Instagram is a fundamental resource for reaching and creating relationships with your audience. However, there are some rules to follow to make the most of this social network and obtain tangible benefits.
Do you need to open an Instagram account for your company? Follow our guide to get started on the right foot!
Short story and success of Instagram
It is undeniable that Instagram has been one of the social networks that has achieved incredible success in a relatively short time. The proof is given by the fact that the platform was born in October 2010 and was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for a billion dollars.
On closer inspection Mark Zuckerberg has made a completely prudent choice, given that the value of Instagram, according to a research conducted by Bloomberg , in 2018 amounted to 100 billion dollars.
A few Instagram numbers?
– 22.3 million users;
– it is the 4th social network in Italy after Facebook, Youtube and Whatsapp;
– 36% of users love to see the contents of the brands they follow;
– 18% of users want to discover other brands similar to their tastes;
– users range from 13 to 55 years ( source );
It is therefore an opportunity to be seized for anyone who wants to communicate on the web, but it must be done carefully. Then follow our tips to start setting up your communication on Instagram.
How to start communicating on Instagram: first steps and tips
We want to make a small clarification before starting our guide: this series of tips is aimed at those who have never communicated on this social network and must start from scratch. If, on the other hand, your profile is in a more advanced state, perhaps you are looking for ways to increase your followers, we will give you this more information later. However, we hope that you will find useful information, so here is our list.
1) Understand what Instagram is
Basic rule: understand the reasons for Instagram’s success and you will understand how to exploit it . The questions to ask are: what do people prefer to see? Why do they love this social network? What levers must my company act on to increase its notoriety?
Reconnecting us to one of the key concepts of social media marketing: put the user and not your company at the center !
2) Work out the strategy
It is not enough to “be there”, you have to plan ! One of the first things to do is to think about the goal you want to achieve from Instagram by developing a strategy and then ask yourself some questions such as:
– do I want to bring more traffic to my website?
– do I want to increase my sales?
– do I want to increase my presence on social networks?
– do I want to generate relationships with my audience?
These questions are fundamental to choose what type of post to do, what tone to choose, the subject of the images we are going to share and so on …
3) Optimize the profile
Think carefully about how to optimize your profile description. You will have little space to describe who you are and why people will have to follow you, be brief and effective! Just like the example that we report
4) Open a corporate account
In a first phase you can easily open your Instagram account as described here to start understanding how it works, but then we strongly advise you to switch to a company profile to make the most of the potential and tools dedicated to advertising or to access advanced statistics.
5) Quality visual content
Instagram is based entirely on the power of images, if you want to use it know that you will have to create original and quality visual content . This means that you will have to devote time and probably also monetary resources.
Some advice?
– create images that are consistent with each other;
– do not upload poor quality images, they convey little professionalism;
– try to always use the same colors or the same filters, perhaps that connect to the main color of your logo or in any case included in a “coherent” communication.
You will have to continually study how to be effective, communicative and evocative with images consistent with the text and message you are creating.
Let’s pretend to be a clothing and accessories brand with an age target between 14 and 30, therefore very young. An example of quality visual content, with the same filter and also with different types of posts (some visual and others more textual) could be this:
We are faced with evocative images, in high definition, the predominant color is the color of the skin, all tones are clear or tend towards this goal.
6) Instagram is different from Facebook!
Closely related to point 5, keep in mind that Instagram is completely different from Facebook . There are different logics and dynamics, just think of the fact that the famous hashtags on Instagram make sense, on Facebook they don’t! Indeed they could worsen the readability of a post and negatively affect those who follow you! The size of the photos in the posts are totally different too! On Facebook you should use a photo of 940×788 px, on Instagram the optimal size is 1080×1080 px
7) Hashtags are important
Still talking about hashtags, they are created to “give character to a post” and to ensure that it can be seen by a greater number of users. Before publishing a post, try to understand which are the most popular hashtags and those most in line with your message. An example? If you have a profile of a restaurant in Abruzzo and you publish a photo of a typical dish, you could try, before publishing the post, to which hashtags this dish can be linked such as #Abruzzo #ristorante #recipe #piattotipico #buonappetito #food etc …
8 ) Don’t cheat with apps to grow your page
Perhaps you have stumbled upon articles that talk about applications that allow you to grow your page in a dizzying way … Just like in the last Facebook article, we absolutely do not recommend buying these apps or these services ! Indeed, Instagram seems to be even more strict than Facebook on this front. Man forewarned …
9) Study of the public
Study the tastes and behaviors of your audience to produce content in line with your audience and users . Surely the followers will come naturally! How to do? Here are some tips:
– study the competition : are you aware of your competitors’ profiles? Well, among what they publish what gets the most success? But above all: what can differentiate you from them ? Remember that Instagram can help make your brand unique and original;
– hashtags : to search for successful content, start with a hashtag that could be used for your post. What subjects or objects are associated with this hashtag? With what messages? What tone is used?
– try to understand the best times ;
– try to understand the posts with a high rate of engagement : what are the posts that push people to react positively? Which ones lead to comments? Which ones push people to tag others?
10) The “stories”, the videos, the IGTV: certainly of interest to your users!
source of the photo: https://blog.crowdfireapp.com/
Finally, we tell you right away that you should think, in addition to visual content, also of multimedia content such as videos . People love to watch videos and the social network itself gives ample space to this format.
As evidence of this, there are two very special post formats.
The “ stories ” are contents that can be both photos and videos, they give a feeling of interactivity and movement and have a peculiarity: they can be seen for 24 hours. They can be embellished with writings, lines, tags and much more.
The IGTV is the TV of Instagram dedicated to very long video content. It is divided into 4 “sections”
– For you;
– People you follow;
– Popular;
– Chronology.
For now we do not delve into IGTV , but it is useful to talk about it because it is not unlikely that Instagram will give it more and more space.
These are our 10 tips to start developing and using Instagram for your business and brand! We give you an appointment at the next article! Do you want to stay up to date? Sign up for our newsletter!
