Liran Mizrahi is one of Israel’s top social media marketing minds, helping brands find success in the space. Liran is an Instagram expert with over 12 years of experience of active involvement in account management and Instagram marketing.
Like most of us, Liran Mizrahi opened her Instagram account as a simple photo sharing account. However, it wasn’t long before he started getting more interested and began connecting with people and collaborating with them on the site.
So we asked Mr. Mizrahi to suggest us 3 tips to growth your Instagram business page.
Elaborate your strategy on Instagram
Start with some research. Try Instagram as a private individual before using it for your business. Find out which companies are the best on Instagram and how other brands in your industry, including your competitors, are doing – you’ll get useful data and inspiration for your business.
Once you’re familiar with the app, start crafting your strategy on Instagram to reflect your company’s social media marketing plan. The goals you set for your Instagram strategy should all be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant (to the end goal of your business) and timed. But go beyond vanity metrics like number of likes and followers! on Instagram, it’s important to maintain regular posting, being careful not to overwhelm followers with posts.
Most brands publish one to three posts per day. As for the time of day to post them, it will depend on the audience they are aimed at. Both factors, time of day and frequency, can be determined with simple tests: try publishing posts at different intervals and at different times of the day and see which get the best results. Don’t forget to keep in mind where your followers are and what time zone they are in, among other things. Also you always have Analytics tools at your disposal (we assume you have a business profile), and Hootsuite can also give you a lot of insight into the habits of your audience.
At this point you can draw up the editorial calendar, which could simply be an excel file that indicates what content to publish, who will publish the posts and when.
Building your brand on Instagram
Not sure what to post on your Instagram account? Choosing the themes and topics of your posts is very important: Instagram is all about visual impact so it’s important that your brand has a consistent and recognizable identity.
First of all, choose the style to use: select a filter or a set of filters to be used on most of your photos (consider that almost no one now uses the native ones, but most users rely on editing apps or presets).Using always the same style, you define an image recognizable by your followers.
You can also explore your followers’ accounts: find out what they’re sharing and try to identify underlying trends, then pick up on them in the content you publish. Or you can share user-generated content (UGC), which is your followers’ photos directly (by asking first and giving them proper credit, of course). Using user-generated content and images from everyday life makes posts less intrusive and less sales-driven, shortening the distance and making your brand values more real.
Finally, the use of brand-related hashtags. This doesn’t mean simply using your company name as a hashtag, but finding hashtags that represent the brand on Instagram, encouraging followers to share photos that can be traced back to that image.
Follow other users
Finally, to kick off your business Instagram account, start following a few users. Choose the top influencers in your industry, customers and engaging users. Find out which hashtags are the most important in your field and gain visibility by commenting on photos and following users who are participating in conversations about them. So…interact! Don’t wait for likes and followers to fall from the sky, go find them! But don’t rely on the now obsolete and hated techniques of #follow4follow (resulting in unfollow) or lik4like. Most importantly: don’t buy followers!
Rather, add the link to Instagram on your social profiles and websites, for cross-promotion. You can also post a few messages asking your followers on other social to follow you on Instagram as well. Start experimenting, in short. The days when the algorithm played in favor of organic reach are sadly over, but there are plenty of ways to grow in a genuine way.
Finally, make plans to dedicate budget to Instagram Ads. Today, it’s almost impossible to get visibility for your content if you don’t rely on Instagram advertising!
