As a small business, or in fact a business of any size, a top priority should be ensuring that your social media presence is top-notch. You can gain so many benefits from fully optimising your social media accounts, which can be done pretty simply, and without having a big budget.
Optimise Instagram for Your Small Business
Instagram for Brands
It’s no secret that Instagram is the place to be for brands and customers. It’s highly visual nature makes it the perfect platform for showing off your products in an attractive way that is easily accessible for consumers to browse. Instagram has taken the spotlight for a while, and with the introduction of new features to help support small businesses, it only gets better.
It’s clear why Instagram is the most popular platform amongst influencers too. And, by optimising the features of a business account, in combination with creating partnerships with Instagram influencers, you’ll be sure to go a long way with your business here. Also remember Instagram story is an amazing way to market your business, so try some Instagram story maker tool to create free designs for your stories.
Setting up a Professional Account
Let’s start with the basics. The first thing you should be doing is making sure that your account is set up as a professional account. By doing this, you can gain access to all of the great benefits such as insights, and Instagram shopping, which we will look at in a moment. You might also be interested in Best Influencer Marketing Courses to Scale up Your Marketing Game.
This is pretty easy to do. Just follow these steps:
- Go to your settings
- Click ‘switch to professional account’
- Select ‘business’
- Follow the instructions to add business details.
For some more information, here is a link to more detailed instructions from Instagram.
Instagram Insights
With your business account set up and ready to go, you can start to take advantage of the features that come with it, like insights. For any business or creator, insights are essential for understanding how your account is doing.
Firstly, you can see metrics on your posts, stories, and various publications. This allows you to see how well they are doing, looking at likes, comments, shares, etc.
Secondly, you are able to understand your audience a whole lot better. Insights will allow you to view detailed information about your followers on Instagram, and to explore the ways in which they are interacting with your content. Find out more about available Instagram marketing classes that suit your learning needs.
IG Shopping
Next up, you’ll want to be taking full advantage of Instagram shopping. If you’re a small business that primarily operates on Instagram, then you will likely already have this setup. But, if not, then keep reading because this is a crucial step in optimizing your performance through Instagram. As many as 81% of Instagram users are on the platform to research products and services. If that’s not encouraging enough, then I don’t know what will be!
Instagram Shopping enables users to browse and purchase products within the app. This feature benefits consumers, by providing users with easily accessible products and business pages, without having to leave the app. For brands, it allows small businesses to set up their e-commerce store in-app, and means that brands can attract a wider audience. For influencers, it allows for added opportunities for collaborations.
Check out this article on how to use Instagram Shopping as a brand or influencer, for some additional details on getting set up. You can learn about the added benefits like product tagging, which has really boosted sales from influencer and brand collaborations. Here are some examples of bad branding that must be avoided.
Instagram Influencers
So, let’s jump onto talking about Instagram influencers. For some people, this can seem like a bit of a mind game. However, once you have done a little bit of research in understanding influencer marketing, you will realize how beneficial it can be to reaching your business goals.
Influencer marketing isn’t really a new thing, but with the constant rise of social media usage and the effects that the pandemic has had on online shopping, it has really taken off. In fact, 90% of marketers say that they have found influencer marketing to be an effective strategy, with 67% of brands using Instagram as the preferred platform.
Working with influencers is a great way to reach your business goals, whether that be brand awareness, content creation, or quite simply, to drive sales. It is a low-cost strategy that has been proving extremely beneficial for getting small businesses noticed.
Finding Influencers
You’re probably thinking – but how do I find influencers on Instagram? How much will they charge? How do I reach out to them? And these are some great questions! I would recommend checking out our full influencer marketing guide, that will answer these in full detail.
However, there are two main methods of finding influencers. The first way is to look directly on Instagram. This will be rather time consuming, and can be tricky to identify genuine influencers. But, here’s a few tips to follow:
- check your own followers first (it’s best to find influencers that are already a fan).
- look at your account mentions
- look at your account tags
- scroll through your post comments
But remember, you’ll need to spend your time researching these influencers, checking for high-quality content and authenticity.
Alternatively, you could search for Instagram influencers using an influencer marketing platform like Heepsy. This is the most effective way, using dedicated search filters such as location, age, gender, category, etc.
As well as using these filters to more accurately look for influencers that would suit your brand, you can then analyse their profiles. This is the most important step, and why using a platform like Heepsy will be of huge benefit. You can analyse influencer account insights such as their audience demographics and interests, their average costs for promotion, audience authenticity metrics, and many more features.
Here, we can see an example of an influencer’s engagement rates. If there’s any one thing that you should take away from this article, it’s that follower count is the last of your worries. Don’t go looking for influencers with high follower numbers. Having a high engagement rate is far more important, as this indicates the interaction with followers, and how genuinely interested they are in an influencer’s content.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, if you’re not already using Instagram for your business, then go and get set up! It’s one of the best ways to enhance your brand performance, no matter what your goals may be. With your professional account set up, head over to Heepsy to get started on your next influencer marketing campaign.
