How To Win the Instagram Game

A Little About Instagram

So what makes Instagram so great? It’s just a camera app. The concept isn’t anything extraordinary. You take pictures with your phone, you share them. So why are there now over 200 million active users (50 million who have joined the network in the last 6 months alone!) and over 20 billion photos uploaded? Instagram is fascinating simply because of its diverse range of uses within one single app. Whether you’re using it to connect with your family on the other side of the world, share what you’re having for dinner tonight with your closest friends, or even promote and sell your most popular products… Instagram offers a new channel to reach audiences you would not have been able to target through Twitter or Facebook.

There are three main steps to Instagram, whether you’re using a business or personal account, they’re the same for everybody: take the photo; edit the photo; share the photo. How long you spend on each step is up to you. The beauty of Instagram is in its simplicity, allowing you to connect with people on the go within seconds should you choose. Or spend hours with your research and marketing team deliberating carefully over each scheduled post…

Launched in October 2010, Instagram had already won over 1 million users after just a couple of months. Apple named Instagram “iPhone App of the Year 2011”, and Instagram for Android was released a few months after. Shortly after that, Instagram joined Facebook in 2012. Facebook’s second largest acquisition to date, acquired for $1 billion, along with Instagram’s team of only 13 employees.

Now Instagram’s role in social media is becoming increasingly more dominant, with 1.6 billion Likes and 60 million photos uploaded on an average day. So maybe they sold off their Indie image when they put themselves in the hands of Facebook. But now everyone and their pet cat uses Instagram. Your grandmother’s crochet club? Probably on Instagram! (Okay, maybe not, but you get my point.)

Rules for the Instagram Game

Instagram created its community guidelines as a short list of best practices to ensure that all users have a good time. To stray from this proposed “Instagram Etiquette” isn’t advised, even if some of these rules aren’t exactly enforced. Their rules are as follows:

1. Post your own photos and videos.
2. Keep your clothes on.
3. Be respectful.
4. Don’t spam.
5. HAVE FUN!

Instagram? You mean InstaGLAM!

The handy thing about Instagram is that you can share any photo from your smartphone’s photo album. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one that you took using your smartphone. So why not differentiate yourself from the smartphone photographers with some high definition! Unless, of course, it conflicts with the intent of the photograph or you’re capturing a moment on the go or something. Usage of high definition images really depends on the brand and what it is that you’re trying to portray. A new product from your catalogue? Go right ahead. The perfect sunset outside of your store? If the photo’s supposed to look spontaneous, perhaps get the professional photographers to sit out for this and opt for a fancy filter instead. Instagram provides a way for all users to instantly edit their photos to accentuate all the bright vibrant colours, set the scene to high-contrast monochrome, or tone it down with some earthy neutrals. Not every photo needs to scream to your followers, “We have our own team of world class photographers!”. Sometimes it’s better to play on the same level as them to humanise your brand more.

Take some artsy pictures of your products, or your product being used in real life situations. Don’t make your Instagram profile look too much like a catalogue. Yes, people would like to see your products. But if that’s all they wanted to see, they would have just visited your e-commerce site. Your fans have followed you because they want the exclusive goodies that make them feel like a VIP whenever you post some juicy behind-the-scenes sneak peeks and previews.

Having said that, if you are posting an informational product image that looks like it’s come straight out of a catalogue, and you’re trying to optimise the image for sales, you should avoid using a filter and other heavy edits. People want to see what they’re buying and it looks a little deceitful if you’re obviously trying to adjust the image and colours to better complement the product. Potential customers may be wary that they won’t be getting what they see in the picture. Images need to be clear whether they are taken as an accurate representation of a product as it is sold, or serving as an artistic representation of the product in use. It’s okay not to look airbrushed-perfect sometimes, and people don’t always expect you to. Which is why #nofilter is so popular…

Maybe you don’t consider yourself a visual brand? You see your company more of the paper-pushing office full of Dilbert lookalikes? That doesn’t mean that you can’t represent yourselves visually. You don’t necessarily have to be selling luxury products to be visually interesting enough for people to want to follow you. Photos of your employees working hard (or hardly working!) also work well. Show your fans, customers and clients that you don’t just work efficiently, but you goof off too sometimes. Instagram is the place to be personable and make people smile. They got nine seasons out of The Office, didn’t they? Would people really have watched all nine seasons if it was a serious docudrama about the trials and tribulations of working at a boring paper company? Probably not.

Instagram isn’t just for photos though. You can use the platform to post up brand-made memes, or funny pictures relating to your industry. Brainstorm ideas for shareable content. These can include images such as tutorials, puzzles, collages, mini infographics and inspirational quotes. Bite size content that people can appreciate on the go and stands out from the rest of the photographs in their feed. Maybe, once in a while, try creating an Instagram video. You only have 15 seconds though so take advantage of snappy edits, making sure that the video really gets all the points across within that quarter of a minute. The real challenge here though is to ensure that the video still makes sense muted. A lot of people will be watching it with no sound on default playback (as volume settings are controlled by the device, and they may have their phones on silent/vibrate) so your video can’t rely too heavily on audio. Think of it like a 15 second high definition GIF animation with optional sound.

#PlayToWin

I wrote a whole piece about the evolution of #hashtags, and the importance of using hashtags in image-based social media platforms such as Instagram. The hashtag etiquette on Instagram seems to go out of the window a bit in comparison to Twitter, where we have learnt to reserve our hashtag usage if we want to drive engagement to our Tweet. Sometimes we spend more time deciding which keyword to hashtag than we do composing the actual Tweet. We don’t have to worry about that so much on Instagram. First of all, there’s no character limit we have to dance around.

Instagram users use hashtags for photo discovery. A picture can say a thousand words, and some people go so far as to tag those thousand words into their image description and comments so that anyone searching for any of those terms will find that photo. This has become common practice, but it doesn’t exactly look clean and can actually come across as a little desperate and spammy. Use popular and relevant keywords to tag your images appropriately, finding the perfect balance between an engaging image description and richly keyworded tags. Descriptions containing open ended questions prove successful time and time again in enticing followers to respond in comment. And if you really want to be ahead of the curve, stay sharp when it comes to hashtag trends; if you can relate the trend back to your brand, jump on it quick for a boost in exposure. You can also plan ahead and take part in the seasonal trends such as Christmas, Halloween and Easter. Get in that seasonal spirit and watch the Likes flood in.

You may find that you are able to quickly accumulate Instagram followers by hashtagging your uploaded images alone. Instagram may not require the constant maintenance that other social media channels like Twitter and Facebook often necessitate to be successful, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore your community outright. Of course, the more active you are within the community, the more you’re likely to see an increase on your own profile’s engagement. Respond to as many comments on your images as you can to show your followers that their input is valued. Make an effort to check on tags that relate to your brand to see if you’re being referred to or mentioned without an @mention. There may be those who don’t yet know that you’re active on Instagram. You can also show your social presence by exploring tags indirectly related to your brand. By Liking and commenting on these photos you’re effectively waving hello at the user, alerting them (and to all those who view the photo after you) to your presence. And they’ll be one click away from following you.

Have a promotional campaign on the go? You want to be promoting your accompanying hashtag everywhere you can then. Preferably using the same hashtag consistently throughout all of your social networks, so as not to confuse your followers and keep the tag easy to remember. If you can include the hashtag in the images themselves, great! People won’t always read the image descriptions, but having the hashtag included in the image will make it pop right out of their feed and encourage more people to join in with the hashtag campaign.

You could host Instagram giveaways, contests or competitions to encourage engagement. For example, “Best Photo of (whatever’s fun that you can relate back to your product, service or brand)“, followed by something along the lines of “Don’t forget to include (insert chosen hashtag here – keep it unique so that there’s no confusion with conflicting hashtags) otherwise we won’t see it!”.

You could then re-post the best of this user generated content. Some users go wild for this kind of attention and exposure, and will be proud to be featured by you. But you may want to be aware that some users do not like their content re-posted. Even if they are given full credit in the image description, the image is clearly watermarked as a re-post and includes the original poster’s username. It is Rule #1 of Instagram’s aforementioned community guidelines after all, but it’s only really frowned upon if the majority of your profile is composed of other users’ images. Perhaps only re-post giveaway and contest applicants who have used the specific hashtag consenting to the re-posting of their uploaded image, or if the re-posting of other users’ images has already become an expected thing from your user account when it comes to these kind of online events.

The After-Game Party

How are your existing followers going to know that you’re on Instagram if you don’t share your Instagram photos with them on your other social networks? You don’t have to link all of your social accounts for your Instagram pics to automatically publish to your Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etc. In fact, it’s usually wise to schedule post activity to each of your social networks individually, so that you have more control over each profile and can manage each one to best suit its own audience. But every now and again, it would be a good idea to share a certain Instagram photo on Facebook. Like you should be doing with all of your other social networks, you need to also consider how frequently you should be posting on Instagram. Maybe you’ll only need to post a couple of pictures a week, maybe a couple times a day. It’s something that you need to figure out yourself based on your own strategy.

There are different customisable widgets readily available, if you can’t create your own, that will help you display your most recent Instagram pics in your website or blog. This can give your visitors a small taste of what’s in stock for them if they follow you on Instagram, and helps to further promote your social profile. Too much? Maybe you could just use Instagram’s embed code to just embed your Instagram “Pic of the Month” into your blog or website. Or at the very least, make sure to include somewhere some kind of icon link back to your Instagram web profile, just as you would your Twitter or Facebook.

There are certain tools that you can use (such as Statigram) that can help you monitor the success of your Instagram activity. Obviously the more images you have posted the more accurate that tools like this become, but you can use it to analyse your most successful images in terms of the filters you used or the hashtags you used, so that that you can easily see whether there’s any correlation between certain filters or hashtags and the success of the image. You can see what kind of images generate the most interest and drive the most engagement. This doesn’t mean that you have to start making all of your posts to fit with this formula, but you’ll certainly be able to see what kind of pictures people just don’t like and avoid wasting your time with these kinds of posts in future.

Your Instagram profile should reflect the personality of your brand and all of its values. You need to strategically build and develop this personality around your social presence as a whole, giving it life. Each social profile should stand as its own unique outlet, but still be sourced from a single core personality. Your company’s image has to be represented consistently throughout all of your social media so that weary travelers from the far off lands of the Twitterverse won’t journey all that way to the kingdom of Instagram to be greeted at the gate by a complete stranger. But instead be warmly embraced by the brand that they know and love.