Grow Your Business on Instagram

Used correctly, Instagram can be a highly-targeted, visual advertising channel for your brand. In fact, in a recent study it was discovered that Instagram provides brands with 25% more engagement over other social platforms. This mean that Instagram is a prime channel to build your brand for your ecommerce business.

Like any social network out there, there are right ways to use it, wrong ways to use it, and clever ways to use it.

Use The Right Hashtags

Your goal on Instagram is to engage your current audience while also growing your following. Posting new, interesting and engaging photos will satisfy the first requirement but to begin growing you’ll find hashtagging your photos to be extremely important. Hashtagging your photos makes it easy for people to find your photos that are searching for those specific terms. If you want to tag your photos properly, you’ll need to find and use the most relevant hashtags. This means doing the appropriate keyword research to make sure you’re using the most relevant hashtags that not only describes your brand, but is also being searched for on Instagram.

Use The Right Filters

Keyword hashtags aren’t the only thing you should pay attention to. The Instagram community respond to certain photo filters more favorably than others. Using these preferred filters can have an impact on your engagement.

Here are the 10 current most popular filters on Instagram according to Populagram:

Normal (No Filter)
Valencia
Earlybird
X-Pro II
Amaro
Rise
Hudson
Lo-fi
Hefe
Sierra

Post On The Right Days And Time

Beyond adding the appropriate hashtags and using the best filters, you should also be considering the timing of your posts. A targeted approach is to analyze what has and has not worked for you in the past.You may want to consider using a scheduling program to schedule your post. For that, you can use a program like ScheduGram.

Steal Your Competitors Followers

One of the best ways to find and attract new following is by seeking out your closest competitors’ Instagram accounts and engaging with their audience. These people have already shown some level of interest in the products you carry simply by following your competitors’ account.

So how do you effectively steal your competitors’ followers?

You can steal your closest competitors’ followers by engaging with them. There are several ways to engage with Instagram users, and predictably, the more work you put in, the more followers and return engagement you’ll get out of it.

The three types of engagement on Instagram are:

Follow a user
Like a photo
Comment on a photo

Sponsored Posts And Product Reviews

All this optimized posting to your account is great but if you really want to make an impact, you need to post to other, larger accounts in your niche, exposing your brand to a wider audience.

So how do you do that?

First, unlike the tactics above to grow your account this one isn’t free. However, if done correctly, it’s good value. To get started, you’ll need to make a list of large accounts in your niche. For example, if you sell beauty products, you’ll want to find large accounts from beauty bloggers.

You may already be following these accounts, if not you’ll need to find them. When you do a search for your keywords, not only will it show you the related keywords, but it also shows you the top Instagram accounts that feature those keywords.

If used correctly, Instagram can be a highly-targeted, visual advertising channel for your products and brand that can lead to a healthy stream of revenue for your ecommerce business.

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