Three Key Instagram Marketing Secrets for Businesses
With over one billion users worldwide, Instagram has become one of the most widely used social platforms in the world. Feeds are carefully crafted by individuals to achieve a certain aesthetic and outsmart the algorithm. Learning Instagram’s algorithm can be a real challenge, but here are three of our Instagram marketing secrets to help your business achieve success.
Know Your Audience
One of the keys to success on any social sharing platform is to know what “side” you are on. Simply put, this is the audience or community of people on Instagram who are seeing your content. No social platform shows all content to every user. The algorithm curates content based on what a user engages with. So, depending on your product, you should curate your content directed at those who already engage with it. This means using photos and captions that are relevant to the age and interests of your targeted users.
Let’s take our Italian restaurant client as an example. We target foodies, families, and locals with lighthearted, fun content. The client’s feed consists of photos and videos of food, reposts from customers, fun interactive content, jokes, memes, and restaurant information to excite followers and encourage engagement. Knowing your audience and formulating your content around them is the most critical of our Instagram marketing secrets to help businesses achieve success.
Relevant and Targeted Hashtags
One of the best ways to work with Instagram’s algorithm is to use relevant and targeted hashtags that your audience is also using or searching for. Hashtags help your content show up where the hashtag is being used. Research can help you build a list of highly searched and timely hashtags that communities are engaging with so that you appear more frequently and higher up on the hashtag feed.
One of the best tools for researching hashtags on Instagram and Twitter is Hashtagify. At Frozen Fire, we use strategies such as looking at competitor content and compiling a list of hashtags we have used and want to continue using for each client. We recommend that businesses research and keep track of relevant, branded, and targeted hashtags to reuse when posting as one of our Instagram marketing secrets.
Frequency and Timeliness of Posts
Only posting once a month isn’t going to boost your engagement because it’s unlikely that a majority of your followers will see the post. Picking the right frequency and time for posting is critical when learning the Instagram algorithm. This is the third of our Instagram marketing secrets – you should be posting at a frequency that works best for your business and a time when your followers are online to maintain peak engagement. We recommend monitoring analytics to see what days and times your followers have the highest rates of engagement so that you can post when they are most active. Staying active and posting at least once a week will increase your chances of Instagram recognizing your content as relevant to others.
Our team generates monthly content for our clients before the next month begins and utilizes a scheduling service, like Hootsuite, to schedule content during peak posting times. This allows us to make sure the content goes out at the appropriate time and maintains frequency for our clients.
Unlock More Instagram Marketing Secrets
If you learned something from this blog, we have more to share. Our goal is to help fire up businesses and spark new ideas in the digital space. If you are ready to unlock more digital marketing secrets, not just the ones for Instagram, contact us today to get started!