Building an Instagram for your small business

Growing a small business and taking it to the next level is what all entrepreneurs look for. There are many digital marketing tools that help you achieve this goal, with Instagram being one of them.

Throughout the years, Instagram has proven to be a powerful visual channel to create brand awareness and a loyal audience that truly responds. With more than 500 million users entering Instagram every day, the social media platform continues to help small businesses of all kinds to increase their reach.

With this kind of potential, it is not surprising that entrepreneurs are so interested in creating an Instagram following!

In addition, when it comes to participation rates, it is known that Instagram offers much better results. In a Forester study, it was found that the average rate of participation of brands in Instagram was almost 60 times greater than that of the social media giant, Facebook.

·         Contact potential customers and connect with them.

·         Build and nurture a stronger relationship with existing customers

·         Improves the possibilities of making sales from the application.

However, to take advantage of the true benefits of Instagram marketing, it is important that you focus on creating an Instagram following that you can count on. Do not worry, in this article you will learn the little things you can do to have a great impact on the numbers of your followers.

Publish at the right time

Make your content seen by as many people as possible should be in your agenda when you do Instagram marketing. Not only because you want exposure, but also because you want more actions that lead to more followers. Creating an Instagram account for your small business becomes easier when you publish at the right time.

So, when is the best time to post on Instagram? According to Further on, these are the 3 best global times to publish on Instagram for each day of the week: the best times to publish however, since each Instagram account is different with a different audience, you must still find your own account. Best time of publication. The idea here is to schedule your Instagram posts at a time when a lot of your followers are online.

Below are two proven ways to calculate the best time to post on Instagram.

Discover when your followers are online

Eliminate guesswork and discover your optimal Instagram publishing time by analyzing Instagram Insights, a feature that allows you to observe the activity of your audience. Instagram Insights is very versatile and helps you understand your target audience. You get information like see...

·         The geographic location of your followers.

·         Whether they are men or women

·         In what age groups do they fall?

·         Especially when your activity is the highest.

Once you discover at what time most of your followers are online, you can start posting at that time. Also search in time zones to see if you can schedule your content for followers from multiple locations.

Experiment with different publication times

If you do not want to rely solely on analysis, you can start experimenting yourself. All you need is a simple spreadsheet to track the hours / days that your content is receiving the most participation. Your goal is to track the amount of "likes" and comments that your content is receiving.

When analyzing, you must clearly understand in what period of time your followers are active. For example, let's say they are online mainly between 2:00 p.m. and 5 p.m. PST, you can have your publications scheduled in this support. Keep changing the times weekly to experiment.

After a month or two, you will have the necessary data to help you select the best hours / days to post on Instagram to get more participation and traffic on the website.

Publish New Content Consistently

The type of content you post on Instagram shows potential followers what to expect if they choose to follow your account. But when they see you publish content constantly, they will be much clearer and sure to follow you.

Creating an Instagram tracking becomes much easier when you make a constant effort to publish relevant content. Compared to all other social media platforms, it is known that Instagram has the best levels of interaction, and that is something you could use to your advantage.

When someone follows your brand on Instagram, they do it to connect and build a specific relationship with you. Its consistency will not only help you get value from your account, but it will also increase your chances of sharing and disseminating your content. Which obviously leads to more followers.

And yes, you do not want your existing followers to forget that they followed you. If you are inconsistent, you may not remember it and stop following it. In the same way that it is important to get new followers, it is also important to keep the oldest ones.

So, what kind of coherence should your brand point to when publishing on Instagram?

According to Union Metrics, most brands prefer to publish between 1 and 2 times per day. They discovered that the brands that published the most did not experience any minor compromise or obtain any bad reputation.

The bottom line is that publishing relevant content on your Instagram always works. Try to be a brand that cares and gives regular value to followers through constant publication.

Use the correct Hashtags

Retaining your current followers goes hand in hand with building an Instagram tracking. Your goal should be to engage your existing followers as much as possible so that they become advocates for the brand and help you increase your followers. But that is not enough. You must go further and harness the power of hashtags to face new people.

By using hashtags of relevant social networks, it is easy for your target audience to discover their content, which increases the chances that they will follow it. But you must do it without exaggeration or, otherwise, it will look like spam. Now, the question is, what kind of hashtags should I use when creating an Instagram?

Your goal is to use hashtags that will help you reach new people. Period. Hashtags can get a lot of exposure when they are done well.

The idea is to find hashtags that are highly relevant to your brand and then use them in your publications. What obviously requires the right kind of research? The hashtags you choose should describe what your brand is about and, at the same time, sound with what your audience is looking for on Instagram.

There are many tools, such as Webster gram, that you can use online to find relevant and valuable hashtags.

A more crude way to find related hashtags that are popular is to directly search for the right keywords on Instagram. Make sure you have done your keyword research in advance.

To make sure you're getting consistent results, you can use the following types of hashtags:

Brand Hashtags: when you use the name of your brand or company, you can generate more participation and participation in your small business. It is not uncommon for companies to use brand hashtags on Instagram. In fact, over 70% of Instagram hashtags are branded.

Trend Hashtags: Instagram's exploration page is a gold mine when it comes to finding trend hashtags that are also relevant to your niche. You may want to add trend hashtags to your content from time to time. Not only does it help you reach more people, it also shows your audience that you are up to date.

Popular Hashtags: Most of the time, popular hashtags do not make a big difference in the ranking of your Instagram content. Just as it is difficult to rank for broad keywords in search engines, popular hashtags are difficult to take advantage of because there is a lot of competition. Even so, you can use them occasionally if they are relevant to your publication.

Location hashtags: if you're a small company targeting local customers, why not use local hashtags? Also known as geographic labels, they get almost 80% more interaction than non-geographic labels.

Steal your competitor's followers

An innovative way to create Instagram tracking is to focus on your competition and try to interact with your audience. Attracting their attention makes sense because they have already followed their competitor who is selling a similar product / service.

Stealing the followers of your competition is not unethical, as long as you are doing well. Now, by competitor, we refer to its closest competitor brand that is already committed to its followers.

When it comes to building an Instagram account, here how you can take advantage of your competitors' audience...

Step 1: Identify your closest competitors

The best place to start is your local competition, because it is very obvious. Add them together with other competitors close to your "results list". Just make sure you do not rush to choose your competitors here.

Step 2: Analyze your followers

Instagram is a popular application, and many people are addicted to it. But that does not mean they do not leave. Instagram users stop using it regularly. That's why it's important that you only go for users who can stay. The more active a person is, the more regularly he uses it.

You can also analyze your obvious habits that indicate a greater likelihood that they will follow you after committing to them.

·         Do they publish content regularly?

·         Have they made a good number of messages?

·         Have you been on Instagram long enough?

·         Are they using hashtags?

·         What is your proportion of followers to the following?

The answers to the previous question should give you enough clarity about whether you should commit to them or not.

Step 3: Participate with them

As soon as you have finished reducing the followers of your competitors to zero and are sure it is worth participating, you should move towards participation with them.

There are three basic ways to interact with other users on Instagram:

·         When you like your publications

·         For commenting on his posts.

·         Following them

This is what you can do to interact with your competitors' followers in the right way...

Ask about their experiences

The idea here is to connect with them on a personal level, showing the human side of your brand. Asking questions that are engaging and insightful can help you not only get an answer, but also help you follow it.

Focus on the experience you are sharing on your Instagram. So, whether you ask about your day or about a particular experience related to your photography, make sure it's worth an answer.

Comment on its unpopular content

If you want someone to follow you, you have to put yourself on their radar. An intelligent way to do this is to find a photo or a video that they published with high expectations, but it did not attract much attention. These publications may have a low participation rate, but they are usually valuable enough for a comment. So, why not leave a genuine compliment in such publications?

Like his recent publications

As you like their recent publications, send them a notification and inform them about you. It may sound simple, but it works. This activity will be worth it only if you find time to receive a lot of photos on a regular basis. Expect to get 3 to 4 followers for every 100 posts you like.

Follow them strategically

Follow the people to follow you. This could be the oldest strategy in the book. It works very well when done strategically. Just like those on your list, not anyone and everyone. Users who have a 1: 1 following ratio are more likely to follow you.

Give people what they want

Whether on Facebook or Instagram, the best growth is the growth of organic followers. Nothing comes close to having an audience that really likes your brand and is interested in its content.

Building an Instagram following organically is not rocket science. Everything you need to focus on providing people with relevant and high quality content. Content that resonates with your interests. That is the only way you will attract their attention and make them like your content, follow it and, ultimately, commit to you. High quality content what do you do to make sure you are only sharing the best content? How do you know what your target audience wants from you?

Yes, you can try to guess, but it's just not worth it. Instead, you can do the following:

Supervise your immediate competitors

Your closest competition that is active on Instagram has a lot to teach you. You should only monitor your activity on Instagram. And see what kind of content they publish on a regular basis.

Focus on discovering the gems. In other words, look for publications that have received the most attention in terms of participation. For example, does your competition attract the most attention with the photos of the products? Or photos with a human element? How do you use Instagram stories?

Know what the trend is

If you can track trends in your space, then you could create content that is requested. So be sure to monitor the profiles of your clients and the most influential people who publish regularly.

·         What kind of images are you sharing?

·         What hashtags are you adding to your publications?

·         Are you following a specific trend?

·         How are you getting involved with your content?

·         What questions are you asking in your messages?

Obtaining information about the content that is currently a trend and high demand among your audience will go a long way towards helping you produce great content for your own account.

Ask your followers

Sometimes, the best way to know what content to create is to ask your current followers. They should give their ideas that can lead to organic growth. Here is how you can survey them...

·         Go to the Instagram Stories feature.

·         Choose the "Survey" tag option

·         Begin to collect and analyze ideas / comments

No matter how much experience you have in your niche, you will be surprised to see the results of those surveys. It is extremely useful, especially when you are in two minds.

Execute a proper draw

The best part about posting content on Instagram is that people can tag their friends / followers in the comments section. It's basically a way to invite them to see your content. Such comments benefit your account in two ways...

They help increase the participation of your content, which places your posts in good Instagram books.

They help you to have more exposure by bringing new people, which facilitates the creation of Instagram tracking.

Now, unless you have hundreds of thousands of followers engaged on Instagram, you cannot expect a lot of people to tag others in the comments. That is why you will have to facilitate the task.

Encourage them to tag their friends by organizing a sweepstakes or contest. Tell them that the only way to participate is to follow their account and tag one or two friends in the comments. This may sound like a very simple strategy at first, but it can be powerful if you execute it correctly. Instagram lottery

Review the following tips to make sure that your Instagram draw is a real success...

Pick a topic

Your raffle should stand out from the rest of the Instagram content. That's why you need to have a theme for your contest, something that people can identify with. For example, if Christmas is approaching, you could use it as an opportunity to run a raffle. Or it could celebrate a milestone of the company, like an anniversary. What you choose will depend on your preference, but make sure the topic is creative and interesting. After all, you want people to join you in the celebration.

Establish the rules

The purpose of your Instagram draw here is to increase your fan numbers. Therefore, the entry rules could be as simple as following your account and labeling someone else in the comments. The easier you make it to enter your gift, the better.

Select a deadline

Having an appropriate deadline is important for your contest to be successful. Your focus should be on creating balance by choosing the time for your contest. Do not do it too long or people can forget it completely. And do not make it too short, since it eliminates the element of urgency.

Select a reward

Make this step simple and not complicated. The selection of a reward or a prize should not be made based on what you consider correct. Rather, choose one that is relevant to your small business.

Giving an iPad is a bad idea because it will attract everyone. Instead, tie the gift to your own space. You only want relevant and interested people to participate in the contest.

Watch your followers

Building an Instagram following is just one part of the equation. The other half is holding them back. What good is it to get more Instagram followers if you're just going to lose them quickly?

You want to closely monitor your Instagram followers in terms of how they are growing and how strongly they are interacting with your content. The last thing you want is for followers to lose interest in what you are publishing.

There are a number of free tools, such as Social Blade, that can help you analyze the growth of your followers along with information on how you are losing followers. Use them to save time and improve your Instagram marketing strategy. Creating an Instagram account if you have an Instagram business account, you should already have access to Instagram Analytics. Use this free tool to better understand your followers and get detailed information about their activity. It informs you everything from the number of people browsing your profile to which of your publications have high participation rates.

This information is valuable because it is personalized and you will not get it anywhere else. When you feel you have trouble creating an Instagram following or retaining your followers, you can use this data to see what needs to be corrected

You can also improve your social media content strategy by understanding which of your publications did well in terms of participation. It will allow you to publish better and proven content in the future and attract more followers.

It's time to start building a follow-up on Instagram

Now that you have the tools and know what to do, you can start to grow your brand and increase your reach on Instagram. If you really want to take your marketing efforts to the next level, consider hiring a Digital marketing company. Or maybe even launch Instagram advertising in your social media strategy.