To boost business Instagram engagement, follow your followers, and comment on their photos. Host contests and giveaways.
Instagram is much more than a platform to showcase and enhance photos. Used correctly, it?s a tool to drive customer engagement with your business. Here are a few tips to accomplish just that.
1. Mix business and pleasure. Chances are that customers feel more connection with photos of cute or unusual animals than with another picture advertising a sale. Encourage your employees to send in photos of their beloved animals.
2. Give customers a peek behind the scenes. What is everyday life like at your business? What do the offices look like? Reveal all! The more customers see, the more connection they feel.
3. Follow the folks who follow you on Facebook and Twitter. They may not realize you’re on Instagram, and boom, now they know.
4. When people follow you, follow them back. This makes them feel special, and you?ll learn from their photos what interests and engages them. Comment on their photos, and spread the compliments around. Do the same for other businesses and clients you?d like to work with.
5. Run photo contests/photo campaigns. Use hashtags and RSS feeds to track submissions, and market the contest on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
6. Post about five times a week. Less than that, and your account comes across as stale or dead. More than five times a week, and you risk overwhelming your followers. Of course, there are always exceptions, so use your judgment.
7. Tell stories with your photos. For example, if you?re a dog-grooming business, post a picture of a dog you?ve just worked on, and tell a cute story about the dog. Remember to get permission for approaches like this.
8. Host a giveaway. Post a picture of the item or service you?re giving away, and set a hashtag for entrants to use. Track entries until the giveaway ends, and announce the winner.
9. Hashtag away?but not too much. Use hashtags to reach Instagram users who search for these tags. Don?t overdo them, though, or your photo captions become too busy.
Of course, it?s also important that you focus on increasing your Instagram followers so that the above suggestions have an ever greater impact.
