Instagram is one of the favorite social networks of millennials, since they use it the 75% of those under 35 years of age and 20% of the world’s population. All companies want to carry out marketing strategies on the platform since it is estimated that there are up to 1,000 million active accounts per month and 500 million active accounts daily worldwide.
To commemorate the eleventh anniversary of this social network, which was born on October 6, 2010 by the hand of its creators Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, IEBS Business School explains how to exploit Instagram as sales channel of any business.
Create engaging content
The key to being successful on Instagram is to stand out from the rest by offering attractive content and of value to the target audience in order to capture their attention. To do this, you have to analyze the objectives of the company to decide what to show, have a defined brand identity and a lot of visual creativity. In addition, the images must be accompanied by a hooked text that encourages sharing.
Join the reels
Reels is a tool within the platform that allows you to upload several clips of up to 15 seconds of video, with effects and filters. It unleashes creativity, since it allows you to record and stop the video and has its own statistics. In addition, it helps to attract a new audience and, if the content is visually attractive, it is possible to achieve virality and positioning in the ‘Explore’ tab.
Use Instagram Stories
According to data from the platform itself, 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day, and a third of the most viewed stories belong to companies, so making use of this functionality is very important to grow. Geolocation and mentions to collaborators, for example, will help to have more visibility, as well as add gifs, music or stickers.
Defined style and aesthetics
Maintaining a consistent and differentiating style on Instagram is a key factor. Having a defined aesthetic makes your profile more attractive and interesting. For this, it is advisable to establish the colors that will predominate in the profile, the composition of the photographs and the filters that will be used. These concepts must be aligned with the logo, the identity manual, the website, etc. Everything should reflect the same.
Show the most human side
Social networks offer brands the perfect opportunity to show their most human side and allow them to embody them. Both in terms of history and the values behind a logo. For this, it is recommended that brands show the world who they are, their identity, that they are authentic and consistent and build a storytelling. In addition, publications that use humor tend to achieve greater engagement and are more likely to go viral.
Create community
Interacting with the public and being close to users not only ensures comments and content is shared, but also gives the possibility of turning those followers into future clients and brand ambassadors. The community is like a group of friends on Instagram, so you have to generate conversation and approach, always answer, ask, listen to the audience and be constant.
Schedule content
Content planning on Instagram takes time and dedication. It is advisable to have a content calendar with specific dates related to the company’s sector to create related publications and schedule their publication at peak hours. According to statistics, the best hours are from 3pm to 4pm and from 9pm to 10pm on Monday, Sunday, Friday and Thursday, in order of relevance.
Pay attention to what’s new
Instagram is a constantly changing social network whose developers are constantly modifying, making changes to the algorithm or launching new features. For example, recently the platform has launched the option ‘Search on the map’. It is a function similar to Google Maps with the difference that the social network uses the most popular images on the platform as a search engine. The objective is to find nearby places such as parks, shops or restaurants and they are classified using hashtags, so it is important to use the most appropriate ones according to the sector of each business.
“The millions of users that Instagram has make it a very attractive social network to increase sales, increase visits to the web, create a community and stay in touch with your target audience”, explains Óscar Fuente, director and founder of IEBS. «Learning to use networks as a digital marketing tool is essential for today’s companies that want to expand on the Internet. For this reason, these professional profiles are among the most demanded by companies, since they become the voice of the brand and manage relationships with their audiences and their reputation., Add.
