Our social media marketing course equips you with the skills you need to help you use popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many more, as powerful marketing tools.

The key to successfully marketing your small business on Instagram is building an engaged following and positioning yourself as part of the online community which could very quickly become your future customer base.

Check out these tips for creating an Instagram marketing strategy for your small business:

Use a business account

When joining Instagram, you can select whether it will be a personal account or a business account. The latter is perfect for business as it allows you to view analytics, connect your account with your Facebook page, and it makes it easier for followers to contact you.

Fill in your bio

Instagram gives you 150 characters to tell potential followers everything they need to know about your business. Use this space wisely – it should be short and to the point. You can include hashtags in the bio, which can help more people find your profile. You can also include a link to your website.

Establish your identity and look

Instagram is a visual platform, the appearance of your profile matters. You want your followers to immediately associate your content with your brand. Using certain colours and fonts can help with this, as well as a certain style of image that’s consistent with your message.

Check out your competitors

Don’t know where to start? See what other businesses like yours are doing and draw on their ideas for inspiration. Take note of the content they post, the hashtags they use, etc. You can also check to see how well they’re doing: how many followers do they have? Do they get any engagement on their posts? This will tell you how well their strategy is working.

Plan your content

Once you have decided what kind of content you want to post, be strategic about it: plan what you’re going to post on a weekly basis, if not for several weeks at a time. Posting regularly and consistently helps keep your followers engaged.

Use hashtags strategically

Hashtags are one of Instagram’s most important features. They make it possible for people who don’t follow you to discover your content. However, the suggested number of hashtags to use varies widely, but we suggest using 10-30 at this moment in time.

Engage with other users

If you want to build a strong presence on Instagram, you need to do more than simply post your own content. Interacting with other people’s posts and comments shows them you are genuinely interested in them and not just trying to get their business. Respond to comments on your posts, follow interesting accounts, and like other people’s posts.

Post at specific times

Posting your content at times of highest traffic means you’re likely to get more engagement and interest. How do you know when is the best time to post? It varies, according to the nuances of your specific audience, and the best way to know the ideal time to post is to experiment and see what works best.

Collaborate with other businesses

When you collaborate with other businesses on social media, everybody wins. Having another Instagram user review your product, run a competition with you, take over your account, or work with you to create joint content exposes you to a wider audience and can be lots of fun too!

See our social media marketing course