At one time it seemed like everyone was turning to Snapchat. Today, Instagram makes influencers say “Snapchat, who?” With a powerful partnership with Facebook and an easy and intuitive platform for sharing photos, Instagram was made for snacky and informative content. But how YOU Instagram matters for your business. Here’s a general primer on Instagram marketing, so your company can get ahead of the Instagram formula.
What is Instagram?
Instagram is an almost entirely mobile social sharing platform for photos and videos. Instagram encourages users to share photos and videos with captions to create a rich ecosystem of visual media. It restricts linking so that photos and videos are the primary focus.
For those who are using Instagram as a social marketing tool, that makes for an interesting challenge. Marketers frequently ponder how to make their messaging fit in an image window, or how to write successful captions without directing people to links.
Still, with 1 billion Instagram users worldwide, it’s important to learn how to use the tool, how it’s similar to its parent company, Facebook, and in what ways it is different.
A Brief Introduction to Algorithms: The Instagram Formula
Instagram has a sophisticated algorithm. In its inception, some users may remember a reverse chronological appearance to posts. But in 2016, Instagram’s algorithm got a makeover. Experts at Facebook believed that a change in the algorithm would help your content be seen by more people. While fans of Instagram lamented the algorithm change, the improvements for business are:
- Your posts will be seen by accounts who interact with you the most.
- Your posts will be prioritized to users by interest.
- Your timeliest posts will be prioritized for users surfing Instagram at that time
Business owners can draw key takeaways from this algorithm update. First, interaction is a key to success. In very simple terms, you need to use Instagram, not just post to it. When you engage on the posts of your followers, you build trust with your brand. But you also offer more opportunities to engage with potential customers, and trigger the algorithm toward showing your posts more frequently.
Tip: Spend one hour a day commenting and liking followers posts on Instagram.
Secondly, like Google’s search algorithm, what you post is important. Instagram wants to serve the right content to the right users. If you want your posts to be seen you need to post good content. That means driving engagement by creating posts your audience wants to see. Some types of winning instagram posts include long-form captions on photos and videos, or short and mysterious captions with interesting and enticing photography, offering education, asking questions, sharing memes and more.
Tip: If you share memes, make them yourself so they are specific to your audience. Then, be sure to put your @ handle and custom hashtag on the image in case it gets shared around.
Finally, timing is everything. Marketers often talk about the importance of posting on social media at the right times. On Instagram, when you post can directly impact who sees it, immediately. If you are up posting at 3 am, but your audience won’t be around until 10 am, by the time they log on and start scrolling your post has long since been buries.
Tip: Don’t look to marketers to find out when to post, find out by understanding the needs and preferences of your unique target market.
Spotting Fake Instagram Followers
On the flipside of marketing, having a marketing presence on the Instagram platform leads to more opportunities for fake followers that reduce your audience quality. Fake followers are promotional bots and accounts created to collect likes. If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, you’ve probably noticed awkward, almost daily fluctuations in your followers. It’s not that your content isn’t engaging, it’s that marketing accounts will robo-follow hundreds of accounts in a day to get likes of their own and then unfollow within days or weeks when their like goals are met.
These accounts usually aren’t harmful or menacing but they do inadvertently decrease engagement on your posts, and quite frankly, it’s a rude strategy. To spot fake Instagram followers:
- Look at the profile for number of followers, posts and amount of engagement: Accounts with lots of follows but few followers and only a handful of posts are more likely to be fake.
- Accounts that leave generic emojis or “that’s great” type comments on three or four photos in a row is likely a bot or someone trying to gain support on the platform who doesn’t have much to offer in terms of social media equity for your brand.
There’s much to consider when embarking on a marketing campaign with Instagram. But if you’re a small business owner, like me, you don’t have to go it alone. Stay tuned to my website for the latest in Instagram tips and education. I’ll be rolling out courses geared at helping you become an influencer, starting with how to get your loved ones to shoot straight photos. Who knows where the road will take us. Join my mailing list to stay up to date on the latest education and photography from me, Kristina Maness. Fill out the form here!