Can You Increase Your Brand's Social Media Engagement with Instagram?

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms today. Its popularity has continuously grown progressively ever since it first came in 2010. Currently, it has around 500 million active users worldwide. After Facebook, it is at present the second most popular platform for social media in the internet world. Marketing strategists love this platform.

It is a fact that the total number of marketing agents and advertisers on Instagram have almost doubled in the last six months to more than 2 million. Instagram is today considered to be the best platform in social media for engaging customers and marketers must take advantage of Instagram to maximize business.

Why is Instagram good for business?

Instagram helps your business to engage with a broad audience as Instagram is a global platform where your posts get a tremendous exposure. This engagement involves a lot of different factors like the visibility of your posts, their shareability, hashtags, comments and interactions, et cetera. To simply define it: it is based on your capability to interact with your audience.  In fact, Instagram is today the most trusted overall social media platform for engaging an audience; even Facebook is nothing in front of it. 

So what makes Instagram so suitable for engaging with audiences?

• Mobility: Instagram is simple and easy to use even if you are on the go. It is exclusive to mobile phones and can help you edit images which take while you are on the go to post onto the platform. Its simplicity makes it so popular. People can check new content even while they are not at home. Thus marketing does not have to be limited while your customers are at home only.
• Images convey more: People, in general, like to understand information and interpret them through sight, this is why these days visual marketing has become such a rage. Instagram appeals to people because of this precise visual nature. Instagram’s newsfeed is almost exclusively occupied by images, all of them in the same square format. This makes information easy to communicate to the audience and marketers can make use of this mode.
• Innovative: Instagram is different from older social media platforms and apps like Twitter and Facebook, simply because of its ease of access nature. It has done an extraordinary job in attracting younger and newer audiences, where most of the users are under the age of 30 years of age. Instagram provides marketers this chance to connect with the youth. Thus you can easily grow your business manifold by targeting newer, younger customers who are on the look for and are willing to try newer products
• Functionality: Instagram exposes your business to a fascinating audience. It will offer publicly accessible posts like on Twitter, but it will also give more control over any spam and has a reasonably firm personal network. Also, your business will not be just exposed to one social function as Instagram is not restricted to just a single mode of social function like for instance LinkedIn is only used for professional networking. Instagram is accessible to a vast number of people. This maximizes and enhances Instagram’s potential user base and thus gives you more potential customers to help you grow your business with. Marketers naturally would devise strategies to see that audience interaction becomes more and you should also ensure that audience interaction increases because this will increase your customer base in the long run.

Tips for Engagement

• Images first: Post images about the products your company deals with. Post images of your business locations, customers. Use interactive hashtags. Post photos of customers with your products, feature them on your page. You will get free Instagram likes from many new followers, and your business will be exposed to new people every day.
• Keep it simple:  Don’t have extended engagements on Instagram. Your post, images, comments must be concise and brief. Just post about your products and get out.
• Call to action: It is good to get your followers pleased and to maintain your audience big and large, but unless your followers do something actively, your campaign is not going to be profitable. Have a call to action in each of your posts.
• Reward followers: For your audience and followers to stay around, you will need to reward them at times too. You can give them some exclusive merchandises, or discounts as rewards. Even simple thank-you messages can help in keeping users around.

Conclusion

Instagram’s popularity is not going to die out soon, and it is set to become more popular. Marketers have to get business owners on Instagram to maximize business outputs. You should have your own Instagram profile for business venture updated today. Keep your content relevant and straightforward, and you will gradually see your business grow and reach new customers. So join Instagram today.

Author bio: Harris is a leading blog writer and content marketing professional with thousands of real Instagram followers for his postings.