creative post that is aesthetically pleasing and sharable can effectively draw in a demographic that will be interested and “follow” your product. Gaining interested followers is the key to success on Instagram. The more followers a page gains, the more interest it gains. The best way to increase the count of these followers is to provide valuable interactive posts. When customers feel that they are gaining something by following you, (such as knowledge, sales, or self-promotion), they will follow your page.
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