In today’s society, social media is ruling our planet. If you aren’t on Instagram do you even exist? Ok, that is a bit dramatic, but is very important, especially for your business. Most business owners just randomly shove a post on Instagram, but there is more to just uploading a post, there should be a thought process behind it. This is what will set you apart from your competitors and ensure you are truly engaging with your customers. Instagram should still be fun to use but you need to make sure you take full advantage of everything it has to offer.
Throughout this blog, we will bring you through some of our favourite secrets on how to thrive on Instagram for free. So read on, Instagram can be a scary place at first but as Vincent Van Gogh once said, “Great things are done by a series of small things brought together”.
Let’s get started!
Post at the right times
Before even creating your posts, make sure you have analysed the right times to post on Instagram. To grow engagement, it is recommended to post at 11 am and 2 pm on Wednesday and Thursday.
Well, if you want to know when to specifically post on Instagram, you should upload when your followers are most likely to be online, as this means that your posts are ‘recent’ on their Instagram feed. Going through your Instagram analytics is a simple way to figure out when your followers are online and most likely to interact with your posts.
You need to make sure your Instagram account is set to a business account. You can easily do this by selecting ‘edit profile’ and scroll down and select ‘switch to professional account’. This is completely free, and it allows you to get insights about your followers, see how posts are performing, create promotions to help reach to more people and allow you to add a contact button to your page to make it easier for people to get in touch with you.
Captivating captions
Hunting unicorns is legal in Michigan.
Did that catch your attention? We humans now lose interest VERY quickly. Our attention span has declined dramatically in just 15 years, according to studies. It was 12 seconds in 2000 and has now shrunk dramatically to 8.25 seconds. Therefore, it is important your first line on your caption catches people’s attention straight away. This is called a ‘hook’. A hook is an opening statement that attempts to grab the reader’s attention so that they want to read on. Your hook can be any form of a sentence, for example, it could be a question, quote, statistic or anecdote.
Be creative with your captions. If you are ever struggling with content for your captions, always have in mind your post needs to be one or two of the following four speeches: informative, persuasive, entertaining or inspiring. For example, an informative post could be about a new service your company has to offer, a persuasive post could be an offer within your business, an entertaining post could be a video and an inspiring post could be a quote. Use your imagination when writing captions and dare to try new things to see what works best for your business to help it thrive.
Note: use keywords relating to your business, so you appear in your target markets searches.
High-quality images
Never do we recommend this bar in this instance…THINK INSIDE THE BOX. On Instagram your feed appears in square grid boxes, therefore, you need to think of what eye-catching image you can fit inside this square to encourage people to click on it. The image you upload can be bigger than a square but make sure how it will be uploaded onto your feed is clear and striking.
The images you upload need to be of good quality or people won’t want to pay attention to them. This doesn’t mean you need to go and buy a big fancy camera, but we recommend taking advantage of your smartphone and the editing apps it has to offer. If it is on brand, picking one filter and sticking to it can have a satisfying atheistic appeal and it can make your feed pleasing to look at. Also, sticking to a colour scheme in each photo can make your feed appealing to look at. For instance, having the smallest hint of blue in each photo can show you care about your brand image and how you want your audience to see you. Therefore, try out any of these ideas and see what suits your business and hopefully if you find your niche users will keep scrolling through your feed and become a follower of your business. If you are struggling to take your own images, make use of free stock photos but use them with caution as you don’t want to lose your brand. A website we recommend using for free stock images in www.pexels.com.
Post consistently
Profiles that post daily gain Instagram followers faster than those that post less frequently. When you post regularly, you’ll see an increase in engagement, and the Instagram algorithm will most likely position your posts at the top of your followers’ feeds.
If you can’t be bothered to log onto your phone every day and continuously post, we suggest using a scheduler for your social media. This is a life saviour and will allow you to thrive on social media so easily and for completely free! A simple and straightforward scheduler is ‘Creator Studio’. This can be found on Facebook and you can connect your Facebook and Instagram account to it. It brings together all of the tools you need to effectively post, manage and measure content across both accounts. There are many videos online on how to use this, but it is very easy to catch onto. If this is something you want to take advantage of you can request a 5-minute training video from us on how to use Creator Studio.
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There you have it…4 extremely easy tactic’s that will allow your company’s social media presence to THRIVE on Instagram for free. This blog post should have highlighted to you how easy it is to thrive on Instagram for free!
Don’t feel afraid or overwhelmed, everyone is learning and there are no strict rules to follow whenever it comes to posting on Instagram, the key is just to post consistently and clearly with the use of Creator Studio via Facebook this will make this process super manageable.
If you need assistance with any of the topics that have been addressed, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to help you make an effective digital strategy and our graphic designers are itching to help make your posts eye-catching. So, if you want your business to thrive, reach out to our team for a free consultation.
