How to improve your Instagram presence in 4 moves

For many consumer brands, Instagram represents the holy grail of social media – crack this space and you can expect a bigger brand profile, an engaged audience, more traffic to your ecommerce website and an uplift in sales. However, achieving a high-profile presence is no easy task – here, we’re sharing four moves you can make to improve your Insta presence effective immediately…

1. Research your competitors When you go into battle it always pays to know who the opposition is, plus what their strengths and weaknesses are. Doing a little competitor research is a great way to gain a huge advantage and bucket loads of intelligence and ideas without having to do all of the leg work yourself.As your direct competitors will be targeting the same audience base as your own Instagram efforts, study how they manage to generate interactions. By that, we mean note the hashtags they use, as this is a huge part of audience discovery, study the style of images they use, their frequency of posting and the nature of their captions. 2. Engage more Go through your recent posts and the comments on those posts. Have you liked and replied to all? Engagement is about conversations and interacting with your audience is a key part of giving your Instagram presence a boost. Be consistent and on the ball when it comes to engaging your audience – respond to direct messages promptly, interact in the comments, reshare user generated content and answer questions as quickly as you can. 3. Use Stories Stories are known to be a very effective way of building a strong Instagram presence. They are well liked by Instagram’s community and generate a good percentage of views. Posting regularly to your stories can bring you much closer to your audience and help you forge stronger relationships with your Insta fans. Stories are also interactive so don’t shy away from asking questions. Video is a popular medium here and it’s well worth mixing your standard image posts with video in Stories for the best results. 4. Publish more video content Videos are now part of the Discovery feed on Instagram and, as is often said, video is the most consumed content format online today. Video draws in users and can turbo charge your Instagram account followers. Experiment with more video if you don’t already do this – you can double down with this content and use it to launch your own Instagram TV channel, if you can commit to keeping it updated.