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Social Media Marketing is about reaching your potential customers and invoking a change in their behaviour and giving them a call to action. The only way to truly make that shift in perception is to be where people are engaging and spending their time. So why are so many business owners reticent to engage with the platform?
Instagram – The History.
Instagram launched in October 6th in 2010 solely for IOS, on this day 25,000 users downloaded and used the free app. The timing was perfect as the IPhone 4 was just arriving with it’s ground-breaking point and shoot camera. Within 3 months Instagram had 1 million users, in January 2011, Instagram added hashtags to help users discover both photographs and each other. On April 3, 2012, Instagram was released for Android phones running the 2.2 Froyo version of the OS and it was downloaded more than one million times in less than one day.
Instagram – The Stats:
In 2015 Instagram overtook Twitter in terms of global users (300m on Instagram, and 280m on Twitter). In January this had risen to 400 Million Monthly Active Users with 17 million of these in the U.K. (Facebook has 35M, Twitter has 15M) More than than 75 million users use the platform daily! 59% of global users are female and 90% are 35 or younger!
At InstaSocial we offer Business Social Media Strategy Plans, training and content management for StartUps, SME’s and Corporates, we always include Instagram within our services, yet it is the platform which business owners are least engaged with – even if they are personally using the platform! So we began to drill-down into the reason behind this and found that their were a number of overwhelming reasons for the lack of engagement.
#1 Cannot Switch between a personal and business account
Overwhelmingly the main issue for users is that they could not swop between using a personal account and a business account. Well Instagram have rememdid this in Febrary 2016 – click here to see how to do this!
#2 It Only Works if You Sell Visual Products
This is one of the main misconceptions, which doesn’t make it any more real. Selling ‘unsexy’ products or being a service provider isn’t a reason to not share photos. Rather, it should be seen as an incentive to get even more creative. The goal for these companies is to find valuable, compelling, or entertaining images to share with their audience.
Since these companies cannot show products, what can they show on Instagram?
Make your brand’s Instagram page more personal by including your employees in your posts. Share pictures of your team members hard at work or having fun at company outings. Doing so will show your customers and followers that you care about and appreciate your employees, and it will make them feel like they can really get to know your brand and relate to it.
#3 It’s Only for Posting Photos
Even top brands still hold this one as true. Some of them have been using Instagram only to push content so far. But that’s missing a key ingredient in Instagram’s advantage compared to other networks: it makes sharing a two way street and enables brands to leverage User Generated Content (UGC) by way of photo contests and special campaigns.
To do this, the first precaution to take is to create a brand-specific hashtag for the contest. In the UK Dorset Cereals run a competition to win a case of their delicious cereals every month simply by using the hashtag #lifebeginsatbreakfast The point is that you can do entirely Instagram / Social Media based promotions by posting an image advertising your giveaway, sale or contest and asking users to repost that image with a specific, custom hashtag in order to enter. You can then search that hashtag to see who has reposted it and pick a winner. Promotions like this allow your customers and followers to market your brand for you by talking about your promotion on their personal pages, and it’ll drive more people to visit your profile.
#4 Links don’t work on Instagram.
The only place you will be able to share a working link that actually takes users to your website is in your profile. Links don’t work in captions or photo comments, so if you’re trying to direct people to a specific Web page, you won’t have any luck writing it out under your pictures or videos because users won’t be able to click on it. You can, however, note in the caption that the link is on your profile, so if you’re promoting a specific page or running some sort of promotion, you can change the default link in your biography to the link of that particular page. For this reason, Instagram isn’t the best place to promote Web content, but it can help you get brand exposure, leading to more traffic later on.
#5 The Instagram website doesnt seem to work!
Many people struggle to set-up instagram accounts….. luckily we have a quick How to get started Here!
