Brief: This blog is a complete Beginners guide to Instagram, that can help you in getting started with Instagram and growing your business on Instagram.
As you are reading this blog post, you might know how profitable Instagram can be for your business or you just want to get more followers to be an Insta star or Influencer.
With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is one of the most used Social Media platforms. Marketing your Business on Insta can be a great idea for businesses and freelancers. If you fall under these business categories below then you might be losing potential clients by not being on Instagram.
The Businesses must be on Instagram:
- Artist, Designer and Freelancers: 3D artists, Graphics, Web designers, and Interior designers can benefit greatly from Instagram. They can post their artwork on their Insta profile, which increases their reach. A lot of artists and Freelancers use their Insta profile as their portfolio.
- Photography Studios: For studios, too Instagram marketing can be a great tool to reach out to a bigger audience.
- E-commerce Businesses: Believe it or not, Since the launch of Instagram shopping Instagram had become a great tool for E-commerce businesses to sell their products directly from the Instagram app.
For all this to happen all you need to do is to create an account on Instagram. If you don’t have an Insta account just yet you can sign up from here. Let’s see how you get the most out of Instagram these steps.
1. Creating an Instagram profile:
After Opening The Instagram App you get the option to create an Account by Facebook or by Email or Phone No. For Business, I Recommend using Business Email to create an account. Do not use Facebook Login as It gives some problems later on.
Select a unique Name and Username for your Instagram profile. Username will be the name that appears on top of your profile. and name helps others to find your profile on Insta. You can add more than 1 name to your profile but don’t add too many of them.
Switch to Business Account:
One of the most important things to do after creating your account is to switch to a Professional account or Business account. It is necessary to get a business account on Instagram to unlock some special features on Instagram, i.e. Insights. Insights are Important to grow your Instagram Profile. It helps to know which post gets the most engagement on Instagram.
2. Building A Proper Instagram Profile:
Instagram Profile Picture:
Another important thing is to add a Profile picture on your Insta profile. I don’t have to tell you how Important, Profile picture can be. It is your first Impression on your Instagram profile’s visitor.
For Influencers: Adding a closeup of your face with a light background is recommended. A close up make your profile more visible, a light background to get more focus on your face.
For Business: Adding the Logo’s icon without text will the best bet for your business. and don’t add any kind of text of it as it did not remain readable in your Insta post. Also, don’t add white background to your logo as It can negatively affect your logo’s visibility.
Instagram Profile’s Bio:
A good Bio increases the chances of turning profile visitors into followers. Insta bio should be short and simple, as Insta lets you add only 150 Characters to your bio. Do not fill your bio with Hashtags as Insta bio is not searchable.
Give your visitors Incentives like telling them why should they follow you on Instagram or why should they visit your website, in case if you have one.
3. Instagram Stories and Highlights:
Let’s talk about Instagram stories, the feature that Instagram copied from Snap-chat. Instagram stories have become quite popular recently with half of Instagram users using Insta stories on regular basis or engaging with them, hence making it most suitable for engaging with your current followers. the slideshow format is great for telling short stories(as the name suggests).
But don’t spend too much time on creating and editing Instagram stories as it remains on Instagram for just 24 hours chronically after that they will be gone but you can add your stories to Instagram Story Highlights in order to preserve them for more than 24 hrs.
Instagram Story Highlights
Highlights are Insta stories that will be shown after your Insta bio and will not be deleted after 24 hrs. It is said to be an extension of Insta bio as it appears after your bio. Instagram Story Highlights is a great tool for businesses to gain visitor’s trust and eventually turning them into followers. Personally, I create stories just to add them to my highlights. You can add stories to highlights just with two clicks, first open your stories after posting then click on the heart shape icon labeled as Highlights. You can add as many highlights sections as you want.
4. Instagram posts types – Which one should you post the most:
Post is the typical content you have to upload to Instagram in order to get followers. There are three types of posts you can upload to Instagram. namely:-
- Normal Single Image Post
- Carousels or simply multiple pictures in the slide format
- Instagram TV (IGTV) or Videos
Go to the explore page on the Instagram app, you will observe that videos (IGTV) get a large part of the page. Carousels take dominance in the number of posts shown on the explore page. It is evident what type of content Instagram promotes and what you should post.
As you can see now, Videos and Carousels definitely given more attention by Instagram. So, start posting your carousels and videos from today. but, while posting carousels make sure your viewers slide at least 3 pages of Carousels (In case you have more than 3).
5. Instagram Hashtags and Hashtags Research for Instagram Marketing:
One of the most important parts of Instagram Marketing is to add proper hashtags in your Post. but you can’t add any random hashtags on your post that will negatively impact your Insta marketing efforts. You have to find proper hashtags for your posts also known as Hashtags Research.
Hashtags research, is very easy to do in the Instagram app. Go to the search bar in the Insta app and write something related to your post then click on the tags option to see only tags write down the tags that are relevant to your post. Find at least 8-10 tags that got fewer posts on it. It is very effective in increasing the impressions that you get. By simply spending some effort in Hashtag research you can see a significant difference in the number of the impressions that your post-receive without those hashtags.
There are a number of websites dedicated for getting trendy hashtags. Some of them are :-
How many tags should you add to your Instagram post:
The no. of engagements you will get on your post rely heavily on the no. of tags you will add. The recommended no. of Hashtags you should add is between 11 to 20 tags in which at least half of the tags should have at least 1+ million posts added to it. Add all the tags at once at the time of posting.
6. Engaging With Top Accounts in your field:
After Populating your Instagram Profile by Posting at least 20-30 posts. Start finding and engaging with the top accounts in your related field. Engaging with top accounts will help you to derive a lot of profile visitors to your profile. But you don’t need mere profile visitors, you want them to turn into your followers, that is why you must have 8 or 10 quality post attached to your profile, which will turn those profile visitors into your followers. By interacting or engaging with accounts means to comment on their post frequently, sometimes giving them a call to action in the comment like to check out my latest post too.
Not only the top accounts also the new accounts can derive more followers, as when you like a relatively new account in your field they will surely visit your profile that’s what I was doing in my early posts.
Engaging With Your Audience:-
Once you establish a bit of Audience, you need to retain it. For it to happen you need to engage and need to build a long-lasting relationship with your audience.
“How to do it?”. Replying to the comments and answering their queries as soon as possible will be more than enough. You can even automate this process with some Automation Tools such as InstaChamp (https://app.mobilemonkey.com/instachamp). Tools like InstaChamp can be very useful. You can add real-time replies for common queries you receive (or might recieve) and can virtually be available to your audience 24/7.
7. Consistency and value Content:
“Consistency and Content are the keys to success”. In any social media platform to get more reach or followers (or whatever your KPI’s are), it is of utmost importance to create good content consistently. It is the same case with Instagram. you have to consistently create awesome and engaging content for your followers.
But don’t post too frequently, too frequent posts will frustrate your followers eventually pulling them to unfollow you on Instagram. It is the most common mistake done by a lot of Instagram accounts they post too frequently that don’t let them retain their existing followers. Now you might ask how frequently should you post, let’s discuss it.
How frequently should you post on Instagram:
Only you can answer this question, but here are a few recommendations that might help. It primarily depends on the type of content you post. My recommended frequency will be:-
- Max: 2 posts per day but don’t cross this line it will harm more.
- Min: 1 post per week. Although there are people that post even less than this but have a pretty good following because they create fewer but quality content. Artists like 3D animation artists etc. post is even less than this.
- Recommended: 2-3 posts per week is the best frequency for your Insta post. Many of Insta’s top accounts used this frequency.
8. Re posting:
Re-posting on Instagram is a great way to get free content to post and getting your content re-posted is a great way to get more reach and followers. It is a win-win situation for both who is reposting and whose content is being reposted.
There are lots of apps on Google play store and app store in ios. just search “reposting for Instagram” on the play store and then you can select your app for reposting. For your convince, I had put some of them down here:
- Repost for Instagram by Red Cactus
- Repost for Instagram – Regram by Kimcy929
9. Check Instagram Analytics or Insights:
Analytics or Insights, is the perk that we get only with business or professional accounts. Insights play a very important role in shaping your future Instagram strategy, determining which post is successful and which is not, on which days and time you should post.
Know your Post is successful or not by viewing Insights:
For Beginners: A post can be said to be a grand success if the post gets a little more likes than the total number of followers or If the impressions are at least double the number of total of followers.
For little grown accounts: When you have grown a bit, the success of posts depends more on reach and Impressions than the number of likes you will, hence don’t go for likes.
10. Time of Posts:
The timing of publishing a post is also very important to get maximum engagement. The only case when the timing does not matter is when you created a viral post. An Insta post, on average, remains on the home feed of your followers for a little more than 24 hours, which makes it more important to post at an appropriate time. So, you need to consider the time zone of your country before posting anything.
One way to find out the right time is to experiment posting at different days of the week and time but it will be very time consuming, let’s shorten your experiment post list with these tips.
- People generally check their Instagram in the morning, hence it makes sense to post also in the early morning.
- Check out, which days and times your competitor’s post the most. Aim for the gap between the competitor’s post.
- Be consistent with your posts.
11. Instagram Shopping:
Some people will say that Instagram is not good for businesses, but after seeing Features like Instagram Shopping they can’t say the same. Instagram Shopping is one of the latest features added to Instagram, which lets you sell directly from your posts without needing you to leave the Instagram apps. This is great news for a business having an E-commerce website. Now they sell directly on Instagram, but it is still a country-specific feature.
You can check , the eligibility criteria, and how to enable this exciting new feature and all other stuff from here: Help.Instagram Shopping
Conclusion:
Hope you liked our beginners guide to Instagram. As of now, you will have quite a good understanding of how you can market yourself or your business on Instagram and can get a lot of followers. If you started your Instagram account after reading this beginners guide or just switch to a business account, then DM me at my Insta account @Shivomgoyal, I will tell you what you can do to make your profile get more followers.
In case of any problem with Instagram, these links from Instagram might be helpful.
Contact us for any assistance.
If this blog was helpful, then you might found this blog helpful too: 8 Common Mistakes that you must avoid on Instagram.
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