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In recent years, Instagram has developed into a hugely successful social media platform. Since launching in October 2010, it now boasts 400 million active users across 25 countries every month, and sees a staggering 80 million images uploaded each day.
What does this mean for brands though?
Well, with such a large user base, brands would be foolish not to tap into this in order to boost their own marketing efforts.
Have you heard the phrase “a picture tells 1,000 words”? In this day and age, this quote truly is relevant. With the other main social platforms being led by written content, the fact that Instagram focuses on pictures makes it stand out from the crowd.
How can you use this to your advantage?
You need to find a way to encourage people to interact with your Instagram. You posting things as a brand is obviously beneficial, and over time and with a targeted content strategy you’ll pick up followers. However, the real success will come when you have your target audience engaging with you.
Many brands find that this can be achieved through competitions and incentives. Everyone is taking pictures wherever they go, whether it’s a luxury holiday or the avocados and eggs they’ve had for brunch – it’s time for you to jump on this. The pictures already exist, so your aim should be to encourage people to share them with you.
As we’ve just said, one strategy could be to host a competition or offer an incentive. Ask followers and users to share their best images involving your brand, and choose winners from this. The prizes you give might not even cost you much, so this is a very low-cost marketing campaign.
However, this type of campaign can only be truly successful if you already have followers. If you need to grow brand awareness, then you need to look at a strategy that incorporates the use of hashtags much more heavily.
All hashtags are searchable on Google and social platforms, so by ensuring that they’re relevant and engaging, you have the opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You can also look at regramming images by users that are both relevant to your brand and include hashtags. This tactic will then increase awareness of your brand not only with those users, but with their followers as well.
The key is to ensure that you have a clear strategy for Instagram that ties in with your full content marketing strategy and is focused on your target audience.
Know who it is you’re looking to communicate with and what you want to achieve from that. From there, you can develop campaigns that will help to build awareness of your brand, increase engagement online and really help you to grow your followers. You can then tie this into your social strategies on other platforms to create a uniform approach to ensure that you’re able to reach your marketing goals.