5 tips for companies using Instagram

Instagram is currently one of the most important social media platforms of all. Not only private individuals are represented here, but most companies also have their own Instagram profile. The reason is that marketing on social media is at least as important today as advertising on posters or on television. This is because younger target groups in particular can be reached primarily via this route. However, Instagram is not always easy to understand, especially at the beginning. Because there are countless functions that need to be used, as well as dos and donts that must be considered. That's why we've collected the five most important tips in this article that you should follow when using Instagram for your business.

Set up company profile

The first step to successfully present your own company on Instagram is the company profile. On the one hand, there are a few points that are generally important on Instagram, but there are also relevant differences between the profile of a private person and that of a company.

First, as a company, you should have a business account on Instagram. To do this, you can simply have a normal account converted into one. Instagram even offers this service free of charge. With this business account, you can use the insights to get precise insights into how many people you are reaching with your own posts. With this type of account, you can also promote your own posts on Instagram, which allows you to reach more people. The budget for this advertising can be adjusted completely individually. A visitor to a business profile on Instagram also directly receives a selection of direct contact options, which you define yourself beforehand and through which you want potential customers to reach you.

Of course, your own profile must be filled with information about the company. The user name and bio, i.e. the short description of the profile, are the most important here. When choosing a user name, there are generally two common options. Either you already have existing profiles on other social networks such as Facebook. If that is the case, you should choose the same username if possible. This allows you to maintain a consistent user image. If you create your first company profile on Instagram, then you should choose a name that unmistakably identifies your company.
Your profile bio is a short description that explains to the visitor who you are and what they can expect on your profile. You have 150 characters available for this purpose, so you should present yourself as briefly and concisely as possible. Information such as contact options should also not be missing here, although most of this information can be provided separately on the profile.

In addition to the username and bio, the profile picture is also one of the first impressions that a profile visitor gets of you. The most common way to do this is to choose your company's logo. However, care should be taken to ensure that the chosen image fits perfectly into the available space. The resolution and image quality must also look appealing.

Now you need to generate followers. To do this, it is advisable to follow other users and companies in your own sector first. On the one hand, this allows you to stay informed about what content your competitors are publishing. But it also gives you an idea of which users on Instagram make up your target group and how you can best reach them.

Finally, you should also draw attention to your profile outside of Instagram. For example, you can print the name of your profile on menus, table displays, posters, or decorations. This means that local customers are immediately aware of this. Because you get more reach primarily from the people who have already been with you, they also need to know about your social media channels.

If you need additional illustrative support when creating an Instagram business account for your company, then you can Explanatory video watch. The process of creating a business account is explained in detail there.

Plan and set goals

The next step is to consider what content you want to publish on your profile. However, before you can determine the exact content, a number of framework conditions must be considered. These conditions are primarily the goals of your own company, the approach of competitors and your own target group.

All activities on Instagram should be aimed at achieving strategic goals. You don't have to completely reconsider these goals when creating an Instagram account. Because ideally, you already have certain goals in mind for your own company that you want to achieve. So all you have to do is ask yourself how you can use Instagram to achieve these goals. In addition to the overall objectives of the entire company, there are of course also fewer long-term milestones that you can set for yourself. You should also do this so that you can always orient yourself to a strategy. When planning these milestones, you should always follow the S.M.A.R.T. principle. This means that your goals should always be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. This principle ensures that you don't set yourself unattainable goals and then lose sight of reality.

After you've set yourself your goals, you should look at the environment in your industry. This gives you an overview of which strategies and approaches are already being implemented by your own competitors. But above all, what works and what doesn't. The competition always serves as a good inspiration, but you shouldn't just copy others' methods and hope that it works better. Instead, you can look at certain points of someone else's strategy and modify and adapt them for yourself. Only if you fit your own strategy, of course. In addition, you should also keep an eye on the captions and comments from competitors. Because here you can find clues to using another very important tool on Instagram: the hashtags.

Hashtags are used by Instagram to categorize content and display it to the right users. Therefore, you should research in advance which hashtags can bring many new visitors to your profile, and which hashtags are more likely to get lost yourself because there is already a flood of content about them every day.

The last point of previous planning is the analysis of the target group. This part is particularly important because the target group is the decisive factor for success on social media. This analysis is particularly fundamental for the next tip, content planning. This is because different target groups can be addressed better than others via different content or content formats. When researching, you should pay particular attention to characteristics such as age and interests or at what time she is particularly active on social media. If you start publishing content without these considerations, in the worst case scenario, your posts may completely miss your target group and you won't achieve anything with Instagram.

Publish content

As soon as the strategic planning of activities on Instagram is complete, it is time to consider what content you want to publish on Instagram. Since this topic is extremely important and extensive, it is divided into three areas: the content strategy, the posts themselves and the other formats that can be used for publishing.

Content strategy is the most important clue for all social media activities. Because with a well-thought-out strategy, you save a lot of time because you don't have to create new content before every post, and you can delegate the tasks associated with Instagram more easily, as there is a fixed plan that everyone should stick to. The first step to setting up a content strategy is looking for inspiration. These can be found in various ways. If you have already looked at the competition before, you can orient yourself to the competitors' content, but you shouldn't just copy it. You can also look through relevant hashtags and blogs to find out which content is successful with the target group.

Once you've found enough inspiration and collected various ideas for your own content, you should start planning your own feed. This step saves the most time and work later on, as you can simply publish the planned post at the appropriate time and don't have to make new considerations first. However, you should first determine how often you want to post content on your profile. Because you can only quickly collect new subscribers by posting regularly, because Instagram's algorithm attaches great importance to this. In most cases, you can assume that 3 posts per week to one post per day are enough to be successful on Instagram. The exact frequency is then dependent on your own capacity. Once you've set up this strategy, all you have to do is follow it. If possible, you should always stick to this strategy, but if you notice that the desired success is not happening, then you have to adapt the strategy and not get stuck in the initial planning.

The second topic in terms of content on Instagram is the posts themselves. Posts are the most common way to publish content on Instagram and there are various points to consider here. The most important thing is always to publish high-quality posts. The easiest way to improve the quality of posts is to publish high-resolution images. Care should also be taken to follow a consistent style when editing the images. Because when companies use Instagram in particular, pixelated images that don't fit together show unprofessionalism. In addition to the quality of the posts, it is also relevant to cover different topics as far as possible. The aim is to make your own profile exciting and varied for subscribers so that they visit the profile again and again.

When creating a post on Instagram, you have the option to add a caption to the image. In this description, you should provide subscribers with context about their own pictures, which should at best be instructive and interesting. At this stage of creation, you should also add hashtags to an image. You should have researched these beforehand in order to be able to use a standardized set of hashtags that distribute your own posts to more users than your own subscribers. Depending on which topic the respective post covers, you can also change or add hashtags here depending on the situation.

In the following image, you can see the process of publishing an Instagram post. First you select the image, then you have various options to edit the image. Finally, you can insert the image caption and hashtags and mark people or places.

After all, there are more formats on Instagram than just normal posts. Especially as a company, you should try to be bold on Instagram and use all available formats to a certain extent. Because that creates more attention and ultimately more subscribers for your own profile. Of course, some formats are more common than others, such as stories. These should be used regularly, while other options such as live streams, IGTV or Reels are not quite as relevant for some companies. In order to use the various options correctly, you should find out in advance how they work or simply try them out to get a feel for how they work. Since stories on Instagram are only visible to subscribers for 24 hours, it is important to save information published here in highlights. In this way, they remain visible to later subscribers. Another important tool is the connection between Instagram and Facebook. This is because this allows you to reach the target group on two platforms at the same time.

Interactions on Instagram

If you regularly publish content on Instagram, you will inevitably receive feedback from Instagram users. Responding to this feedback and interaction with subscribers in general is particularly important if you want to improve your own customer loyalty.

Probably the most common feedback you'll receive is comments. These are written by users under your posts and can be of various types. You will either receive praise and friendly encouragement, constructive criticism or, in the worst case, very negative comments or possibly even insults. In any case, it is important to respond to and answer all of these comments. You may be able to use constructive criticism to improve something in companies. If you are attacked by a user for no reason, you must never counter or react disparagingly, but you should remain friendly, factual and professional, which should usually stop the attacks.

In addition to comments, there are also direct messages on Instagram that can only be read by you and your interlocutor. Again, you should respond to all messages and try to always remain professional to make a good impression on users.

Finally, it can also happen that users themselves post content that concerns you and your company. If you are happy about the respective post and want to return the favor to the user, then you can repost the user's content. In this way, you show your appreciation and increase customer loyalty at the same time.

optimization

While you're following the previous tips and being active on Instagram, there are numerous points where there might be a need for optimization. When identifying these points, you can use a very helpful Instagram Business Account tool: Insights. These statistics provide information about the success of your own content and can help you discover weaknesses in your own strategy. In addition to the insights, you should always pay attention to the feedback from your own subscribers, as they can best tell you what works and what doesn't. These two points should be reviewed regularly and included when adjusting your own strategy so that success on Instagram does not fail.

conclusion

In this blog article, we've shown you 5 tips on how you can make the most of Instagram as a company. First, you need a company profile and must analyse the framework conditions. Then you should develop a content strategy and publish quality posts in all available formats. You should also always seek interaction with your subscribers to increase customer loyalty. Finally, you must always optimize your social media activities to achieve long-term success.

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