Type of Account
Let’s talk first a little bit about the kind of account you will be running, there are different kind of accounts each with different strategies:
-Local Business or Businesses in general.
-Personal Accounts.
Accounts you run about your life, personal experiences, vlog.
-Niche Accounts. (motivational, food, healthy living, etc.)
In the case of niche accounts, I suggest picking up a niche that you are passionate about a niche you feel you could post for hours without getting paid (But in this case for your passion you will $$).
Picking The Right Username
Picking the right username is a very easy instruction, yet a very hard task to accomplish; because as you know the best usernames are already taken, so what do you do about it? I wrote some suggestions in the image above, even though they may sound vague this can help you out, another thing I may add is to look for other people in your niche to get even more ideas. Unfortunately, the only way is to keep looking for better and easy to brand names. Keep trying until you find a username that you like and is easy to remember.
Content
Posting quality content is required for our business, images are good but videos are quite hot these days so if you could grab your camera and record more and post daily videos that would work great.
Quality over Quantity
Scroll down and take the time to see how different companies structure their content and the time they put into their work.
Taking time to post quality content is the right way to go. You need to find out what your audience likes and what creates more engagement in the platform, this way your posts get shared more and as a consequence, your posts gets more exposure.
How Often Should I post?
You should post regularly, depending on your niche and what you do. But obviously you also want to be careful here, you don’t want to bombard people with a bunch of posts hourly every day because they will get notified every time you create a post and it will be annoying as hell once they get similar content or even if one posts is completely different from the other, the fact that your brand is showing hourly there, will be annoying.
Always remember to split test different times and see how well is converting for you. So you could post twice, three times or even 4 times a day again it really depends on the kind of business you are running, there is a very interesting video from Gary Vaynerchuk he recommends to post 4 times a day for a restaurant business owner, there are niches where this is very easy to accomplish especially those that are very visual.
Theme
Once you start posting you will see that you will find a theme for your Instagram posts, this is another thing to keep in mind, find your theme could be a combination of images with videos at certain days, for example, take a look at these accounts and see for yourself a theme based:
You will see each of them is different from each other but both are from different people or businesses, now each keep one style if you have a local business you can take a look at other local businesses of your same niche and get an idea on how you should structure your posts, play around a little bit and also take a look at other people or business accounts make your own judgment improve it and split test for the WIN.
Write an awesome and catchy BIO
This is your presentation and is one of the first things people take a look for either follow you or visit your site, so this has to be a well-written description of you or your business.
Keep in mind that the BIO section allows a limited amount of words (150 words) you should use this limited space wisely.
Using emojis will help a lot too to grab more attention from our users and lead to take the actions which in most cases is visiting our site and following us.
Highlighting Your Business
Due to the fact that we have limited space, we need to think about what the most important features of our business are, think about a couple of facts that you consider are relevant and will give more credibility to the account.
CTA (Call to Action)
In most of the posts, we create on Instagram we should remind people to follow us or visit us or make them perform the action we are looking for.
Some people include calls to action in every single post and others some of the time, you will see how often you have to do this the more you see reactions from people and try to figure out what works best.
The main purpose with all of this is to try to increase our conversions (more followers or more traffic) often times those will be the reasons.
Create engagement
Look at the high engagement in these posts, videos are king and people are very visual.
There is no doubt that having more engagement in your posts increases your reach on Instagram, Instagram loves this and when you create this engagement your posts reach more people thus more traffic, so always encourage your followers from time to time to post a comment or like your posts.
Hashtags
Hashtags is another good strategy for getting more followers to your account, so picking up the right hashtag seems to be the main problem to solve when reaching more people. We get this right and our post will get more reach.
To accomplish this we have to recognize first that there are different categories of hashtags out there, so I will write them down now so we can get to know them better:
Branded Hashtags
These are hashtags that are associated with brands and popular businesses:
#krispykreme #justdoit
But you could also develop your own branding to make your account more popular.
Location Hashtags
Location hashtags are useful when you are trying to target a specific city so let’s say you have a local business from time to time is useful to name the city you are in so you can get more exposure within that place.
Trending Hashtags
There are many websites online where you can check trending hashtags if you just hit to twitter they always show it on their sidebar.
This is when an event or situation is happening in the world so let’s say the event in Paris
#prayforparis
Usually, these events will be trending or will be mention on the news and we can use some of these when it fits or is related to our business.
Keep an eye on trending hashtags though you get traffic almost guaranteed.
Niche Hashtags
Niche hashtags are spammed a lot, these are more generic hashtags that I’m pretty sure you have seen them when you browse Instagram, the problem with this kind of generic hashtags is that they are also used by bots a lot and the idea when we post ourselves manually is to make it as personalized as possible.
So which one to choose?
This is where we get technical there are different strategies that we can follow and it will depend on the niche, on the number of followers and other factors. I will mention some of them below:
We can see the number of hashtags at the top of the Instagram page when we use the searcher #happybirthday
As you can see this hashtag has been used over 74 million times, try to rank for that: D; it will be a great pain to do it.
To rank for one hashtag in particular we must consider how difficult it is first and we do that by seeing the number of times this hashtag has been used.
If your account is small (less than 10k followers) try going after less competitive hashtags the more your account grow the more you can expand to more competitive hashtags.
Do not post generic hashtags: #beautiful #wonderful which will be very hard to rank and also there is no targeting there at all.
Do not post unrelated hashtags: make sure to always post hashtags that are related to your business.
Do not post banned hashtags: Illegal activities, nudity, porn, racism, etc.
Limits with hashtags, you can post up to 30 hashtags per post.
We have to do this always trying to not being so annoying so we could include a call to actions in some posts and in some others not.
We have to split test and see how well this convert for us.
Recent Comments