How to Use Instagram to Benefit Your Business

Everyone knows that Instagram has gained immense popularity in the past few years. According to Instagram, their social media presence currently brings with it over 800 million active users. Of those millions of people, over 500 million are on the platform on a daily basis. Instagram also has one of the most active and engaged user bases, above even Facebook and Twitter. But did you know that you can use it as a tool to benefit your business?

People love feeling connected, and with such a high engagement rate, this is the perfect place to build a relationship with current or new customers.  

Visual Content

Instagram is based on visual content, meaning you can only post images and videos. This is a great opportunity to build up your brand image and enforce familiarity with your logo or label.

It’s important to keep your Instagram content consistent with your brand image so you attract the right audience.

Groundwork Coffee maintains an Instagram feed that includes different type of coffee and pastries in order to attract those who enjoy cafés.

Nike posts athletic-related content in order to attract people who like sports.

Urban Outfitters posts their style of clothing and lookbooks. 

Hashtags and Location

Your business probably has a certain audience that you work to reach, like “coffee-lovers” or “college-students” or “people who live in Los Angeles”. You can use tools on Instagram, like hashtags and location, to target your audience specifically!

Hashtags serve as a way to sort pictures into categories that anyone can look through. To productively use hashtags, think of categories that you think your audience will be interested in. For example, if you’re targeting people who like going to the gym, you can use hashtags like #workoutmotivation #fitspo #gymlife, because they are likely to look through those hashtags.

Make sure to do some research on popular hashtags for your targeted audience in order to get the most out of your hashtags! Instagram only allows you to use up top 30 on each post, so make each one count!

Location is another way to organize posts. If you want to target an audience based on where they live or spend time, you can add a location to your post. For example, if you’d like to target students at a particular college, you can add that college as the location. Or, if you’d like to target people who go to the beach, you can add your local beach as the location.

Use Business Insights

Instagram provides you with great tools for understanding your audience and analyzing which of your posts are performing best. Make sure your account is set as a business page so you have access to all of this free data! You can learn which cities your followers are from, age groups, and gender. Instagram also collects data on the best times and days to post when your followers are most active, and then summarize each individual posts performance in likes, bookmarks, shares, and clicks.

Create a social media strategy

Consistency is key, so keep your brand messaging the same across all channels including social media. Plan out your weekly and monthly goals (whether that’s followers, likes, engagement rate) and then create a content schedule ahead of time to layout your overall campaign. Mad Mind Studios can help you manage your social media marketing so you can take advantage of your business’s potential on Instagram.