Why is Instagram Not Working for Our Business?
Instagram, while relatively new to the social media scene, has become a popular venue for consumers and businesses alike.
Started in October 2010, the site allows users to post photos, and its mobile apps let users add filters and effects to their pictures.
Instagram can be a great marketing tool for many businesses, but only if you use it correctly.
Benefits
As a means of engaging with customers, Instagram provides you with several key benefits:
* With its mobile focus, it provides real-time communication with your followers. You can take a photo, apply a filter, and upload it in seconds, and your followers can share your images just as quickly;
* Photos can bring up to twice the amount of engagement as plain-text posts, making Instagram a gold mine for your customer relations efforts;
* The Instagram app provides a variety of filters you can add to your photos, allowing you to create professional-looking images in a matter of moments.
While the platform is great for visual-based businesses (such as those who have products or processes that are good photo subjects), it’s not for every business. Even if you do have good photo subjects, you can turn your followers off by making these mistakes:
Over-branding your feed
If your main Instagram strategy is to splash your logo across every photo you post, you aren’t likely to gain much traction on the site.
Your branding should be only a small portion of your Instagram message.
Instead, fill your feed with interesting and visually appealing shots that are related to your brand, but are not obvious ads.
A few ideas for this include behind-the-scenes photos for how your product is produced or packaged; pictures from events your company either attended or sponsors; and profiles of a few of your key employees.
Clogging your followers’ feeds
While you need to post on a regular basis to keep your followers interested, dumping 50 photos per day into your feed is a quick way to drive them all away.
If you’re at an event, you can share a photo or two throughout the day, but avoid posting several at once. Unlike Twitter, Instagram has a slower-moving feed, and your several posts in a row can hide other posts from your followers.
Repurposing your content
Instagram is designed specifically for photo sharing. Text and infographics don’t work as well, and should be saved for your Twitter and Facebook profiles.
Reusing your content across platforms also has the danger of looking like spam to your followers, and can hurt your online reputation. And even if your users don’t see it as spam, using the same content on multiple networks makes it less valuable for users to follow you in more than one place.
Instagram can be a useful part of your social media strategy, as long as you take the platform’s unique nature into consideration.
As with other social networks, taking the time to learn how users consume your content and developing goals for your profile will help you make your efforts successful.
About the Author: Freelance blogger Angie Mansfield writes about a variety of topics for both consumers and small business owners. Her work addresses subjects such as business management, marketing, and car insurance.
Image Credit: instagram.
Posted in Social Networking. Tags: business social networking, instagram, social media brand marketing
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