Last year the Instagram community surpassed 500 million users. The second most used social platform is heavily populated by the younger generations, whose majority of users 55% are people between the ages of 18-29 . Of all the social media platforms Instagram is the easiest to use, personal and infinite in creative possibilities. This platform is not only great for marketing your business but fantastic for establishing and broadcasting your business’s personality. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are our tips on best practices for using Instagram effectively:
- ATTRACTIVE VISUALS – Visual appearance drives people on this platform. Color is super important; you want what you’re posting to be vibrant and distinct. Instagram and other second party apps such as Boomerang or Instagram Layout, can offer many different visual effects that can be applied to a photo/video to enhance visual aesthetics.
- ENGAGING CONTENT – The content you choose to post should appeal to what your audience wants from you. You need to remember to keep a good balance though between promotional and entertaining content. A few tips to increasing your audience’s engagement is to use hashtags, post a location and using photos as opposed to videos. Surprisingly on Instagram photos attract more responses than video posts do, at least for the time being.
- STAY INFORMED – Being up to date and aware of changes/additions to the platform are important. Our recommendation is to follow the official Instagram account to be aware of these modifications. Also be attentive to current social trends to help improve your content ideas. Some recent social trends for example would be the Harlem Shake, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the Running-man Challenge and most recently the Mannequin Challenge.
- CONSISTENCY – Now you don’t need to post every day, but you should post fairly regularly a few times a week minimal. More importantly every post should have a purpose in mind or tell a story to your audience. Definitely feel free to post more than this and even during non-working hours, just make sure what you are posting has a purpose and looks good.
Although the platform is solely based on its mobile app there is no need to fear. More and more people continue to switch to smart phones, which is the most common way people are accessing the internet in this modern era . As customer engagement continues to transition, the possibilities for growth of brand awareness exponentially increases.
