Instagram has become a more competitive platform and posting content just on the go will not give you the required results. Regardless of whether you have a personal account or a business account, maintaining a consistent style, planning your content, posting at the best times when your audiences are most active are some of the important things that you have to remember while posting on the massive visual social media platform where users are likely to engage only with the most appealing content. This article explains some of the best practices you need to follow for every post you upload and to be successful on Instagram.
Understand your audience
The number of Instagram users keeps growing rapidly which clearly implies that it is one of the perfect marketplace to gain more brand recognition. With the total number of users crossing 1.6 billion and over 80% active users daily, you have to think of some ways to narrow down this massive database to determine who your target audience will be. First you need to classify your audience by age, gender,location and their interests. At this point, you just need to remove people from your list whom you think will not fit as your ideal customer. Once you find your target audience, you need to research and confirm their interests to post appropriate content to gear up your Instagram marketing strategy.
Set Goals
If you want to get a dedicated audience leading to more website traffic and brand recognition, you need to set specific, measurable,attainable, relevant and timely goals. Initially you could plan to achieve some 1000 followers and then grow to millions from there. Posting appealing content more consistently and ensuring a lot of interaction happening beneath the content is the key to keep gaining new audiences. This eventually gets a lot of likes and shares for your content. Keeping in mind the important factors while posting content can help your content receive automatic Instagram likes further stimulating higher engagement rates for a long term. Content freshness, usage of brand hashtags, precise publishing schedules, responding to your audience comments are all the basic things needed to achieve your goals on Instagram.
Measure your performance
Instagram insights serves as an excellent tool to measure how your content performs and lets you know how much your audiences engage and interact with your content. By knowing such details, you could better understand what to post to increase engagement levels. On
You need to have a business account to gain access to Insights. For every post, you can click “View Insights” on the bottom left to see the number of likes, shares and comments. Reach and impression are two other important metrics which Insights provides and you can make the best use of it to determine the active times of your audience and the kind of posts that they find more interesting.
Stick to a consistent style
Instagram, being a visual platform emphasizes you post eye captivating content that prioritizes the look and feel of the content. Identify and follow the same style in aspects such as color scheme, editing patterns, etc to keep your brand uniform and make people remember your brand either when your brand name flashes their memory or when they see your branded content on someone’s feed. Nevertheless, you don’t need expensive professional cameras to capture photographs to post to your Instagram feed. Using your smartphone, you can shoot pictures under good lighting and make use of some editing apps that are free of cost.
Schedule your content
Planning to post content might sound easy but remembering to post as planned is not easy often. The following are some important things that you need to bear in mind while planning content:
Identify the best time to post
The Insights feature of Instagram allows you to know when your audience are most active online. Under your profile,click “View Insights” and tap the “your audience” section to get detailed insights about your followers and audience so that you can get a better idea about improving content and scheduling strategies.
Optimize your profile
The Instagram Highlights feature in your profile section facilitates you to add and showcase important information. People who head to see your profile tend to see the highlights section. So you can add more about products and promotions of your brand.
Get your account verified
Aim to get the blue checkmark that applies for Instagram verification. Getting your Instagram account verified can make you appear professional and take your business a long way in the large social media platform.
Team up with reputable Influencers
A plenty of new advertising forms have emerged and Influencer collaboration is one of the best forms that has high potential to build more social proof and credibility for your brand leading to reaching more new audiences. Most of the top brands use this strategy to make a close connection with the audience as a part of brand promotion.
Make Your Posts Entertaining
Along with showcasing your brand personality in your content, you also need to make it entertaining by posting some of the behind-the-scenes content like time spent with employees, making of a product and other creative trends to keep your audience engaged for longer hours.
Conclusion
Brands and marketers have a lot of things to learn from different social media channels. With a right mix of these practices and your strategies, you could increase the audience engagement on Instagram and achieve grand success.
