3 Ways to take your Instagram business use to the next level

With over one billion active monthly users worldwide, it’s a good bet that at least some of your customers can be found on Instagram. Along with having a highly functional, mobile optimised website designed, maintaining and using your social media presence to build a profile, find new clients and strengthen existing relationships can totally transform your business.Most of us will be familiar with Instagram and know how to upload posts, tag and comment. If your business activity on Insta stops at that, you could well be missing out on lots of sales and marketing opportunities. Read on to learn how to advance your business Instagram use and take it to the next level in 2019…

Get clever about your hashtagsInstagram is a discovery medium and the way that users find content they love is via hashtags. With this in mind, get clever about how you use hashtags to help more of the right kind of users find your business page. Be strategic about which tags you use – to really maximise exposure, you need to get tagging using hashtags that your customers, and potential customers, use and search for. Try and develop a core list and each time you post, use this same set of hashtags. Being consistent and using your carefully researched and targeted hashtags with every post means that your content is more likely to be discovered by your intended audience.Don’t just use the discovery feedIt’s all too easy to scroll through your feed or perhaps tap onto discovery and see what Instagram has suggested for you to pass ten minutes on but as a business marketer, knock this habit on the head and instead, try the places tab. If you’re looking to generate leads or network with key people, the places search is invaluable. You can use this to see who has posted at a certain location, such as the head offices of a target client and then follow up with a LinkedIn search to identify the correct person you want to connect with to further your sales or networking objectives.Search for content inspirationSocial media marketing can often feel like a process of trial and error as you strive to create posts and share images that resonate with your audience and help drive traffic back to your website. One of the ways to further your efforts which you may not be familiar with is to use Instagram a little like a content inspiration search engine. Beginning with your important hashtags, search out posts which also contain those same tags. Look at the images which have accrued the most traction and use this as a source of inspiration. It can also help with hashtag discovery too, cross reference the other tags used on those most popular posts and add to your own list to use in your future content.