The first thing you need to know about Instagram is that, well, Facebook owns it. Yep; Zuckerberg and crew bought it for a cool $1 billion back in 2012; which tells you that the photo-sharing website was as promising then, as it is successful today.  It has over 33 million active monthly users, and many more moderately-active accounts – which represents a healthy stream of potential business, if you play your cards right.  Instagram’s 400 million-strong user-base (and growing) beats out even Twitter, which is why you need to pay close attention to the marketing tips to follow.

Start Out with Attractive Images
These don’t need to be directly related to your business; the point here is to gain some traction. Instagram is quite aware that it’s a great platform for businesses, and so there are tools on the website that can have you up-and-running quickly and smoothly. Post images of puppies, attractive fitness models – obviously, if you can find a way to tie these into your business, then that’s a good thing.

1. Soon, you’ll start to cultivate a following. How big this becomes is up to your investment of time; it’s always a good idea to take advantage of your other social accounts – especially your Facebook – by linking it to Instagram, so that you can tap into several different streams of traffic. It turns out that Instagram users are looking for something different from Facebook, and you can leverage this for business by following a couple of best practices: Use hashtags. On Instagram (and Twitter, for that matter), these are the equivalent of keywords for Google Search. Hashtags allow people to find your images, and this is, of course, the very first step towards interaction. The content/quality of the image is the next determinant.
2. Feel free to scan Instagram after you sign up, find people to follow, and then peruse and like their photographs. Heck; take it one step further and leave comments – in our experience, the more insightful the comment, the more likely that people engage you and then follow your username back to your profile to find out more about the wizard (that would be you).
3. As mentioned, leave links to your other social networks on your profile page, so that you connect the other important aspects of your online persona together in one spot, and traffic trickles from one to the other.

More than most other sites, Instagram is one in which you need to follow back whoever follows you; because there’s not a lot of copy associated with the website, Instagram posts don’t easily show up in the search engines without very specific keywords that contain the name of the site, itself. Thus, the community grows mostly from within, and your liaisons there take on an extra bit of importance.

The Little Things Matter On The ‘Gram
We live in an age of apps; in fact, many would say they’ve become more important than websites, in a sense. Turns out that there are many image-related apps that can enhance your photo-sharing escapades on the ‘Gram; use them. You want it to be as easy as possible for your growing stable of followers to share your images and help you spread the love.

Other than the above, there’s not much left to do besides remaining engaged on the platform. Find a way to post regularly, because once you get to a certain size, your small efforts make big waves in terms of increasing your popularity. Instagram isn’t going anywhere – so rush to it and get started.

Contact Blast Creative if you are interested in our Social Media Marketing Services.

If you are a business owner in any of these genres, financial, photographers, dentists, hotels, restaurants, construction, HVAC, hardware stores, real estate, or any business owner and want more information on Internet Marketing, please contact Blast Creative today!

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