4 Tips to Grow Your Business on Instagram

If you’re looking for places to grow your business using the internet Instagram can be one of the best places to go invest your time. Instagram has some of the highest engagement of any social network and more than half of all 18-29 year-olds are using the platform.

This level of attention can do wonders for brands that know how to use the platform properly, but when you’re still getting the hang of how to do that it can be frustrating.

These 4 tips will help you as you build your audience and grow your business on this powerful social network.

1. Post consistently

When was the last time you formed a meaningful relationship with someone that comes in and out of your life at random times? It’s a difficult thing to do, especially when you hardly know the person to begin with. Forming connections with your followers on Instagram is no different.

Instagram is an active community full of users that expect to see their follower’s content in their newsfeed. After all, that’s why they chose to follow your page in the first place. This means when you commit to growing your business on the platform you’ll need to post consistently to see results.

Typically, the advice I will give newcomers to the world of Instagram is to be active on the platform at least 3 times a day and at least one of those times should be used to share something from their profile. In my opinion, this is the bare minimum that a brand can do and truly say they are committed to growing their business on the platform.

Being active means you are interacting in some way with your growing community. That could mean sharing a post three times a day, or sharing one post a day but engaging with your follower’s content twice a day. The idea is to keep your brand fresh in the minds of your audience.

2. Use strong calls to action

Why does your business have an Instagram account in the first place? Building relationships and spreading the word about how wonderful your brand appears to be are supporting the real reason why you’re there: to get your followers to DO something.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your content looks, how many times you post every day, if you use Instagram Stories, Live, or just the regular news feed. If you don’t ask your followers to take action, most of them will never take the time to learn more about you outside of the app.

It’s so important to understand what you want your followers to do before you invest time into creating content and building your profile. When you know what you want them to do you can create content around that goal, and write calls to action such that they fit with the overall theme of your profile.

Consider an online retailer selling very high end widgets on their website and sharing beautiful pictures and videos of their widgets in action on Instagram.

You know that you’re sharing content because you want users to get curious, head over to your site where they learn more and eventually buy your product. In this case you need to create a desire to learn more about the product, so create your content in a way that keeps the viewer interested and tells them where to learn more.

When you do this instead of talking about the features of whatever widget you happened to post this morning on your page, you’re facilitating the conversion rather than using Instagram as the place to sell.

Businesses that understand what they want from their followers and use Instagram appropriately to get them to do it will be growing their business on the platform instead of simply growing their following on the platform.

3. Share content that stands out

There are 400 million active daily users on Instagram. The average person follows enough of those users to effectively block out most attempts to gain their attention with boring, repetitive, and unoriginal content.

If you want to grow your business on Instagram you need to cut through the noise created by everyone else by being different from them and sharing content that stands out.

Assuming you’re not already a cultural icon and your business doesn’t have a massive following on some other platform, you’ll need to rely on good old fashion creativity to figure out what will make your content stand out.

Remember that Instagram is full of brands that think they’re unique little snowflakes by sharing images with eye-catching color schemes and high-quality photos, so really put some thought into what makes your brand stand out from the rest and apply that to your content strategy.

Be authentic because that’s the one true way to stand out. Any business that truly commits creating content for Instagram will be doing a good job of it, so make your content better than them and win battle for attention with authenticity.

4. Measure and optimize

Growing your business on Instagram is a process of trial and error. You’ll want to make sure you measure your results using Instagram analytics tools. Taking the time to review how different posts performed against your goals will prove to be one of the most rewarding things you can do to grow your business.

If you haven’t started this yet, be deliberate about posting different types of content with different hashtags and at different times of day for a week and then review how each post performed.

Instagram insights is the built-in analytics tool for businesses to examine their performance on a weekly basis, but for the most in-depth look at what works, I suggest using a tool like Owlmetrics. Third-party tools often give you the most information on what you’re doing right, wrong, too much, and not enough.

Whichever option you choose to go with, make sure you form a habit of tracking the results of your posts and making the changes to improve future content based on what you learn. When you do this you will improve the relevancy of your content and the engagement with your community.