How to Get Started with Instagram for Business?

All of us must have heard about Instagram, one of the most popular social platforms for photo-sharing.

It isn’t just limited to people sharing pictures about what’s fun in their lives but also a platform to showcase their talents. Lately, many people, as well as small businesses, are considering this platform to reach out to a vast majority of audiences. It works on different levels - from getting ideas to selling products. When it comes to business, one needs a strategy for marketing that wouldn’t just promote products and services but also increase the sales on Instagram. 

How do we use Instagram for business? 

Step 1 - Creating a Business Account on Instagram 

It's essential that you start your account with the business profile feature of Instagram. It will provide you access to unique features that would make your journey to use this platform for your business even smoother. 

For that, you need to get to your profile and press the three bars in the upper right-hand corner. From there go to Settings, and select “switch to business profile”. After that you can go ahead and add on all the details about your business - the name of the company, good profile picture, URL to the websites, and catchy & short description/biography. Make sure to connect as many other platforms as possible with your Instagram business account. 

Step 2 - Acquaint Yourself with the Commonly used Instagram Terms

For instance, the most commonly used Hashtag (#)  that's used to index words or short sentences. 

The other common terms to know are - highlights, followers, follow DMs, or direct messages. 

With the basics nailed, let's move on to other important things to consider while making your brand-new business account professional. 

• Make sure that the pictures that you use to promote your business are visually pleasing. You need to take a good amount of time making sure that the picture you put up portrays a nice image of your business
• Use one of the best features of Instagram “Hashtags.” It makes the user easy to find you while they are scrolling for related content. It’s clickable and can be searched easily thus making it a very effective tool for your brand promotion. With a limit of 30 hashtags set by Instagram, make sure you use it wisely. Focusing on quality rather than quantity is a good way to go. Keep experimenting to find out what method works for you.
• Interact with other Instagram users especially your followers by liking a photo that they post or by commenting on it. It adds a personal touch. You can also use the tagging feature to tag other users to interesting posts.
• The very recent addition of streaming live video is a great way to connect with your followers. You can answer questions they would have regarding your project or showcase a new product launch.
• Instagram stories are also one of the most popular features of this platform. The stories which can be either a picture or a video 

What Else You Can Do?

1.    Use the analytic tool to track success or results -  There are many Instagram analytical tools available to help brands optimize their contents by analyzing and figuring out what the audience is looking for. Here are a few of the best Instagram analytics tools –

A) Instagram insights – built-in insights into this channel. It’s great to have an in the general idea of how your business is performing. It’s easy to compare among your posts which one was the best and thus helps you figure out what works for you. Some metrics you can use to sort are – reach, likes, shares, comments, website clicks, etc.

B) brand watch consumer research can be used as a powerful Instagram analytics tool. It can be used to track and analyze accounts that aren’t owned by you, thus making it easier to find your position compared to your competitors. 

2.   Run ads if required for the specific product: Businesses can use this platform to advertise, with three main formats to do so.

A) Photo ads: photos with sponsored label on it. Clicking on the learn more button right at the bottom of the picture to provide the audience with more information about your product.

B) Video ads: Videos with sponsored label on it.

C) Carousel ads: Identical to photo ads but with multiple photos can be swiped through.

3.  Promoting account on other channels: You can use other handles like twitter, Facebook, etc to promote your channel. 

4.  Work with Instagram influencers: Research and explore to find out which influencer fits well with your product and reach out to them

5.  Keep posting regularly to keep the audience engaged

6.  Create a well thought of an interesting biography. In it explain what your business is all about and how to do your function and cater to the audiences.

Wrap Up!

Instagram may be one of the most popular tools for photo-sharing, but if used correctly, it can be a powerful tool for social media marketing. In this article, we have tried to cover certain points that showed how to use Instagram correctly for business and then, we have also covered the importance of hashtags, analytics, live video, stories for effective Instagram marketing. 

With this, I will end this article & I will hope that you can use some of these points to enhance your Instagram marketing for your business. Meanwhile, if you think that we have missed something, then please do share in the comment section below.