Marketing Your Business with Instagram

Instagram started out as a way for people to share photos. But Instagram has grown a lot since then, small businesses can use it to enhance their online marketing efforts. Instagram is used to cater to a specific audience, those who prefer hearing quick and short messages with visuals.

Instagram Practices for Marketing

Instagram may not be as big as Twitter or Facebook yet, but it can bring about relevant results to your business too. You can try using these practices to market your business and gain more search visibility in Google.

  1. Do Photo Contests– Since it’s a photo sharing site, a photo contest is deemed to be the most suitable. You can ask followers to submit their own photos (based on the contest rules), ask them to vote or anything similar. Ask the followers to put hashtags on the photos. Offer contestants cool prizes so they’ll actually put in some effort in joining the contest.
  2. Give Promo Codes– Who doesn’t like free stuff or discounts? Reward your followers with free promo codes. However, you must do some research on your audience and see what type of promos they will like best. Post pictures of items that your customers keep coming back for and include a promo code for that. You’ll easily get a lot of shares for that.
  3. Engage with Customers– Talk to them when they comment. Answer their queries if they ask something. Feature customers daily or weekly to show that you appreciate them. Engage with your customers and build that relationship.

Growing Your Business and Google Visibility

Instagram is a whole new marketing environment for SMEs.Your small business ideas can benefit from the growing active users of Instagram. Today, Instagram has 100 million active users (monthly). There are 40 million photos being posted daily and an average of 1000 comments (per second) and 8500 likes (per second). And as Instagram continues to become more popular, it would be a shame if you don’t harness this marketing potential into your business.

In terms of Google visibility, marketing through Instagram can help too. By regularly posting attention-grabbing photos in your Instagram profile, this introduces people and followers to the products and promos you currently have or may have. It builds brand awareness which in turn builds the interest of customers and stimulate conversions. As a result, you are more likely to get your site to rank higher in Google.

However, uploading and sharing photos won’t be enough to get the visibility you want. It is important that you promote your photos with the use of hashtags that are specific to your business. Not only will people associate the photos directly to your brand, but it will help them locate your products a lot easier too. In addition, don’t ever forget to use keywords when captioning your photos. This can also appear on Google’s search engine result pages.