6 Facts you need to know to grow your Instagram Business

6 Facts you need to know to grow your Instagram Business

With the current Covid-19 pandemic and a lot of people losing their jobs, this will be a perfect time to jump onto the Instagram Business train to take advantage of the platform and promote yourself or products online.

with over 1 billion active users every month, Instagram is quickly becoming the most popular social media platform to promote business and products. In the beginning, Instagram used to be just a photo-sharing platform, however, the platform has proven to be a perfect place to do business and reach targeted customers.

In this post, I present 6 Facts you need to know to grow your Instagram page.

Target Audience

In order to make money on Instagram, the first thing you need to take into account is the type of followers you build. Before you start an Instagram business, you need to have a target audience. For instance, you can’t sell gadgets to followers who are mostly interested in ladies’ products. If most of your followers are people who are interested in gadgets, it will be difficult to get sales from them if you sell or promote products related to fashion. While you build your Instagram page, get a clear goal, and target. Know the niche you want to go into and tailor most of your content and #hashtags towards that interest group.

People do not like to follow Instagram Business pages

One thing I have noticed is that most people do not like to follow pages that are set up purposely to sell. Am one of them. When I stumble upon an Instagram page, the first thing I look out for is: who owns this page and what is this page about. When the page is mostly packed with products and items, I skip that page completely.

Make sure your page appear personal, if possible, post more of your personal photos and then once in a while throw in one or two products with a good caption. One trick that some people adopt is that they create two pages, one for personal, and the other solely for products. If you take a closer look at the screenshot above, it’s clear that the personal pages receive more followers than the business page.

Hashtags

I believe you have heard a lot about hashtags but probably do not know the importance of it. Posting a photo on Instagram without a hashtag is like hiding your photo album under your living room table.

Those people outside your room will never see your photos except those who are already in your room. To get new people to come to your room to view your photo album and possibly become a fan, you need to inform them. This is where hashtags come in. Instagram hashtags give your photo better exposure and inform people around the world to come and join your fan base. If you post a photo about fashion, you could use some hashtags like #fashion, #style, #stylish, #wear, #ghanawear, #ghanafashion, etc.

If you don’t have any idea what kind of hashtags to add to your photos, there are a lot of apps that can suggest hashtags to you based on the items in your photo. [wpdiscuz-feedback id=”6lwa9xds6y” question=”Do you want me to write an article and suggest some of these apps? Please comment” opened=”0″]With these kinds of apps, all you need to do is upload the photo you want to post in the app, and it will suggest some hashtags to you.[/wpdiscuz-feedback]

Planning and Consistency

Before you post anything on Instagram, it will make sense to plan ahead. In order to attract the attention of users and get them to visit your page, your photo needs to be of good quality and with style.

Millions of photos are posted on Instagram on a daily basis and it’s likely you are not the only one targeting certain hashtags of audience. The only difference you can make is to post quality photos and be consistent.

Being consistent means, you have particular days and time that you post your content on the platform. The most striving Instagram pages post at least 3 photos a day. Getting 3 photos to post daily may be a problem for some people. In this case, you can decide to post 1 photo a day, or at least twice a week.

With this consistency and the use of hashtags and, your photo has a better chance of getting in front of the line and getting seen by your target audience. Also make it a point to post more photos than videos, as photos turn to get more engagement than videos.

Comment and like other people’s photos

Hashtags are an important feature to get your photos to your target audience. Commenting and liking other people’s photos can also boost your visibility and attract them to also visit your page and comment, like, or possibly follow when they like what you are doing.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. This strategy works like a charm. Find hashtags that relate to your target audience and follow those hashtags. Eg: #ghanagirl, #style #shoeaddict, #ghana #accra #kumasi. Every time someone posts their photo on Instagram and add that hashtag, you will see it in your feed. Spend at least 30min a day commenting and liking these photos, you will be amazed how they will return the favor and comment on yours. The trick is to get people to visit your page to see what you are up to. Once they are on your page, the likelihood of following your page is high especially if you have very interesting photos on your page.

Unique visual style

Make it a point to use the same filter and style for your content. Your page looks organized when you have a unique style of posting content and it can tell your visitor how well you plan before posting.

Best practice to follow:

1. If you own the photo: Caption, 5 dots, hashtags
2. If you don’t own the photo: Caption, 1 dot, credit to the owner, 5 dots, hashtags

Some people prefer to give credit to the content owner at the bottom. Everything is up to you to generate your own unique style and remember to stick with it throughout. You can also tag other Instagram pages at the bottom after your hashtags.

Conclusion

In conclusion, never set your Instagram page to private if you intend to do business with it. Setting your account to private can discourage people from following your page. There are a lot of tools available that you can use to help boost your page and gain followers but that will be discussed later.

A lot of people have created successful businesses out of their Instagram pages and so can you. What you need to do is have a clear goal and be consistent.

Leave your comments below, what do you think about these facts?  🙂

Source: GhanaPlus.com