How to engage with your audience on Instagram?

Social media marketing is a useful tool for both large and small organisations alike. It is particularly advantageous for small brands who have a limited marketing budget. Instagram is valuable for brands with beautiful or quirky products and you don’t need an army of marketeers to make the most of it, just a few useful tips…

Follow and engage with relevant Instagrammers

Social networks are all about community. You just have to find, follow and interact with the right people and brands. Start by monitoring industry hashtags and commenting on appropriate Instagram posts. This is a simple way to make your presence known to people who are likely to be interested in your content.

Use the right hashtags

Captions on Instagram are not searchable, but hashtags are. You need to make your Instagram content easier to find by using the relevant hashtags and get your content in front of people who don’t already follow you. There are a few rules to follow when it comes to hashtags:

1. avoid using generic tags: adding #greatpic won’t do the trick
2. don’t overuse them; a few relevant ones are better than hundreds of random ones.
3. don’t spam: keep them relevant to the image you post

Engage with your audience

Your followers are humans, so treat them as such. Following you should not be an excuse to be served over salesy content. It’s vital to try to engage with your followers as much as possible. Your Instagram account should feel more human and less corporate. An easy way to encourage engagement is to organise some Instagram contests like:

1. “Share a time when…”
2. “Caption this image”
3. “Tell us how this image makes you feel”
4. ‘’We like this, tell us what you like”

Become a storyteller

Stories on Instagram disappear after 24 hours and live broadcasting features are the perfect way to grab attention. More than hundreds of million people use Instagram Stories every day, and 39 percent of people surveyed said they became more interested in a product or band after seeing it on Stories. Time to give it a go and remember to try to give your stories a beginning, middle, and end!

Sell products on Instagram

With the launch of Instagram shopping in early 2018, brands can tag products directly in posts (and Stories) and take customers directly to the item they want to purchase. In March 2019, Instagram went even one step further by launching is new checkout feature. Users no longer have to leave Instagram to purchase many of the items they discover on the platform. This is a huge opportunity to small businesses to sell more products and expand their customer base.

Figuring out what to do on Instagram will take some practice in order to determine what methods work best for your business but give it a go! Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be off to the races, engaging with new people who just might turn out to be your next customers.

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