instagram

6 Instagram Hacks to Grow Business in a Month

June 6, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

This is a guest contribution from Lale Byquist

One of the fastest growing social networks is Instagram. Everyone knows about it and almost everyone uses it.

But: Do we truly know the power of it?

While most people believe that Instagram is a website for sharing private photos only, proficient marketers use it as an effective tool for growing business.

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Although most brands know reasons for using Instagram, there are some stats to prove that this social media platform is in a high demand for modern businesses:

700 million monthly active users
Around 1/3 of Instagram users have purchased a product online
By 2017, 70.7% of US brands will use Instagram for business

In other words, if you want to grow a business, you’re in the right place.

Creating an effective marketing strategy that includes running Instagram account takes a lot of work. However, if you know and follow recent trends, you can achieve success faster without wasting time or effort.

Here comes a list of tips that will help you grow a business in a month:

1. Create Business Profiles

Instagram takes care of its users and its team has announced a new tool that allows brands to understand their followers better. Now brands can create business profiles that give an opportunity to analyze insights: impressions, reach, profile views, website and email clicks. It also helps to understand what works best for your audience.

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Switch your account to business as it allows you to analyze statistics which means understanding your subscribers’ needs better so that you can get more followers on Instagram by suiting their expectations.

2. Fulfill Contact Info

If you want to increase the number of subscribers, give them reasons for doing it! Obviously, people pay attention to eye-catchy content, but they want to know who you are as well, so fulfilling your contact info is a must: add a description, website, phone number, address, and any other information that can help people learn more about your company.

Moreover, you can increase blog traffic from Instagram which helps to turn followers into customers and, therefore, grow your revenue. The only one thing you need to do is to help followers understand more about your company, its values, and how they can make the most out of using your products/services.

3. Use Paid Ads

When it comes to business promotion, get ready to spend money. You want to deliver your message to the target audience, right? If so, you need to use Instagram to target your posts, and it costs money. Using paid ads has become an important element of any social media marketing, and Instagram rolled out this service to help brands grow their business faster.

Three main benefits of using paid advertising on Instagram:

It has great targeting: choose your audience to reach the right people with your ads.

It grabs fans’ attention: people spend an average 192 seconds on the site after watching Instagram ads.

It pays off: Michael Kors posted one of the first paid ads and it earned 16 times more followers than their unsponsored posts.

Any other proof needed? 75% of Instagram users take action after seeing an advertised post.

Invest in Instagram ads to attract high-quality followers and, therefore, succeed with running your brand profile.

4. Share Up-to-Date Content

Having an Instagram profile isn’t enough to grow your audience. You need to post interesting and unique content daily that gives something valuable to your followers. If you want to expand your audience and cause a buzz with your publications, posting up-to-date content is the biggest helper.

Post Instagram stories: a type of disappearing content that is available for 24 hours and doesn’t appear on a profile. It’s aimed at showing current events that are not so important to be on the main newsfeed.
Share breaking news: modern people crave for urgent information. When you share up-to-date content, you earn trust and loyalty which means attracting new fans to your brand profile as you help to follow the recent trends.

If you post current news, you earn followers’ trust and loyalty. Plus, you attract new people who want to stay up-to-date.

5. Backstage Photos are Booming

Instagram is a social network that puts visual content first. MDG Advertising found out that 67% of online buyers rated high-quality images as an important element to their purchase decision. It means that good visuals matter.

As most brands promote themselves online, and they know the importance of high-quality images, it’s a normal practice to buy stock photos.

It’s harsh, but true: Internet users are sick and tired of artificial content. Stock photos don’t look realistic to cause emotions and, therefore, you can’t convey.

What’s left? If you want to use visuals, create them! Unless you have a great content creation staff, take photos with your gadget! In fact, backstage photos are booming! If people choose your brand, they are interested in your staff and working process that shows them more about your company, its values, and a lifestyle.
Backstage content is exclusive, so sharing it with your followers has an impact on their loyalty as they become a part of a private community.

6. Get Influencers to Promote Your Business

While most marketers try to deliver their messages to the masses, targeting opinion leaders is a key to success.

To begin with, let’s find out who these people are. An opinion leader, or an influencer, is a socially active person who keeps up with the recent trends and news, and this person has won trust and, therefore, he or she gets asked for advice a lot. All in all, it’s a person who has an effect on the decision-making of other people. If influencers speak well of your brand, you’re about to win: a consumer to consumer communication is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.

Influencer marketing has become an actionable tactic when it comes to business promotion.

Although it has many benefits, get ready for some pitfalls. For instance, collaboration with opinion leaders is a time-consuming task as you need to pick up credible people who have earned trust and loyalty from their followers who might be your target audience.

Once you’ve established good contact with an opinion leader who can promote your business, you’re one step closer to success.

How to collaborate with influencers? Tell them more about your product or service and name reasons for using it (how it can solve someone’s problems).

Give them a sample. To promote your product, they need to be sure that it works well.

Be beneficial to them: you need to pay for this recommendation or give your product for free.

For example, if you run a fashion business, send your item to an influencer and ask to tag your company so that other people can contact you fast.

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Every opinion leader has an already existing audience that pays much attention to things, products, and services he or she promotes. Thus, it’s your chance to reach potential followers fast. Give it a try to measure the effectiveness of the results.

The Sum Up

Whatever happens, always put your customers first. Let’s draw an analogy: running a business profile on Instagram is like delivering a speech as you have to do your audience’s analysis to suits their needs. If you show what your product can do for them and how they can make the most out of using it, it’s more likely they will stay with you.

Every business owner dreams of making a business profitable. If you’ve decided to use Instagram as a marketing tool, try to use all tips and hacks to grow your business. All the above-mentioned hacks can help to achieve better results in a month only.

Bonus Takeaways

Interact with your followers and potential fans: like and comment on their content

Include a CTA in your posts: make your followers discuss the topic and involve other people

Use popular hashtags and geolocation to attract potential followers

Run contests to boost followers’ engagement

Add links to Instagram account on other networks

Although running an Instagram business profile is a long-term marketing strategy for growing your business, there are some tips for skyrocketing results in a month. Do you know other hacks that help to grow the business fast?

About the Author

Lale Byquist is a media communications student who runs PrsentationSkills.me website. She is fond of the digital marketing, so Lale studies a lot about it, and social media marketing especially. Feel free to contact her on Twitter or Facebook.

7 Ways To Get More Instagram Followers

October 7, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Photo: (cc) Pixabay

How hot is Instagram for businesses? Well, the social network boasts over 300 million daily active users and engagement is through the roof compared to other social networks. So what’s the trick to increasing your Instagram followers?

I recently posted a picture to my 2,000 Instagram followers that was liked over 40 times. That high level engagement is normal on Instagram. If any of my tweets was retweeted or favorited that many times, I’d be overjoyed.

That’s why brands are scrambling to master Instagram as quickly as possible. They want large, targeted, and active audiences who will fall in love with their pictures and products.

I recently started taking the social network more seriously and was happy to discover that many Instagram growth methods are similar to those used for growth on Twitter. If you know how to get more Twitter followers, then you have an edge when it comes to Instagram.

But there are also some differences that I will discuss within this post. Here are seven ways you can get more Instagram followers:

#1: Follow The Right People

You could technically follow many Follow4Follow accounts to increase your following. However, those followers are more interested in adding you to their own list of follows than your content.

You don’t want an audience of real, yet non-targeted and non-interested followers. Rather, you should be looking to build an audience of targeted individuals who have a strong interest in your brand. Here’s how you find those people:

Find a person in your niche with a big audience.
Go to that person’s most recent post.
Follow the people who liked that photo.
Repeat the process with more influencers’ accounts.

While Instagram requires a few additional steps compared to the Twitter approach, you’ll be following people who are:

Interested in your niche.
Active.
Engaging with content related to your niche.

Making a careful selection of who to follow will help you build a relevant audience that engages with your content. Try to be sure that the people you follow will be likely to follow you back.

Not only is it possible to find targeted and engaged users who are likely to follow you back, it’s also easy.

#2: Like The Right Pictures

Google the phrase “how to get more Instagram followers” and you’ll come across the tip I previously mentioned: follow users who like content related to your niche. More people are clicking on particular images to see who has liked them, then following those users.

This is a method people use to gain liked-minded followers. Liking hundreds of pictures related to your niche will put you in front of thousands of potential targeted followers.

Like photos posted by influencers in real time. The sooner you like the picture, the more exposure you’ll get. If you know an influencer posts pictures at a certain time each day, be sure you’re logged into Instagram at the same time so you can be one of the first people to like his or her post.

#3: Post Consistently

Engaging with other people’s pictures and following their active users will put your account in front of more people. But unless your account makes an impression on visitors, you won’t get many followers.

Posting consistently makes your account more impressive. Consistent posting makes it clear to potential followers that you are an active user. Until recently, there was no free way to schedule your Instagram posts. Now you can get the job done with HootSuite, but keep in mind that you must be logged in to the Instagram app in order to post it.

HootSuite doesn’t actually schedule the Instagram post. Rather, it notifies you to post to Instagram according to your schedule. So if you schedule a post for 6 pm, but don’t log into Instagram for the entire day, your picture won’t get posted.

Posting consistently on Instagram requires a bit more work, but it is also more rewarding. Far more people engage with Instagram posts than with Twitter and Facebook posts.

I have two predictions: the first is that the scheduling problem won’t last very long. My second prediction is that Instagram will keep growing, and you’ll want to post consistently now (and let other people complain about the technological restraints).

#4: Optimize Your Bio

Let people know what you do professionally, and who you are personally. List some of your personal interests and professional accomplishments. People who have never heard of you before should immediately get a sense of who you are just by reading your bio.

And no bio is complete without a link to your blog or website. This link will help you increase your traffic from Instagram, and that traffic can equate to subscribers and sales. So should you link to your post or landing page?

If you post your blog post pictures on Instagram and want people to read your content, simply include “Read this post by clicking the link in my bio” at the end of the post description.

If you prefer to include your blog’s link within your Instagram post descriptions, link to your landing page in the bio. Social media is a means to an end.

Successful Instagram users aren’t getting more followers just for the sake of having a pretty number and bragging rights. The purpose of Instagram varies for each person. Some people view Instagram as a way of building an audience and getting more blog traffic, while others want to funnel as much of their Instagram traffic to their landing pages as possible.

If you are using Instagram to grow your email list, then why link to your blog? Link to one of your landing pages to expedite the process.

Of course, if you view Instagram only as a means to an end and don’t bother interacting with your audience, your Instagram experience won’t be a smooth one. No matter which social network you use, interaction is a must.

#5: Include Hashtags

Use Hashtags to get your content found on Instagram. They’re the SEO for Instagram. Choose the right hashtags and your pictures will get in front of all of the people searching for that hashtag.

I like to use at least three hashtags in a given Instagram post. Before I choose hashtags, I’ll put the hashtag into Instagram’s search engine to see how they rank.

When choosing my Instagram hashtags, I’ll mix in the most popular hashtags with hashtags that aren’t as popular. Often less popular hashtags still get a lot of visibility.

Getting a lot of engagement for those hashtags boosts social proof and helps out with the more popular hashtags.

#6: Comment On Other People’s Pictures

Here’s a fun activity. Find a successful Instagram picture related to your niche. Then see how many people liked the picture and how many people commented. I decided to do this with one of my pictures:

41 likes
2 comments

Foundr Magazine is crushing it on Instagram. I decided to look at the stats of one of their Zig Ziglar pictures:

5,021 likes
34 comments

Why does this fun and insightful game help you obtain more Instagram followers? Instagram pictures don’t get nearly as many comments as likes, which makes the comments section an easier place to stand out.

Post a meaningful comment, and you’ll get more followers from that person’s audience.

Foundr Magazine currently has over 800,000 Instagram followers but the case study post only received five comments. So if you add comment #6, you are automatically exposed to thousands of people. You won’t get in front of Foundr Magazine’s entire audience, but a few thousand people seeing your comment isn’t so bad 🙂

#7: Post Awesome Pictures

Not all pictures are created equal. In the end, there are only three types of pictures that I post on my Instagram account.

The first type is something personal. I like it when people can connect with me on a more personal level. I’ve had numerous conversations with my audience about running, dogs, and the Red Sox. I love those types of conversations.

Not only does my audience get to know me better, but I get to know them better, too.

The second type of picture is a motivational quote. I like to inspire my audience so much that I created an inspirational quotes board that currently has over 4,000 pins. I am that serious about inspiring others (to be fair, I’ve got almost 600 contributors helping me with that board).

The third type of picture I post is a picture of one of my blog posts in order to drive more traffic to my blog.

Understand what types of pictures you want to craft and make them epic. For personal pictures, I like candid shots take in the moment. I hire a freelancer for my blog pictures because choosing those images is not my strong suit. For motivational quotes, I edit images using Canva (although I may begin outsourcing those as well).

In Conclusion

Instagram is a social network seething with new opportunities. You’ll tap into a powerful, highly engaged audience that can take your brand to the next level and beyond.

Foundr Magazine is doing very well, and the owner attributes much of the magazine’s success to Instagram. If you take action, you may attribute much of your business’ success to Instagram as well.

What are your thoughts about using Instagram for your business? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

5 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic From Instagram

September 30, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Ever get random blog traffic? It’s a mixed feeling of excitement and the question, “What can I do to get more traffic from that source?” I was recently surprised by Instagram traffic to my blog.

I followed targeted people on Instagram to grow my account, and I noticed that Instagram brought 10 people over to my blog that same day. Ten visitors a day adds up to 3,650 new visitors each year. I’m not doing cartwheels over an additional 10 visitors, but neither am I discounting the potential power of Instagram to increase my blog traffic.

In fact, I am doing cartwheels precisely because those visitors came from Instagram. At the time, my last Instagram post was two months old, and the one prior to that was almost a year old. I attracted 10 people to my blog via an inactive Instagram account. Imagine if it was an active account.

That’s why I was doing cartwheels.

Now I’m dreaming of the day my monthly Instagram traffic surpasses my monthly Twitter traffic. One-thousand daily visitors from social media alone has a nice ring to it. Today my blog is consistently getting more traffic from Instagram, and that traffic is growing.

Want to get blog traffic from Instagram? Follow these five tips:

#1: Link To Your Blog In Your Bio

This is how I got my initial 10 visitors. I followed people, they followed me back, and some of those people decided to check out my blog. I was also experimenting with a second method (but more on that in a second).

Linking to your blog in your bio is perhaps the easiest way to increase traffic. It takes a few seconds and requires little to no effort. All you do is edit your bio and add a link to your blog.

It’s that easy!

#2: Grow A Targeted And Active Audience

There are many ways to grow an audience on Instagram. Many sites out there offer myriad ways to grow your Instagram fans, particularly those encouraging you to buy followers.

That method doesn’t interest me. In fact, buying followers will not give you an authentic picture of your account activity and most will be bot accounts. At one point, I used a point exchange site to build up my Twitter audience during its infancy stage (I stopped when my account had 1667 followers), but I did nothing like that for my Instagram account.

I am more interested in methods that will actually result in an audience of people who are interested in my pictures and ready to engage with my posts. And you should be too.

Build a targeted and active audience by hanging out where the targeted and active people hang out. How? First, find an influencer in your niche with a big audience. Next, visit the influencer’s account and look at his or her latest post and who has engaged with, or liked it. Finally, follow all of those people.

It’s that easy. People liked the picture because they were interested in that topic (your niche). These people are likely active and engaged on the platform, so this simple follow strategy will help you build your own audience.

#3: Post Pictures Of Your Latest Blog Post

The day I received 10 visitors from Instagram to my blog I did not include an image from my latest blog post. But if I had, I would have easily doubled my visitors. Posting pictures of your latest blog posts on Instagram is a creative way to use the platform to increase your blog traffic.

Most of my blog post images are 300×300 pixels, but I can quickly and easily resize them to 400×400 pixels so that they are optimized for Instagram.

#4: Post Pictures Made To Spread

If I share a motivational quote on Instagram, it doesn’t usually result in a direct increase in my blog traffic. If anything, I’ll receive an indirect increase in traffic because some curious people will click on my blog link.

These types of posts are designed more for spreading power than traffic power. The stronger your image’s spreading power, the more people that image reaches. Motivational quotes happen to perform very well on virtually every social network. These pictures normally get a lot of engagement and attract followers.

This means my blog post images are seen by a larger audience. Motivational quote pictures motivate others and increase my following, which brings more attention to the blog post images that drive my traffic.

#5: Make Those Pictures Awesome

Each picture you put on your Instagram profile needs at least 10 minutes of care and attention (with the exception of random pics taken in the moment). I hire a freelancer to choose and edit my blog post pictures, and it looks like I’ll be hiring another freelancer for the motivational quote pictures as well.

If you want to create the pictures yourself, use Canva. It’s a free tool that makes image editing a breeze.

In Conclusion

While ten visitors in one day doesn’t look like much, Instagram is attractive because of its potential to bring in serious traffic and revenue.

Instagram users are active and engaged, so if you aren’t already using the platform, start now. You don’t need many followers to get dozens of likes for each picture you post.

The potential Instagram has to transform your business is huge. However, the only way Instagram will transform your business is if you take action.

What are your thoughts about using Instagram for business? Which of these tips resonated with you the most? Have any Instagram tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

20 Social Media Statistics That You Need To Know

August 26, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

It’s always difficult to decide which social network you should use. All of the social networks have millions of members. I use Twitter and Pinterest every day. I will be using other social networks every day as well (Instagram, Tumblr, and Google+).

I am not jumping right into those social networks because it’s better to focus on an individual social network. Once I reach 3,000 followers on Pinterest, I’ll incorporate another social network into my business plan (UPDATE: I now have over 3,000 followers on Pinterest).

You may be juggling around social networks, or you don’t know which social network is right for you. These are 20 interesting statistics that will help you decide which social network to use.

Pinterest users spend an average of $180 per purchase which is far greater than any other social network. Facebook users are second at $85.
The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 age bracket.
Companies that generate over 1,000 likes also receive nearly 1,400 visitors on their website a day.
50% of Twitter users are more likely to purchase from brands they follow.
80% of pins are repins.
40% of marketers use Google+.
45 million photos are uploaded to Instagram every day. That’s 521 photos every second!
Instagram has grown very fast in less than 3 years.
24% of teenagers who use the web also have Twitter. Some of them are moving from Facebook to Twitter.
Facebook has 665 million users who are active every day.
Over 6 billion hours of video are watched every month.
Companies with over 1,000 followers generate more than 800 visitors to their website every month. I can vouch for that.
Pinterest hit 10 million unique U.S. visitors per month faster than any other website in history. It’s growing, and it’s growing fast.
One out of every 7 minutes spent online is on Facebook.
The average Pinterest user has 171 pins, 229 followers, 3 boards, and 28 likes.
720 million minutes were spent using Pinterest’s mobile app in 2012.
60% of Google+ users log in every day while 80% of Google+ users log in every week.
Every minute, 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter.
There are 2.1 million LinkedIn groups.
Over 400 million tweets are sent every day.

If It Were Easy

August 21, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Everyone would be doing it.

If being a bestselling author was easy, everyone would be writing their own book and becoming the next bestselling author.

If having a million Twitter followers was easy, everyone would be on Twitter talking with over a million followers.

If having a mansion was easy, everyone would move into a mansion or turn their house into a mansion.

If having a successful business was easy, everyone would be an entrepreneur, and none of them would quit. Sadly, over 90% of them quit within the first 5 years.

If coming up with a big idea was easy, everyone would be thinking of big ideas. The people who can’t think of big ideas sell products similar to their competition.

If running the mile was easy, everyone would be running that mile without stopping. It isn’t as easy as it appear.

However, it’s not easy. That’s why few people do the difficult tasks. The safety zone is not safe at all. Everyone is in the safety zone which makes individuals in the safety zone become invisible.

Becoming a bestselling author, having a million Twitter followers, having a mansion, having a successful business, coming up with a big idea, and running the mile are not easy. As we get more experience, these tasks become easier.

After writing a lot of books, an author can build a following and eventually become a bestselling author.

After consistently tweeting for years and going viral, it is possible for someone to reach a million followers without knowing how to sing well or buying a million followers.

Everyone who started with a business started at the bottom. Macintosh computers were first made in garage. Now Apple is a multibillion dollar company that pays billions of dollars in taxes. They can pay those billion dollars in taxes and still make a profit with their Macs, iPhones, iPads, and more. Amazon started out as a bookstore. Now Jeff Bezos is a billionaire who recently bought the Washington Post. Not bad for “another bookstore.”

When someone thinks of a big idea, and creates a business based on that big idea, that person has a good chance of becoming successful. Twitter, Facebook. Instagram, Pinterest, and Google are some of the big ideas. The person who came up with an idea for any of these social networks (or Google) is either a millionaire or a billionaire. That’s not bad for an idea that started out on paper. Back in 2004, people would have looked at you funny if you talked about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. Google was around at that time, but Google+ was not.

Running the mile becomes easy after a lot of practice. People give up when they run the mile for the first time because it’s excruciating. The people who run day after day will be able to easily run the mile.

It’s not easy, but with practice, dedication, and commitment, you will make it easy.