When forming your social media strategy for your business, Instagram is an excellent mobile marketing app that can effectively carry over your companies marketing strategy. While Instagram is not the only tool that has been proven effective for businesses, it is hard to ignore as it is currently valued at One Billion dollars and 80 million+ users. There are many ways that Instagram can be a huge benefit when promoting your businesses: marketing strategy, philosophy, and brand image. Here are a few key tips to keeping your Instagram account consistent with your marketing strategy
Create your own unique hashtag
Creating your own unique hashtag is a simple way to build a loyal following on your businesses Instagram. Once you establish a name for your hashtag, make sure that you are promoting it to your audience by posting it across all social networks and as a caption on every Instagram post. Instagram also makes it very convenient to monitor which followers are actively using your businesses hashtag. I recommend engaging with the users who post your hashtag by either thanking them personally or re-posting their photo, and tagging them. By recognizing the users who are actively using your hashtag, new users will be encouraged to post as well.
Geo-Tagging Your Photos
Geo-Tagging your photos on Instagram, will allow your business to involve your community on a completely different level. By Geo-tagging photos, your followers will be able to view the location(s) of your business if you happen to be a: retail store, restaurant, or office location. Geo-tagging is another great way to build your businesses following. If you and a co-worker go out to lunch at Chipotle, you can geo-tag your photo at the location you are dining at. By doing so, Instagram users who also geo-tag this same location will be able to see your photo, which will hopefully encourage them to follow your businesses account.
Encourage Employee Posts
Some of your most loyal promoters should be your employees. Encourage your employees to be actively involved in posting photos on your businesses account a few times a week. By having your employees on board, users who are following your account will appreciate the ability to get to know more about your company’s employees. As long as you set clear guidelines of what is appropriate to post, you should gain a following rather quickly due to the variety of different types of posts your account will consist of.
Connect your Social Media Accounts
Be sure to sync all of your businesses other social media accounts to your Instagram every time you post a photo. Having all of your social media accounts connected, your audience has a high potential to expand, because not all of your fans and followers will follow your other accounts such as: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Flickr. Syncing up all your other social media accounts not only allows for additional content but an opportunity for more frequent posts.
