With every new social media tool, there’s a learning curve to using it to benefit your business. It might be intuitive to use it personally, but if it’s not, the business angle can be a bigger leap.
Here are five tips to help you make the jump:
- Establish or convert to a business account. Here are the detailed instructions from Instagram.
- Create a strategy for capturing or gathering photos of your work. What’s the most visually compelling way to share the story of what you do?
- Follow your intended audience, and others in your space. With whom are you trying to build relationships? What relationships already exist? Make sure, as you move forward, that you are tagging and engaging with your community.
- Use hashtags to make sure you show up in the feeds of people following a hashtag. For local business, I follow the #charlottesville and #cville hashtags. This is a great way to find new people to follow.
- Remember that Instagram is a very different platform from Twitter or Facebook. I don’t recommend automating because links in posts on Insta do not work (you must put a link in a bio or create action buttons to enable linking for users) and generally, linking to content on other platforms is a good idea! It’s more work, to be sure, but I still recommend posting customized content to the platforms you choose to use for your business.
How about you? Have you been using Instagram for your business?