We recently welcomed Stephanie Onyeiwu to our team and are excited to share her first blog for Green Loop! A recent Butler graduate, Stephanie is a data-driven marketer with a passion for research and strategy. Look for more from Stephanie as you stay In the Loop!
Ninety percent of users on Instagram follow a brand or business account. As the consumption of media continues to rise, it is important for brands to stay current on the transformative aspects social media has to offer. By following some best practices on Instagram, you can boost your brand’s voice as a creative catalyst in the market.
These Instagram best practices allow you to magnify your content.
1.) Make a good first impression with a solid Instagram bio
Voices and personalization elevate content. When you’re creating an Instagram bio, make sure to keep it enticing with relevant keywords to attract new consumers and maintain an active audience.
Your bio can easily help your audiences understand what your business aims to achieve. Some ways to showcase your brand personality are using active language that helps paint an image for your target audiences. You have 150 characters to sum up the relevance of your business to target audiences. Motivate action by including the link to your website, adding hashtags, or incorporate a creative design to build rapport with your audience. Make sure your profile photo is relevant to your business and don’t forget to maximize your social account to your brand aesthetic!
2.) Put your best 9×9 face forward
The 9-picture grid is the first thing audiences see when they click on your profile. So it’s key to make sure these pictures give the best representation of who you are as a company, brand, or organization.
Whenever you post to your grid, focus on what you want your audience to be aware of at this moment in time.
This is the ideal time to get creative! Try different angles to approach your content, use a colorful aesthetic that matches your brand guidelines, or utilize the tools the platform has to offer. These tools can be anything from the filter, image collage, or brand colors of a photo that may enhance both the quality of your profile and cohesiveness of your online presence.
3.) Earn engagements by staying active
Monitoring and replying to comments is important and can help humanize your brand to target audiences. The goal here is to balance a certain level of authenticity with creativity. Staying active by commenting and staying up to date with Instagram trends could help your brand benefit in the long run.
Another way to increase engagement on Instagram is to make use of the Instagram story platform. Instagram stories are places when you can feature photos or videos for 24 hours. This can help you align your social media language with your business practice, and it gives you the opportunity to test and try new content styles.
4.) Know the difference between Instagram Live and IGTV
Instagram Live offers exclusive access to viewers from the perspective of your business or brand. Low fidelity content flourishes here! Low fidelity content on Instagram Live is best described as the translation of storytelling to designs that test the functionality of the visual appearance. Audiences can familiarize themselves with these designs digitally and in real-time at no cost.Additionally, Instagram Live is an authentic way to display current trends, challenges, or any other forms of interactive content. You can either integrate certain hashtags to fit in with trends or create brand activation strategies to motivate action!
A brand activation strategy is a way to develop customized integrated marketing content for consumers to bring the brand to life. Some examples of this include Coca Cola’s Share a Coke campaign, McDonalds’ limited edition Big Mac MacCoin campaign, and American Eagle’s #AEReal campaign to promote body positivity. It is a way to balance authenticity and creativity in order to gain both earned and owned media impressions. These activation strategies create lasting connections with target consumers.
IGTV, or Instagram TV, aims to have a similar platform as YouTube, where you can create a space for longer formatted videos. The platform allows you to engage with an audience by providing deeper connections through storytelling. This is another way to showcase your brand’s ecosystem! A brand ecosystem is the experience you design for your target audience. Building a brand ecosystem can be formed by defining the interconnected elements or touchpoints that connect your business to your audience’s lifestyle
5.) Regularly Review Your Analytics to Learn What Works Best for You
Always use data to inform future decisions. Taking action based on your analytics improve your overall marketing strategy and help you understand what drives engagement and influences action. In order to drive value to your Instagram business account, it’s important to think about Instagram profile analytics, Instagram audience analytics, and individual post analytics. Let’s break these down a bit more.
Instagram profile analytics
Instagram profile analytics help create an access to the insights and interpretation of your data. Utilizing profile analytics shows your weekly metrics highlighting some of the terms below:
Impressions – The number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not
Interactions – The amount of interactions with your account
Profile Visits – The amount of visits to your profile
Clicks to your page – The number of clicks on the link in your profile
Reach – The total number of people who see your content
Mentions– The amount of times your account’s @ handle is publicly used
These specific metrics help business profiles understand how to leverage your Instagram account for a mixture of storytelling and quantitative data.
Instagram audience analytics
Aligning your target audience with people who interact with your posts is crucial. There are multiple ways to gain insight from individuals. Being able to understand your target’s interests can certify whether you’re reaching your target audience on your Instagram account. Below are some of the categories Instagram has to help pursue and interact with your target audience.
Audience Location – this allows you to see the top cities from which your followers are currently interacting
Age Segmentation – Instagram sections off specific age ranges depending on your audience’s social media interaction
Gender – Here you will find your male or female follower interactions
Follower Activity – Instagram allows your business to analyze the average time of day your followers are online and their highest activity by day of the week
Individual post analytics
To see how your message resonates with your audiences, you may want to dive into your individual post analytics and use these as part of your follower brand awareness metrics. Your individual post analytics give brands the opportunity to infuse their personalities in an everyday platform. Below are some categories for individual post analytics.
Interactions – Actions taken directly from your post
Follows – Any type of new follower received from your post
Reach – The amount of accounts reached
Saves – The amount of times someone saves your individual posts
Comments – These are the comments each post receives by your online audience.
Optimizing your post analytics gives your brand the opportunity to get ahead of a variety of audiences or increase the exposure of your current target market.
One of the best things about Instagram is that you are able to build a relationship with your target audiences by educating or entertaining them based on societal influences! This helps your customers feel like they are a part of the brand. Get ready to build your audience and let us know which method worked best for you!
