If you’ve been paying attention to Instagram’s impressive increase in users over the past several years, you know that the platform currently has 700 million monthly active users. This means businesses and aspiring influencers are very interested in marketing themselves on the Instagram platform and grabbing the attention of some portion of that 700 million people.
If you happen to be one of those and you’re looking for some guidance on how to carve out your space on Instagram these tips will help you boost your marketing efforts and win attention.
Assuming you’ve put in the work to gain followers and you’ve been engaging with them to build your presence on Instagram, going live is one of the best ways to grab their attention.
[pullquote]Broadcasting live on Instagram is unique in that your live video will not be saved anywhere once it has been ended.[/pullquote] This gives the element of exclusivity to your broadcasts and will allow you to use the platform to do things like run flash sales, contests, and offer other exclusives to your viewers.
When you start your live feed, your followers will be notified with a push notification (as long as they haven’t disabled the setting) that you’ve begun, so you’re getting their attention right away through that feature. If you plan things correctly, you can inform them that you’ll be going live on a specific day and to keep their eyes open for your stream.
While you’re streaming live from your app, you can see how many people are viewing and both of you can comment and like things throughout the broadcast. This will be a great way to interact with and your most engaged followers, so use this opportunity to insert some strategic calls to action once you’ve added value.
According to John Rampton, the founder of Calendar, when it comes to Instagram content, you’ll want to keep things authentic, aligned with your brand, and interesting. One of the best ways to keep things interesting is to mix things up a bit in terms of the type of content that you share in your feed.
Consumption of videos on Instagram increased 40% last year, but photos still generated 36% more engagement than videos. What this means is that more people are watching the videos in their feed but they’re not taking action after viewing them.
This could be due to a number of reasons; perhaps static images lend themselves to interaction more so than videos on Instagram, perhaps video posts need to be more engaging or have a stronger, more specific, call to action. Whatever the case may be, you’ll want to include both videos and photos to get the most out of what Instagram has to offer.
Instagram is unique from other social networks in that the only link you are able to share is the one single link in your profile bio. This makes things easier and more complicated at the same time for marketers.
It’s easier in terms of management and optimization because unlike other social networks, you’re not concerning yourself with optimizing several funnels and tracking links. It’s harder because you’re going to need to make sure your content is good enough to inspire the user to click over to your profile and then tap the link in your bio.
[pullquote]Making sure your content is good enough to earn each referral from Instagram is something that will take some trial and error and the use of Instagram analytics tools like Owlmetrics to perfect, but tracking the referrals from Instagram is a much easier process.[/pullquote]
If you’re using Google Analytics to track your website traffic you’re probably familiar with UTM links since GA needs a little help collecting your traffic from the Instagram app. If this is foreign to you or you don’t use GA, don’t worry, there’s a more simplistic option available for you. Just head over to a link shortening site like bit.ly and create your custom tracking link for your Instagram profile.
Once you have a trackable link in place, you’ll be able to see how much traffic you generate to your site from Instagram.
Using the Instagram Insights feature, you can already see Link Clicks for the past week and how they trended against the week before, but using trackable links, you can change links based on marketing campaigns and other initiatives and do all sorts of testing while keeping results separate from one another.
“What gets measured gets improved.”
This Peter Drucker quote that has stuck with me since I first heard it in business school and it’s especially true for marketing on social media.
In a world where you can test out literally countless variables on your messaging, you can imagine that some of the big brands have tons of money and highly-skilled analytics pros working to make sure their message gets more attention than yours.
While this might be true for most platforms, Instagram offers business accounts some very useful information in the Insights tool, and you can take advantage of some of the same metrics that large companies pay to track on other platforms for free.
I suggest using Instagram Insights to help you become familiar with metrics and test out different posting strategies as you build your initial following, but branching out to a more advanced Instagram analytics platform once you get the hang of the basics.
For more Instagram-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, click here!
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