People seriously love Instagram. Over 55 Million photos are shared every single day and that number grows by leaps and bounds. To make the most of this popular social platform, you need to be smart with your campaigns and the images you share, but you also need to think of Instagram as a part of your overall search engine optimization.
So here are 15 tips that you can try for 15 days to master Instagram marketing:
#1 The Importance Of Your Instagram Keywords
Did you know when you search on a keyword, Instagram looks for this keyword in your HANDLE to show results?
If your handle does not accurately reflect your niche, your product or your target keywords, consider making a change unless your handle is alreadywell-known or you are using your name/brand as the handle.
Using one or a few of your target keywords will increase your chance of visibility in Instagram search results.
Here are 3 Ways Keyword Research Can Make A Difference To Your Online Craft Business
#2 The Importance Of Your Instagram Name
Yesterday we talked about Instagram search using keywords in your Instagram handle.
Instagram search also looks for KEYWORDS in your NAME to show results. Another opportunity!
Consider adding these keywords either in place of your name or in addition to your name.
Using one or a few of your target keywords will increase your chance of visibility in Instagram search results.
Here’s How To Choose A Name For Your Craft Business
#3 Instagram Link Profile Tips
Your link in your Instagram profile is probably one of your most critical lines if you are trying to monetize your
Instagram. Make sure to utilize this one link to direct your audience to your website where they can
Redirecting your audience to your website is also a great way to build your audience by collecting their email.
Remember, Instagram is not your platform and as many followers as you have, this audience can go away at any time if your account is hacked or banned for some reason. Directing your audience to your website and requesting their email address on your website ensures that you have control over further communications with your followers.
One more tip! Users who click on the link are not tracked in Google analytics unless you add Google utm parameters.
This means you will not have a count of how many people clicked through to your website from Instagram unless you setup this tracking.
Here’s a Crafters’ Simple Guide To Google Analytics
#4 Looking At Your Business Logo
As a general marketing metric, people resonate more with other people, especially smiling faces. However, if your logo is consistent and memorable, this may be your trademark and used as your profile picture.
The image should be high-resolution, crisp & sharp. Your profile picture will display as 110 x 110 pixels in the mobile app and 180 x 180 pixels on web. So use the 180 x 180 pixel image to upload to maintain a high quality image in both web & mobile.
Note: You can only change your profile pic from the mobile app. Make it stand out. As you scroll through your feed and especially looking at competitor images, pick something that resonates with your brand that is memorable and unique to you.
This may be using color, image, contrast, or a unique setting but keep it professional. Pick an image and stick to it.
The image becomes a part of your brand similar to your logo. Consistency is key in social media, and especially
Instagram. Make it consistent across all of your social media channels so your profile is easily identifiable.
Here are Easy Tips To Design A Great Logo
#5 Your Brand’s Story
This is your chance to tell users about yourself and why they should follow your feed. Potential Followers will decide in 2 seconds if they want to follow you based on skimming your description and your first 6 images in 2 seconds.
That’s all the time you get, so make it count.
Keep it short. The profile bio is limited to 150 characters.
Optimally only use 4 lines for readability and the ability to still see 2 image rows on your account.
Break up the text with paragraph returns so it’s not a huge run-on sentence and a big block of text to read & consider using emojis.
Either use the NOTES feature on your phone to create your bio and copy/paste in on your phone OR click the {123} button to get the secondary keyboard with the RETURN button to create paragraphs.
Here’s A Formula To Master Product Story-Telling For Your Business
#6 Mastering Your Niche
Defining your Instagram account’s niche and target audience are some of the most important things you can do to gain an audience amongst 400 million active users on Instagram.
Knowing these elements, you can create a unique approach to first grow your Instagram account in your niche & then focus on your target audience.
We have found that focusing on just ONE very specific niche in all your actions speeds up the process of getting a solid foothold on Instagram and favorability in the algorithms.
As your account grow, you can start adding more niches or broadening your content on your account.
Here’s an overview for market research
#7 Join Comment Pods
Your new community works together to grow your Instagram accounts.
Another benefit of being grouped with other Instagrammers in niche and interested in growing their business accounts is the small group discussions generate niche specific strategies and real friendships.
Here are 30 Facebook Groups That Will Help You Increase Your Sales
#8 Your Posting Schedules
The main rationale for determining your posting schedule is to maintain CONSISTENCY!
The key is to post at a rate you can maintain so your audience receives a steady stream of content and value from you.
Posting 1-2 times per day yields both exposure to your audience and maintains good engagement rates. However, you don’t want to inundate people with images. If posting more than 1x per day, space your photos out at least 3-5 hours.
The #1 reason that people will unfollow is if you SPAM their feed with several photos in a row. Each account is different because there are so many variables that go into each post and the audience that sees it. Therefore, you should test and record results to find your optimal rate of daily posts.
Here are Free Tools To Help You Analyze The Best Times To Post Online
#9 The Power Of Image Quality
Quality for this post meaning – Crisp with good resolution.
Phones generally store images 2048px by 2048px – iPhone use this & Android devices vary.
Instagram stores images at 1080px on the long edge. So if you take a square image, it is stored at 1080px by 1080px.
If you take a rectangle, then the longest edge will be 1080px. If you take or upload a square photo directly on your phone LARGER than 1080px square, then Instagram will compress it with their compression tool and it may lose some quality but probably not much.
If you edit photos on your computer, you should be aware of how you exporting them and how you are sending them over to Instagram for posting as this is where people see the big difference in quality & fuzziness.
If you use Facebook messenger, some versions of Google Drive or email, the transfer from computer to phone may also be compressing the photo with sub-standard compression tools – losing quality.
Best practices, if you are editing photos on your computer, export them to 1080px long edge and then send them to your phone for upload using a method that does not compress the image. Examples of tools that do not compress –
Dropbox, Google Drive (*if used as a folder), Airdrop.
Here are 4 Secrets To Posting Stunning Instagram Arts And Crafts Photos
#10 Learning Effective Instagram Captions
Instagram is intended to be visual storytelling in the image that you post.
However, the platform has evolved and Instagrammers are using it many ways to tell stories through the pictures only, by creating mini-blogs in their captions, and something in between. Not to mention marketers using the caption as an area to engage their audiences with a call-to-action.
So.. should your Instagram captions be long or short?
You need to create your own style with your audience. It’s quick sentence and sometimes it’s a longer paragraph format giving information about the post. If you do choose a longer format, you should break up the content with paragraph and/or emojis for easier reading.
Here are Tips To Improve Your Descriptions And Make A Sale
#11 Understanding Hashtags
How many Hashtags? Knowing that you have a limit of 30 tags, how many hashtags should you use on a post?
Sounds like a trick question and you will find a variety of opinions out of the interwebs.
Many detail that you should only put 10-12 because putting 30 looks “needy” or “spammy”.
If you are given 30 lottery tickets, are you only going to take 10 because you don’t want to seem “needy”? OR There are lots of rumors going around that you should only use 5 for this reason or that. Nope, we have have not seen any statistical evidence of this!
Answer: 30! Use EVERY opportunity that Instagram provides us to maximize exposure on our posts and also maximize exposure for the brands that are sponsoring us to get the maximum reach.
Here’s Social Media Hashtag Explained To Handmade Sellers
#12 Easy Ways To Reply On Comments
Now, who did you respond to and who did you not respond to yet? I am not a big fan of many 3rd party apps and do not recommend having a lot of 3rd party apps hooked into your Instagram account, but one you might be interested to check is an app for iOS – MyCommenter.
This app shows you by POST: A summary count of “Replied” and “Not Replied”
You can select one or multiple people and respond in the app.
NOTE: This is not an auto-comment program from strangers by coins or points. This just facilitates keeping track of who you have responded to and grouping replies on each of YOUR posts.
Here’s How To Get People Love Your Social Media Posts
#13 What Posts To Like?
First assumption, hopefully you are following in niche and have identified some target accounts with YOUR target audience.
Now you have an opportunity to focus on what that target account is liking!
From the menu, click on the “heart”. But instead of looking at the “YOU” submenu, click on over to the “FOLLOWING” tab.
What you will see is a list of people you follow and what accounts they have liked.
Every time that someone you follow likes or comments on photos, it shows in this log.
Now you have a chance to interact with your target accounts friends and essentially piggy-back on their engagement targets / friends.
This is a great way to find a target audience following a larger accounts engagement to see who they are commenting / liking.
Here are 5 Things You Can Learn From Your Competitors
#14 Cross Promotions On Instagram
Don’t miss this opportunity to cross-promote your content to a wider network.
From the profile menu (Click your picture in the lower right corner), click on the gear in the upper right. Scroll down to “Linked Accounts”. Here you can connect other platforms i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.
Ongoing, when you create an Instagram post, you can share on these platforms in the final posting screen.
For Facebook, you can also select to “Share To” your personal page or a business page. First you will connect the account to your personal page. Then click on Facebook, then Share To for options to select a business/fan page.
Here is a Huge List Of Free Places You Can Advertise Your Handmade Business
#15 Congratulations!
We have LOVED receiving all your likes and comments and so proud at the success of this 15 day challenge in providing RESULTS to our followers.
Thank you for reading this article. We have more in store for YOU on the blog.
So what was your favorite tip?
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