Depending on your audience, Instagram marketing is a great way to get the word out about your business. As someone who loves Instagram for both personal and business reasons, it’s also a lot of fun.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve grown my Instagram following from 700 followers to over 13,500 followers. I’ve also learned a thing or two about what makes for an engaging feed. Of course, these are based on my experiences using Instagram marketing for my own business. As with all social media marketing techniques, a lot of this is about experimenting to see what fits. Here are a few places you can start.
Use photos of yourself.
One thing I notice about Instagram is how much people love photos of other people. For example, every time I post a picture of myself, there is far more engagement than if I post a picture of, let’s say, a building.
The photos of yourself don’t need to be professional either. One of my highest performing posts as of late is terrible quality with very little lighting. It was taken with an iPhone during a networking event and yet it still performs well.
Use real photos.
Through my Instagram marketing experiments, I noticed how people like real photos more than they like graphics. For example, if I post a real photo of myself with a caption related to a blog post, it will get more engagement (and traffic) than a professionally made graphics. In fact, graphics with text referring to a blog post are some of the lowest performing posts on my feed.
Use quote graphics.
In addition to real photos, quote graphics are also a great way to get some engagement with your Instagram marketing. In particular, I find that inspirational and witty quote graphics get the best performance.
Another option for quote graphics is to use screenshots of your tweets. These also perform well and all you need to do is take a screenshot and resize it with a tool like Canva.
Get a decent camera.
I recently purchased a camera for the first time in my blogging career. I wanted to see if image quality affects how people react to images on Instagram. Every single image I post that was taken with a better-quality camera has gotten high engagement in the form of likes and comments.
Even though I actually bought a good camera, you don’t have to. The cameras on smartphones are getting better with each upgrade.
Use photo apps to make your pictures pop.
A big part of Instagram marketing is knowing what apps to use to edit your photos. While you may be able find a few for Android, the truth is iPhone apps are better known for this. In particular, you’ll want to check out Snapseed and VSCO for editing and Mosaic for planning and scheduling your Instagram feed.
Write killer captions.
Captions can get you pretty far with Instagram marketing. Remember how I said one of my most popular photos isn’t that great? Well, the caption is fantastic. I have found that telling small stories and inspiring others gets a lot of attention. Just remember to add a call to action at the end of posts.e
Final Thoughts
Instagram marketing has been wonderful for driving traffic to my website, engaging with my audience and adding people to my sales funnel. However, it took some time of experimenting to see what worked for me.
