Instagram For Business: How To Increase Your Page Engagement

Instagram keeps making everyone feel warm and fuzzy inside. The poster child of social media, it can seemingly do no wrong. And don’t worry, we’re not going to say it has done anything wrong.

It has, however, been a little problematic for some businesses, who find building engagement on the platform tricky. It’s a such a big space now that it can seem like you’ve missed the boat a little.

With seemingly every single business on the planet having an Instagram Business page, how can you possibly hope to compete?

Use Hashtags

That’s right, hashtags are where it’s at. They aren’t used well by every business on the planet, but if you remember one thing about them on Instagram, it’s that you can post a hell of a lot of hashtags and no-one will think it’s a bad thing.

In fact, Instagram is the one place where you can hashtag to your heart’s content. Take the opportunity and maximise it by finding as many hashtags as you possibly can. There are surely hundreds that are linked to what you do, and it’s important that you get as many as you can up there without seeming spammy.

There is one good reason for this. People will find you. It’s all super-dependent on you finding the right hashtags though, so some testing will have to take place.

Bear in mind that hashtags are more than welcome (in their multitudes) on Instagram, and you have a perfect way to get started on building up your Business page.

Get Out There

This is now more important than ever. If you want to make the most of the business presence on Instagram, you need to promote it as much as possible. This means taking a look at the rest of your social media and ensuring that it is spreading the word.

There are many ways to use social media for cross-promotion, and the simplest one is simply linking to your business page. This way, people will click on that link and see your feed. However, all of this will happen only if you make sure that you consistently promote the Instagram account on all of your other social media networks. If you’re not doing this, people simply don’t know that you’re there. And all of that awesome content will go to waste.

Quality First

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is posting photographs that are of low quality. This is simply something that you cannot afford to do. Instagram is an incredibly visual medium, and you need to make sure that you are not only being visual but that you are being visual in the most exciting and dynamic way.

This is the time to put some budget into it. An inexpensive camera will bring you some of the best shots around, and it’s important that you focus on creating visual content that impresses. Remember, it’s your brand-face that is on display, so it has to look absolutely impeccable.

Contests

Tried and tested, this will literally bring engagement to the business profile because the audience will get involved. A good contest is always appreciated on social media, so making this a regular part of your Instagram work makes perfect sense.

Contest prizes need to be valuable of course. But this doesn’t mean they have to be expensive, and it’s worth putting the time into finding a cost-effective solution that doesn’t break the bank. This way, you are able to hold a few contests and get more engagement from the audience.

On top of this, using hashtags to promote such contests means that you’re able to get things moving relatively quickly. People will see your contest details with hashtags, and the engagement will start to build relatively speedily.

Be Regular

This piece of advice will never go away. It is vitally important that your audience knows that you’re posting on a regular basis. If you’re not posting every day, we think there is an issue, so that is very much worth thinking about.

With Instagram, the audience may even decide that it’s not worth following you. This can be a direct result of posting on a haphazard basis. So get the Instagram thing into your social media routine, and as a marketer, understand that your audience needs to see you showing up as much as is possible.

Use The Business Suite

We can call it a ‘suite’, and there are plenty of apps and tools that your business or clients can get involved in. Particularly useful are the different advertising tools, and that is a major plus, in that the options from Instagram are not only reasonably priced but also incredibly effective. But some businesses just don’t use them.

Er…advertise

The budget has to be spent, and we can wholeheartedly recommend that you spend a sensible amount of money on advertising. It is the backbone of social media, and if you’re not spending significant amounts on ads, you’re going to be left behind.

Test the ads though. If things aren’t working out as you want them to after a few weeks, switch it around a bit, and use one of the many ad formats Instagram offers to test what you’re coming up with.

Those are just some of the ways you can use Instagram Business Pages to your advantage. It may be a saturated arena, but some good choices and a focus on making sure that your audience is catered for should see some good returns coming your way.

Do you know what is happening with your brand on Instagram? Do you know how your social accounts are doing? Take out a free seven day trial of Locowise and get control back.