What are the Benefits of Instagram for Business — A Complete Guide
How to take benefit of every feature of Instagram to leverage the business? Beginning as a photo-sharing app, Instagram is no less than a business asset today. It has a bunch of opportunities to grow the business enormously that everybody is trying to impress the algorithm to leverage their practices.
Another fact that Instagram is way better than any other social media in terms of business as it has the highest user’s base of age range 20–35.
Statista (2019) states that 32% of the active users’ age ranges between 25–34, which is the highest distribution of Instagram users, by age group.
The 2018 data also states that it has 1 billion monthly active users, in which 500 million users use it every day.
Such high engagement and a young user’s base can provide incredible leverage to the businesses that have quality services and products to serve.
After observing the rise of the platform, we have created this post for you. Here, you will get to know how each feature can contribute to the growth of the business at a broader level.
Instagram Stories
Snapchat was the first to introduce stories to the world, and Instagram adopted the same.
However, it doesn’t matter as Jean-Luc Godard said,
‘It’s not where you take things from, it’s where you take them to.’
Stories have proved to be very beneficial for Instagram, and also the users liked it worldwide. They;
· Let your followers know what you’re up to
· Easy to share among the audience
· It vanishes after 24 hours; make it interesting and clearly depicts the algorithm that your audience is liking your content, only if they view your stories as you post.
· They are great attention scorers due to their position; at the top of the screen.
· To update the audience about an exclusive offer, sale or a short-time period offer.
· You can even divert your audience on a third-party link using the ‘swipe-up’ feature which has enabled to accounts having 10 thousand or more followers only.
· You can make the story uploading fun using stickers, drawings, gifs, audios, different style texts, and screen shades.
Instagram Feed
The primary attention gainer on Instagram is its feed, and its infinite scrolling feature never lets you put the phone down.
The business must have an impressive feed which must produce value to the consumer. It can be;
· Tips to the products you’re producing or delivering.
· Contests/quizzes to boost engagement
· Humorous, knowledgeable, how-to content, learning lessons, etc.
Always use the caption of your posts too. Do not do it just for the sake of adding the caption but do it to distribute the content equally. Detailed captions keep your audience stick to your post for a longer time, and users could find a story to relate.
National Geographics recites the story of every photo they post on Instagram.
Carousel posts are also a great way to use the content strategically as it intrigues the users to swipe between videos and pictures. You can even narrate the story using it, and people will love them.
Including a pattern in Insta feed is also a useful tactic to impress the audience. Either you can choose a color combination or a design to experiment with the feed. However, it is not necessary, but it leads to a good account’s appearance.
Use Videos in Feed
Instagram stated on itself about the engagement a video could deliver as compared to a photo or a text post.
It allows posting one-minute video, which makes the message precise, quick, and turns out to be a great attention scorer. The users can consume a bunch of information in a minute, and creators have to remove the unnecessary or filler data or better to say, bullshit.
So, if you weren’t using video posts in your feed, start doing it now as you are missing with a high chance of engagement.
Personalize with your Profile Photo
You can use your display picture or a company’s logo to personalize the account. It is a fact that the audience wants to see an image, either logo or a person’s impressions as their content creator. They want to see a face even if you don’t want to show.
Add a clear picture instead of using filtered, high contrast, or any landscape and scenery image. Just make sure the audience can see and understand it well.
Use a Straight Bio
A straightforward bio is enough to tell the audience that your brand is trustable. Do not write an expert if you’re not an expert.
Avoid;
· Using bluffs in your headline
· Overloading your bio with emojis
· Using fancy and hard to read fonts
· Repeating the same fact in different lines and sentences
Instead, you can;
· Write your first line as what are your services, either it is tips and tricks or products to offer.
· Show if you have any past achievement which can leverage your services. For example; if you have collaborated or served a famous brand or a celebrity, mention it there.
· Use your bio link wisely. Never leave it blank. You can write your website’s URL or your blog’s URL, affiliate link, review by a famous brand.
· Use one or two emojis to make your bio creative and impressive. But as I suggested, don’t overload it.
Produce Content for IGTV
Instagram has provided enough possible ways to distribute the content to keep the audience busy in consuming it. IGTV is also one of the latest Instagram features.
Instagram brought IGTV to keep the users within the ecosystem. It was launched on 20 June 2018 which introduces the concept of watching videos in vertical mode.
Official accounts can post up to 60 minutes of video while ordinary accounts can display up to 10 minutes of video. Due to its recent release, it has excellent exposure to content distribution among the users.
The algorithm is promoting its latest feature, and those users are using it, witnessing the leverage of it.
Instagram Business Account
Using a business account gives you access to the statistics of profile visits, number of impressions, and reach the profile has witnessed during a definite period. It also allows you to run ads for your account to expand the reach, followers count, and awareness among the users.
They follow the same algorithm as Facebook’s ads manager and brings you the attention of the desired audience based on their demographics, interests, and age you want to target. Also, they are affordable at the same time.
You can also get lead conversions, divert traffic to a specific landing page and take out the most of the sales funnel.
Instagram Live
You can go live anywhere direct from the app.
It is a great way to direct the traffic if you have a good number of followers under your belt. It helps in establishing a foundation of greater engagement between the users and the business.
You can be creative in various ways by setting Q n A sessions, share any advice or even a piece of information about upcoming contests and sales.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags can lead to spammers and higher reach at the same time. One should use interest-based and relevant hashtags so that they could benefit the post.
Instagram allows the users to use 30 hashtags and a few accounts know how to use 60 per post, which is purely against its algorithm.
Instagram stated that the number of hashtags doesn’t help you, but the right and relevant do.
See, which hashtags are most engaging.
If you look at a popular hashtag, you’ll notice that they feature a story with a few random user’s stories and a regular feed showing random posts of other users at the top. Using hashtags can expose you in front of other unknown and interested Instagrammers and audience.
Video Call Feature
Instagram has also enabled the video call feature in the chat window, which makes the conversation smooth. This way, you can lower the time to share the information, and you can plan for collaborations as well, without wasting time in writing long texts.
While you use video calls with each other, the algorithm serves the preference to them in your feed.
Note: A new update has rolled with the voice note feature in the chat system of the app.
Quick Reply
Quick reply has nothing to do with bringing traffic and new followers, but it helps to reply fast, which will reduce the response time, and users will love you for this.
You can save a default quick reply as a template assigning to a shortcut key which you can use to send a quick message whenever need.
For eg.,
Hello,
This is Shubham.
We are happy to see your message. This is an auto-generated reply. We will revert to you shortly regarding your query.
Have a great day ahead.
Save this message as a quick reply, assigning it to the shortcut, suppose to be ‘Hello’ or just ‘H.’
Use Tags
Tags are fabulous magnets, capable enough to drive the attention of unknown users. You can collaborate with other Instagrammers under your niche by tagging them. Some of them may label you back as a sign of welcoming your proposal.
When users visit your post, they will see the tags hanging on the pictures, and they may click on tagged profiles and even follow them if they find the content relevant. The same process can work for you too if other Instagrammers tag you in their posts.
Hence, even being the tiniest feature, tags can be utilized smartly.
Shopping on Instagram
This new shopping feature is also released by Instagram in February 2018, allowing the users to buy from the app. Then, they gave entrance to ‘product stickers’ to use in Instagram stories so that users can shop through stories too.
However, this feature is available only in a few regions and for a few accounts. Here, you can see in which parts the feature is available.
Shopping on Instagram has the potential to turn the potential leads/discount offers/ into sales. The users who couldn’t find this feature have to wait a little longer as the team is working on making the function global.
However, this can produce enormous engagement and prove to be massively beneficial for e-commerce business accounts. Even, Instagram stated the same;
‘Our traffic from Instagram has increased by 44% since implementing shopping on Instagram. It’s a clean and simple way to show your product in a lifestyle setting, without affecting the user experience.’
-Savannah Boysen, Marketing Manager, TYME
Checkout on Instagram
After these two starring features came to the surface, they left a space for improvement. So, to fill that vacant space, Instagram rolled ‘Checkout on Instagram’ feature, which enables the users to place an order without leaving the app.
However, this feature is only available in the USA currently, and Instagram’s team is working towards expanding it in other regions too.
From here, you can find a fantastic trailer.
The dominance doesn’t stop here. You can even shop from the videos running in the feed as depicted here.
The checkout feature just doubled the engagement after including it in the app. If smartly used, it can fantastically leverage the business.
Final Thoughts
We have listed almost all of the features an Instagram app has. It is possible that we may have left a few like;
Comments, which Instagram brought after years of its launch, has become a factor to scale engagement.
Explore Page, which is different for every user has the power to serve never-ending content.
Chat system, which makes the end consumer interact with the business directly by eliminating the path of the middlemen. It also pushed B2B companies, and it worked wonderfully for them.
If you have other than these in your mind, any major feature which can impact the business’ motion, feel free to tell us in the comments.
