Instagram was initially launched as an innovative new image based sharing platform. 2 years on from its initial launch Facebook took over and transformed it into of the biggest social media platforms around, April 2017 marked five years since Facebook’s purchase of Instagram. In that time, the platform has grown from 30 to 600 million users – it’s a success story of sorts.
There are several benefits for taking use of Instagram for business & marketing,
- Increased Engagement – In short people tend to engage and take note of visuals rather than text.
Depending on the quality of the post, updates on Facebook and Twitter are sometimes overlooked by the user. However this isn’t true for Instagram users; having an active Instagram account with useful and interesting content can earn you crazy levels of engagement with your audience. Latest study by Forrester found that Instagram content generates 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter.
- Building Trust And Personality
With branded content being more popular for generating engagement, one of the key benefits of Instagram is that it can help you build trust. Recommendations are a huge market for generating sales, people buy from people and Instagram will help you to with that. The great thing here is that it allows you to share the day-to-day experiences of your business in an informal and casual way – therefore giving a personal feel to your business. Behind the scene photos and employee images tend to rank well on Instagram, especially if you’re a specific service provider.
- Increase In Traffic
Although you can’t add clickable links to every Instagram update you publish, Instagram can be a powerful source of generating inbound traffic. With the higher levels of engagement compared to Facebook and Twitter, creating and maintaining a strong profile could be hugely beneficial for your site’s visibility
- ‘Free Advertising’
Yes, you’re reading it correctly; the great thing about Instagram is free advertising. You can showcase your products and services in action which generates huge exposure. It gives you a chance to show off more of what you have to offer. You can potentially reach hundreds if not thousands of people for free, just by carefully selecting the right hash tags and optimising these.
Instagram is a very time consuming marketing strategy, it requires in depth analysis of the right hash tags to achieve the very best results, but even more importantly it requires high quality, engaging pictures. Not every business will have the time to find the perfect picture and then come up with the hash tags, that’s where we come in, we can create engaging content on your behalf and help you reach a whole new market.
If you want to discuss your business further and how we can help, feel free to drop me a line jake@dsgnuk.com or give us a call 0161 627 1857 , and we can create you an effective marketing strategy to take your business to the next level.