Why Use Instagram?
Like everyone else you have a FaceBook page. You know you are not into Twitter, and Pinterest doesn’t float your boat. But what about Instagram as another platform to engage your demographic?
Instagram has over 1,000 million users and, given it was mobile first, 50% visit daily given the ease with which to check what’s going on. Not so surprisingly, 68% are under 35. In addition, over 25 million businesses use Instagram and over 80% of Instagram accounts follow a business. So you do the math.
Instagram is a visual platform that, unlike Facebook, is hashtag intensive. The idea is you post a photo, give it a caption, assign some hashtags and you’re done. All from your phone. Then hopefully your followers will like and/or comment and hey you’ve got “engagement” that might generate more followers and more engagement, organically growing your account.
Say you are a hairdresser. You could take a photo of a customer and post their new do (with their permission of course).
Or you are a chef, so you could post a photo of a dish you just prepared.
But what if you are an accountant? You’re not going to post a photo of someone’s tax return! So what to do?
Well people are clever. They can take a tool and work out alternative ways to use it. So many businesses, like us, use custom graphics to actually post text messages.
There are tools like Canva that can make that effort less intensive. Or there are people like us who can do it all for you.
Some of the unspoken rules of Instagram are:
- Your page has to look aesthetically pleasing. To understand that think of a collage of photos in a three * three grid. They need to look like they go together. At least, they need to not jar. So that takes a bit of skill to achieve.
- You need to provide interesting captions for your image because this is about entertainment but not about prose.
- You need to use appropriate hashtags because people follow hashtags as well as accounts and without them you miss picking up new followers.
It takes some planning and it takes effort to implement.
The good thing is you can replicate what you do on Instagram automatically on Facebook so the effort is to use both platforms is not doubled in terms of the posting. You just have to put more time into planning and preparation. It can be fun and we provide services to coach people in how to do this. But the fun can also wear off so we also provide services where we do it all for you.
If you are on Facebook then there is really no reason to not be on Instagram as well. It is after all where your (future) customers are.
