Instagram: 7 tips to boost your company's visibility
Today, with its millions of users, Instagram is the social network to adopt in order to acquire visibility and improve your ROI. You will have noticed that the number of companies and influencers who integrate this social network into their digital marketing strategy is steadily growing. Before revealing our tips on how to increase your company’s visibility on Instagram, we have to explain you how its algorithm works.
“On average, an Instagram professional profile benefits from an audience growth of 2.5% per month.” (source: zenuacademie.com)
Instagram’s algorithm is continuously changing, so you always need to be up-to-date and define what this social network is promoting so that you are more visible and have a better reputation. Currently, when you publish, only 10% of your audience is likely to see your publication. In fact, the more your community will interact on the post, the more visible your publication will be.
Today, saving posts are what matters most, because it sends a positive message to the algorithm and it will also be good for you, because you will see which publications are really interesting to your audience. Then, Instagram considers comments on a post indispensable, because that’s what allows a social interaction between the content creator and his community. Furthermore, the circulation of your content through sharing is also important, as it can also increase your audience. As you probably noticed, for this social network, the likes only come in last position to define the commitment of a post. Now that you know how Instagram works, don’t wait any longer and read our article on how to acquire more committed followers and build your brand image.
Table of contents
1. Define your target
Getting a lot of followers is not going to make you successful. On the contrary, your followers must be qualified and committed. Indeed, engagement is more important than the number of subscriptions. In addition, Instagram has billions of active users, so if you don’t set a target beforehand you won’t be able to reach your goals, because you will never be visible to everyone. Before starting to use the platform, define the type of community you want to target in order to set up a better communication strategy. This will allow you to understand and get to know your target audience and therefore to know what interests them, their preferences and their behaviour.
For example, let’s say you are a start-up company commercialising anti-wrinkle beauty products, which are organically certified, and you have decided to launch your business on Instagram. You need to define your target audience according to different criteria such as age, income and gender. So, for this start-up, the target audience will be middle class women, aged between 30 and 50 years old and interested in beauty. Now you can design your posts, write relevant descriptions and use appropriate hashtags according to your target audience.
2. Create an editorial calendar
Drawing up a long-term editorial calendar, with an overview of the coming month(s), allows you to be better organised and to anticipate your off-peak periods so that you are not short of ideas. To ensure that your management and planning tool is effective, the most important thing is to set your marketing objectives. This will allow you to determine your ideal content to achieve your goal. Then, you need to define the frequency of your publications so that you can be regular and avoid being forgotten by your followers and disappearing from their feed. Once you have chosen your publication frequency, then you can also inform your followers of the publication dates so that they can wait for the information you will publish that day.
“According to social network specialists, the most common frequency of publication is 3 to 4 times a week.” (source: hubspot.com)
There are different types of publications on Instagram. There are indeed the classic ones that you will find on the news feed, the stories, the IGTV videos, the Reels and also the guides. So, it is up to you to choose, beforehand, which type of publication you will post. Remember that the best solution for the Instagram algorithm is to alternate the type of content. To conclude, a relevant editorial calendar allows you to guarantee a good management of your presence on social networks, including Instagram.
As far as the creation of the editorial calendar is concerned, you can do it either on Excel, easily and free of charge, or you can use more professional tools such as Swello and Trello. If you are a start-up that is only present on Facebook and Instagram, you can use Facebook Business Suite desktop to plan your publications. Moreover, if you publish content often then you will be visible more often in the news feed of your followers and thus it allows you to have a good visibility and to build customer loyalty more easily.
3. Use good hashtags
Hashtags are crucial to your Instagram presence strategy. To choose the relevant ones, use the hashtags of your target audience while keeping an eye on the competitors. Make sure you use those which are truly linked to your brand or content. Don’t use hashtags that may penalize your account or that are not related to your domain. For example, if you publish marketing content, avoid using hashtags such as #music #love, but rather #blog #marketing.
Also privilege the ones that are not used a lot so that you will be visible on the first page of the results. Actually, when an Internet user searches for a hashtag, the publications are displayed in an anti-chronological order and thus, the more competitive the hashtag is, the less your publication will remain on the first page of the results. You can also create a brand hashtag specific to your image.
“The ideal number of hashtags to use on Instagram would be 8.” (source: agorapulse.com)
Remember that Instagram does not allow you to use more than 30 hashtags, and if you overload your publications with hashtags, you will be considered as spammer. In addition to hashtags, you should write a description with catchy and credible keywords that will allow followers and other users to get interested in this publication.
4. Take care of your biography
The biography on Insta is important, you can consider it as if it were your business card. It’s the first thing people will see when they go to your account. First, you have to choose the best profile picture. Since Instagram does not have cover such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn then everything relies on your profile picture. If you are a company that represents a brand, then ideally you should use this space to put your logo.
Second, choose an easy-to-remember username which is unique, represents your brand, is as short as possible so that it is easy to remember and which is coherent with your other social networks. Then, you need to choose a name with relevant keywords, as this is what Instagram will index. The best thing to do here is to write your name or the name of your company followed by relevant keywords so that users who do not know you can find you. Be careful, regarding the last two points, above, Instagram limits the number of characters to 30. Then, concerning the text in bio, it must be simple and easy to read: we strongly advise you to privilege keywords and to add next to each of them an emoji to make it more personal, joyful and memorable. In this space you can also write your location so that your account will be more visible to users who live nearby.
Furthermore, Instagram offers you a CTA in your biography, so take advantage of it and insert the link to your website or the URL of your latest blog post. This will also help to better reference your website if the click rate is high. You can also share your YouTube account or the link of your latest video. Little tip: you may be able to bypass the restriction of inserting only one link by using tools such as linktree or many.link. The latter two allow you to create a third-party page where you can list all the links you want to give visibility to. Finally, you can add your contact details such as your email address, your company address, if it has a physical location, and your telephone number. It is important to include this information, as it will enable interested parties to contact you or find you.
5. Harmonize your Instagram account
Getting a good Instagram feed is not as easy as it may seem. You need to post very good quality content while paying attention to harmonise your posts to ensure that there is a certain homogeneity so that the whole feed has a pleasant and consistent look. It is also important to differentiate yourself from your competitors and to have a distinctive identity. Here are our tips for a harmonized feed below:
- Define the general theme of your feed and harmonise the colours and tones according to it,
- If you edit your photos with a filter, then you must use the same one for all your posts,
- Organise your publications before posting them, hence the importance of drawing up an editorial calendar,
- Privilege quality over quantity. You must always publish high quality images or videos.
6. Create partnerships with micro-influencers
In a previous article, we explained to you that when you set up an influence marketing campaign then you must be sure that it will not only increase your notoriety, but also strengthen your visibility. Indeed, influencers already have a strong and committed community, so if they promote a product or talk about your company then their followers will want to buy the product and want to know about your company. Thanks to them you will get new followers and customers. However, you don’t have to use just any influencer. You need to find the one who will really be interested in your company and who advocates the same values as your brand. In addition, micro-influencers have a more engaged community and ask for lower fees than influencers with 10k followers. So, don’t hesitate to contact a micro-influencer to increase your visibility on Instagram.
“In 2018, there were 3.7 million sponsored influencer publications on this social platform.” (source: hubspot.com)
7. Interact with your community
Previously, a company could only post relevant and optimized articles on its website blog and publish on social networks to attract new customers. But this is no longer enough to nurture a good digital marketing strategy. Now you need to interact with your community to make it feel involved in your business. There are many different ways to interact with your audience, but we will only focus on contests and surveys.
Contests
This is one of the best ways to make your community members interact and increase your visibility. It also builds loyalty while rewarding your community. A classic contest is when a company publishes a post in which it comments on the conditions for being the potential winner. For example, you have to subscribe, like the post and tag 3 friends. This type of competition allows you to create interaction under your post, but also to win followers and therefore to enlarge your community.
Another type of contest is related to the seventh tip in our article. Indeed, it is about partnering with micro-influencers to boost your notoriety. These influencers will create a contest on their Instagram account with your products or services. This is an effective way, because influencers already have an engaged community that wants to buy the same thing as they do.
“Instagram accounts with regular gifts and contests are increasing their audience 70% faster than those without.” (source: lesuperdaily.com)
You can also engage your audience by creating a contest in which they have to post an original photo with your product on Instagram or Facebook. This is an easy advertising tool because your followers promote you on social networks. In addition, the fact that there is a prize for the winner will generate more interest in your community to get involved in the photo.
However, if the objective of your start-up is to attract potential customers who will be part of your target group, then we advise you to limit competitions, as they certainly attract visibility, but not especially a community that will be interested in your services once the competition is over.
Surveys
Surveys on social networks are currently hitting the big time, as members of a community feel much more involved with the company when they participate in a survey. These generate a lot of feedback so, don’t wait any longer and create surveys especially in your Instagram stories. For example, you can ask your followers if they prefer you to post in the morning or in the evening.
In conclusion, Instagram is one of the best tools to adapt to maximize your notoriety so if you still don’t have an Instagram account, go and create it now taking into account our 7 tips above for a better visibility.
Briefly, you need to segment your target audience to make your content relevant, plan your posts by creating an editorial calendar, have a neat biography and a harmonised account, choose hashtags that match your target audience, interact with your community in different ways and finally, you can use influence marketing if you want to gain even more visibility. However, for better social media management, you need to hire a community manager to create quality content and increase your company’s notoriety.
Feel free to send us your accounts and comment on the benefits Instagram has brought to your brand and whether you are already applying our advice. We look forward to your feedback!