Instagram is an incredibly useful tool for businesses – big or small. Regardless of what your goals are, knowing how to effectively engage with your existing audience will help you to expand your business. Let’s explore a number of ways you can use Instagram to grow your business…
- Follow and interact with potential customers
A simple way to do this is to look at businesses which are similar to yours and follow and interact with people who follow them. However, you don’t want to spam or annoy anyone as this can hurt your brand instead of help grow it. It is important to take time to form genuine connections with your followers and intended audience.
- Create content that will appeal to your target audience
Once you know your target audience it is important to do some research in order to know what content you need to create in order to increase engagement on your Instagram. You can look at your competitors pages to see what posts work for them and then use this to help inspire your own posts.
- Post high-quality, aesthetically pleasing photos
This may sound daunting for a small business but all you need to create good quality content is an iPhone camera! To improve the quality of your photos you should use natural light and learn how to edit on photo editing apps – there are many out there (free one’s too!) so this is an important skill in order to make your photos look more professional and aesthetically pleasing.
- Offer discounts and run competitions
Offering discounts and promoting this through your Instagram is a great way to get people more interested in your product and likely to buy what you are advertising. As well as this, running competitions will give followers the chance to tag friends, follow your account and share the post to their story.
- Post consistently
Maintaining a regular posting schedule is highly important as it means you are more likely to show up on your follower’s feeds. Instagram’s algorithm tends to monitor what users like and engage with; therefore, the content users see and interact with the most is more likely to consistently appear at the top of Instagram users’ feeds. As people can’t like what they don’t see, posting regularly means you are more likely to appear on people’s feeds and increase engagement since it will be your posts that are most visible to your intended audience.
So, there you have it – 5 simple, but extremely effective tips to help you grow your brand using Instagram! Although it may seem like a huge and overwhelming platform at first, once you break it down all it takes is some time to research what your audience wants to see, engage with potential customers and produce consistent content, and Instagram will be invaluable for your business!
Written by Millie Bateman
If you have a business registered under 42 months within the Liverpool City Region – Enterprise Hub can support you! get in touch on enterprisehub@thewo.org.uk
