Instagram is a crucial place to build your audience, solidify your brand, and make connections to further your career.
Here we look at the best tips and tricks that will allow you to navigate the ultra-competitive world of Instagram.
Post less, engage more!
If you are posting too often, the likelihood is you will get social media burn out! It will actually put people off and you risk decreasing your followers. Most successful Instagram marketers post on their main grid at least a couple of times a week but then will load more content onto stories. You also need to be engaging more! To grow your followers you can either take a passive or active approach. For active strategies, focus on engagement in the comments, and collaborations with other Insta profiles. For passive strategies, you can use hashtags and shareable posts. Let your followers grow your profile for you by sharing your hashtags and engaging posts (the paper airplane icon). A mix of the two strategies often works best and as long as you are engaging, then you are on the right track.
Make posts more conversational.
What's the best way to turn a regular post into a conversation? The answer is simply to take that post and turn it into a question; on Instagram, that’s the caption! For example, if you post about the perfect cappuccino you just drank in your favourite cafe, ask your audience in the caption where they like to sit and relax with a hot drink? You can also use Instagram stories really effectively for dialogue by creating emoji slider polls, question stickers, etc. At the bottom of every story, you can DM the person who posted it so encourage your followers to do just that! This feature is built for conversation!
Use the right hashtags.
Make sure you are paying attention to “relevant” hashtags to your brand or industry. They also need to be specific as something too broad won’t get you any real exposure and you won’t see any results and you will get lost in the pages of competition. Likewise, something too small and you will not have many people searching for them. You need to find your sweet spot which in a lot of industries is a hashtag showing around 10,000 searches. Do your research ahead of posting and make sure you choose hashtags that will give you growth but also a connection.
Plan more.
Sure the platform suggests everything should be “instant” but this really isn't the case for effective Instagram marketing. Most posts should be thought out and planned in advance. You need a strategy for clear growth. You may have taken the ideal photo that will promote what you do best, however, if you have already posted in the last day or two something very similar, save it and post when it will achieve the most impact.
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