The ultimate guide to promote your brand on Instagram
This article gives you a snapshot on why you should consider promoting your brand on Instagram and best practices to adopt.
Instagram’s popularity has seen a drastic increase since it was first debuted in 2010. With more than 800 million active users today, it is currently the third most popular social media network in the world, behind Facebook and YouTube, and marketers are in love with this platform.
In fact, according to our observation, apart from the organic approach, the paid ads on Instagram gave us 2 times more the number of leads when compared to Facebook ads for the same brand and we can observe that the number of advertisers on Instagram particularly in India has almost tripled over the past six months. For certain brands, we can agree to the fact that Instagram is now regarded as the best social media platform for audience engagement. But what is it that makes the platform so successful for brands, and how can social media marketers take advantage of it?
Who wouldn’t want their products and brand seen by more people, grow a strong following of customers who really relate to the brand and get paid. According to a study by social sprout, we have learnt that 70% of posts do not get seen due to the latest update by Instagram.
Before the update, the posts were ordered in the chronological order but after the algorithm change, posts are now ordered by how popular the post is according to likes and comments. Your posts will also appear if many users have searched about your brand or have visited your page.
It has become a concern, for Brands particularly, that their content might not be seen. So how do they make sure that their content makes enough sound to be seen?
Simple, make use of hashtags. Instagram hashtags help followers discover your content. Brand hashtags can build a large community and can be important for the promotion of Instagram content. Check with your social media marketing agency if they are adopting these best practices or you can follow the below steps.
So what is Instagram Hashtag and why use them?
A Hashtag is a singular word or phrase with“#” in front of it. If you post a picture or video on instagram without #, you are limiting it to only your audience. To get wide-reach to your posts and increase the number likes and followers to your content, it is advisable to add relevant hashtags to your post.
Not using a hashtag is not much of an issue if you have a lot of existing followers. But if you are just getting started on Instagram it is likely that your content will have maximum reach and might achieve decent results if hashtags are added along. It opens up your content and your brand to tons of new engaged users.
How to find the best Instagram Hashtag?
Now that we know how a hashtag can help you generate more likes and followers and ultimately more sales, let us see how to find the best hashtag for your brand.
It is a must that the hashtag you use must be relevant to the post. There are a couple of tools which might help you generate a large number of hashtags that are perfect for your business like Tag Blender, Instagram tags, Seek Metrics. Each of these tools is free and easy to use and are great for generating a list of hashtags.
How many hashtags should you give in one post?
Now that you are convinced that hashtags are important and we have found a few tools to generate them, there is one more thing to keep in mind-
DO NOT OVERDO!
We see a lot of posts that have as many as 100 and 1000 hashtags. Having so many numbers of hashtags can be considered as spam. A limit of 30 hashtags per post is considered to be set on Instagram. This is to make sure that the hashtags are not taken a wrong advantage of and content on Instagram is relevant to the users.
According to a study by smart insights, if you use appropriate hashtags and keep the count below or equal to 10, you could reach around 15,000 to 25,000 engagements per post. Therefore, aim for 5-6 hashtags those are relevant and those which give you an opportunity to engage more audiences with your content.
How to keep a track of your progress?
As we do with all marketing techniques, measuring the success of hashtags you use is important. If you analyse the performance of a hashtag, you will be able to validate your traces with data and it is always a good idea to be data informed. This will also give you knowledge about the hashtags which aren’t performing well. This data can be used to improve your future content by removing the poor performing hashtags.
There are various tools which can be used to analyse the performance of your Instagram content. Sum All, Simply Measured, Iconosquare being a few of them. These tools are free and easy to use and understand. They will help you analyse the average number of likes and comments which you receive on your content.
If you are a startup then, it is ideal to contact the best digital marketing agency for using the best and relevant hashtags on your post which will drive more traffic to your page. Their team of Social media experts will give you the best outcome as they will know which tools are to be used when and which technique could serve you better in terms of your business.
