Since its launch in 2010 as a content-sharing platform, Instagram has grown tremendously to serve many purposes than just posting photos online. At present, it is widely used by governments, businesses of all sizes, and individuals to target their respective audiences and achieve desired goals. It provides an immense opportunity to connect with people on the internet, coming from varying demographics and psychographics. Besides, Instagram continues to introduce new features to support effective and more targeted communication. It is gaining increased popularity among marketers due to its better performance as compared to Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter for establishing brand images and selling products. Over 200 million businesses use Instagram for social media marketing due to its growing importance and effectiveness.
Joining Instagram to connect with friends and share life events is easy, but if you aim to grow your followers and boost engagement on your posts, you need to put some effort into understanding powerful tactics for marketing on Instagram. This article discusses four comprehensive and effective strategies that will guarantee an increase in followers, likes, and comments on your posts. But first, get a Cox high-speed internet connection for your home or office network for a smooth online experience.
Optimize Your Profile
An Instagram profile comprises many elements. The first element is the username. The username must be simple, meaningful, and implicative of the profile’s purpose. The next element is a profile picture. Without a profile picture, users tend to hesitate in trusting the account. If you are operating a business account, the ideal profile picture will be that of the business logo. The logo must be strong and meaningful. If the account is personal, you still need to choose an appropriate image that aligns with the image you intend to create in the audience’s minds. It must be in one of the following formats: JPEG, BMP, or PNG, and have dimensions of 110×110.
Next, write a well-articulated bio for the profile that concisely communicates the business’ mission and encourages the visitors on the profile to explore the content. The bio can also include a link to the business website or other important links to direct traffic to purchase platforms. Completing these steps will make your account more discoverable and easily reach the target audience.
Leverage Marketing Tools
Instagram provides the option to run sponsored ads. These ads are usually shown to the viewers in the stories and posts sections. The platform allows you to precisely define the segment of the audience that you intend to target, the number of people you want to reach, and the time at which the ads should be run. Instagram ads are cheaper as compared to YouTube or TikTok. Moreover, Instagram has a built-in Insights tool to help track and understand the engagement of your posts. The Insights tool can be accessed by clicking on the insights option under the profile tab. It provides detailed insights reports to evaluate the performance of each post. These reports should be used to articulate strategies and action plans to improve engagement on future posts.
Employ SEO Practices
Search engine optimization is a technique that determines the most frequently searched keywords on digital platforms to be integrated into captions, hashtags and profile bios. This makes your profile easily discoverable by increasing the ranking of your content when a user tries to search for something similar on Instagram. SEO establishes competition among accounts and gives an edge to the ones with more keywords. After keywords, Instagram ranks profiles based on likes, comments, shares, and followers. Therefore, greater engagement on posts will increase reach and ultimately garner greater engagement. Moreover, hashtags are an effective way to multiply the reach of your content because Instagram groups together different posts with the same hashtags and suggests content based on users’ interests. This again helps in reaching the target audience and delivering the message. For this, you may need to contact Cox Communications for a fast internet plan that works well for running your Instagram marketing campaigns.
Improve Your Content
Finally, being a marketer, you must tap into the behavior of the target audience on the platform. This can be done by monitoring their activity on your own or competitors’ posts to modify content and tailor it to their preferences. One effective technique is “social listening”, which involves reading comments and posts of the audience to understand their sentiments regarding various topics. This can help in better understanding the audience and taking data-driven decisions. Moreover, besides making changes in the content, improving its aesthetics can potentially lead to better performance. Users are becoming more conscious of the visual aspects of the content. Therefore, to make the brand resonate with the audience, it is important to make it visually appealing to them.
Post Consistently
Posting consistently is one of the most important things you can do to grow your Instagram following. Try to post at least once a day, and use a mix of different types of content such as images, videos, and stories. This will keep your followers engaged and help to increase your visibility.
Analyze Your Results
Finally, it’s important to keep track of your Instagram marketing efforts and analyze the results. Use Instagram’s built-in analytics tools to track your follower growth, engagement rates, and overall performance. This will help you to identify what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments as needed. One way to analyze your results is by using Instagram’s built-in analytics tools. Instagram Insights provides detailed information about your account’s performance, such as the number of followers, engagement rates, and reach. It also shows you the demographics of your audience, such as their age, gender, and location. This information can help you to understand your audience better and tailor your content to their interests.
Final Thoughts
Social media marketing is growing rapidly as small and large businesses recognize its potential and the opportunity cost of not adopting it. There are many techniques from EarthWeb to be employed to achieve individual or business goals via social media marketing. Even though the techniques are easy to adopt, marketers must find out what works best for them by trial and error.
