If you are running a business and adopting a social media strategy for advertising, you could be missing a huge market by ignoring Instagram.
The popular image-sharing social network, with around 800 million active monthly users (and growing), has become one of the largest new advertising platforms, with some overwhelming benefits for businesses, in almost any industry.
Here are some of the top benefits of using Instagram for business:
- Great connection with customers: Connecting with customers becomes very easy over Instagram, the recently introduced business profile gives customers additional ways to interact with you, with the ‘contact’ button, on your profile page, which provides additional details to allow people to call or email, or get directions to your business, with map integration.
- Learning from trends: The hashtag system on Instagram is a great way to search for posts, as well as another great way to find out what your customers like. With geo-tagging, as well as searching out common hashtags amongst your customers, you can do market research for cross-promotion ideas in your area, or various subjects that your market typically shares with others.
- Insights, lets you see how your posts are performing with a basic set of analytics, to show you the number of impressions, the reach and engagement of a post.
- A brand-new audience: Instagram represents one of the newest frontiers in social media as well as one of the most popular new social networks. By creating a page on Instagram, you could potentially reach an audience that may no longer access Facebook or Twitter.
A well-performing post can also be ‘promoted’, much like a Facebook ‘boost’, to allow you greater reach, giving you the ability to choose the demographics of an audience, from location, interests, age, and gender, or let Instagram pick them for you.
Another feature, if you have a Facebook business account (why wouldn’t you?), you can create your ads in Facebook Ad Manager, link your Instagram account to your Facebook account, and have your ads displayed on Instagram.
With Facebook owning Instagram, we can only see this and other marketing tools developing in the future.
Direct Sales: Instagram ‘Stories’, like that of Snapchat, provide more direct response options, giving businesses the opportunity to drive more interaction, linking customers directly to a product or call to action, with greater functionality and flexibility than that of a regular Instagram post.
Also, with ‘Shop Now’ ad links, you can land customers directly on to product pages of your eCommerce store to place an order, making Instagram work as a sales funnel for your brand.
This is just a brief overview of the features and benefits currently available and there’s no doubt Instagram will continue to develop and add to these, and many other features, as it continues to grow.
Updated to include Product Tagging
As of Mid March 2018, Product Tagging has rolled out in the UK.
So, what does this mean?
Well, first of all, before you can use this feature your account must be approved for business shopping and fulfil the following requirements:
- Your business must sell physical goods that comply with Instagram’s merchant agreement and commerce policies.
- Your business must be located in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain or Brazil.
- Your Instagram account must be converted into a business profile.
- Your business profile must be connected to a Facebook catalogue. This can be created and managed by Business Manager, through Shopify or BigCommerce platforms or directly on your business’s Page on Facebook.
Once you’ve done this, you need to enable product tagging in your profile settings, under the ‘shopping’ section, then you can create shopping links directly to products on your website, from your posts, giving you more reasons to utilise this platform for your business.
More details can be found on the help section of Instagram’s website by clicking >>> here!
Keep these benefits in mind next time you’re considering your marketing strategy and if you’d like to know more about how Instagram can work for your business, hit the blue speech bubble in the bottom right of your screen and get in touch.