There are already one billion people who use Instagram actively each month. In fact, half these active users or 500 million actually log on the social media channel at least once a day every day! With this much traffic, there are about 4.2 billion posts being liked on Instagram per day. Do you think that out of those 4.2 billion posts, yours is one of them? Because of these statistics, it is safe to say that maximising Instagram and its features is one of the best ways to increase your online presence and to introduce your brand to your intended market. But out of the 25 million business profiles on Instagram, how can you make sure that yours would be able to stand-out from the rest? The answer is quite simple, really. Instagram updates are done frequently, but for a good cause. These updates and features would be able to give you the leverage that you need so that your brand would be on top of your competitors – as long as you understand and know how to maximise these updates. Being in-the-know and regularly being update with Instagram’s new and added features would help you create better content for your business that your market and audience would relate more with.
Engage your Audience Better with Relevant Hashtags
Anyone who is anyone has already used a hashtag in at least one of his or her posts. In fact, a lot of people nowadays even inject the concept of hashtags in actual conversations. It is a great way for brands to create top of mind content that people could easily remember and in fact, also spread to other people. While this is not new to Instagram, hashtags are still an effective way to determine what is working for your business and brand building, and what is actually not. A great update from Instagram relating to this is the integration of Hashtag Insights for businesses to track the number of impressions their individual hashtags are getting. This is a great way to determine just how effective hashtags being used for brand awareness and introduction are. This way, you can build on the hashtag that brings your brand top of mind recall to your audience, and scrap those which make it complicated for your brand.
Highly Targeted Ads
Instagram recently did an update on their explore button section so that businesses could strategically place ads that target potential customers. The explore section is used by people who want to look for accounts, posts and feeds which are similar to what they are already looking for. Instagram’s new feature allows for brands and businesses to inject their ads as if it was part of the normal feed the user is scrolling in. This is similar to an ad placement found on a search engine results page where the ad is also a link which is at the top of the list of results. This would mean that there could be a great increase in the impressions of your posts because it does not make it easy for users to just scroll over and skip your ad.
Not only will you be able to place ads on the explore newsfeed, but you would also be able to promote and boost ads to target the stories of potential customers. This serves as similar ad placements in videos on Facebook and even YouTube. As people scroll through the stories timeline of their friends, a sponsored ad may pop up should the criteria for the boosted post fit and target the user. This way, you have a niche market targeted for your ads so your marketing and advertising expenses and strategies would not be put to waste with an uninterested audience.
The Convenience of Shopping on Instagram
There is already a shopping icon feature on Instagram so that users could already be able to shop and buy products from the channel directly, without having to leave the Instagram app or switch through apps. If you create content which features different products or services that you would like to market, you would be able to tag your post so that your followers would be able to view all of the product information that you would like to introduce to them, simply through the post. You may also include the prices so that if after reviewing the product information presented to them, they decide they would like to purchase, they could simply proceed to checkout, even as they stay on the app. This update is great for businesses who want to have better online sales without having to push more money to marketing and advertising strategies that may just not work at all.
