How to use Instagram for Businesses

Instagram is a massively popular photo and video sharing app amongst smartphone users (pretty much everyone around you) so naturally businesses want to find out how they can reach out to the crowd using it and promote their products and services.

Before going ahead with any sort of strategy though it is important for you to get accustomed to how the thing works. Start by setting up a personal account and have a practice run, playing around with all the features it has to offer. Let’s take a look at some of these now!

If you already know how to use the app, go ahead and jump to the part about using it to help promote your business.

The Home Tab/ Update Stream

When you open the app, this is the first section you’re presented with. It features public photos and videos shared by the people you follow. Similar to Facebook’s update wall but with picture updates and comments in response to the posts.

From here you can see what your friends have been taking snaps of lately in a single feed, leave a comment if you want, or like individual photos or videos by double tapping on them. You can even share them on other social networking sites.

Through here you can also navigate to your Direct inbox.

The Explore Tab/ Search Feature

This area within the app lets you find new and interesting shots that Instagram users have taken. When navigating to this tab you will be presented with a range of suggested photos and videos that are popular (indicated by the number of likes they’ve received).

Here you can also search for other users or photos with hashtags by using the search bar at the top of the tab. You can adjust the settings so that the ones you like are shared to your Facebook page too for extra social engagement!

The News Tab

If you go to the “Following” section of the news tab, you can see your friends’ activity, such as the photos they’ve liked, comments they’ve made, and people they’ve started following.

When you switch to the “News” area you can see who liked the images you published, who left comments on them, and who your new followers are, as well as who has just joined Instagram from other networks like Facebook.

The Profile Tab

This section of the app allows you to view your public profile as other Instagram users see it. Here is where you will be able to edit your avatar and other profile information, as well as adjust any privacy settings. You will also be able to see information like the number of posts you’ve made, how many followers you have, and how many people you are following.

Direct

Direct is accessible through the Home tab, as well as through the camera tab, and is the feature that allows you to send private photos and videos to individuals or groups of users, much like Snapchat. What’s different though is that you have an inbox where photos you receive are stored for future viewing and the same goes for the ones you send.

You can send Direct photos to any user that has their profile available for public discovery. This is a great feature that businesses can utilise which we will explain later on.

The Camera Tab

This is the tab you use for taking photos and recording videos that will either be posted publicly on your profile or in private through Direct. At first you are provided with a few options: a camera button, a video recording button, the option to upload an existing photo or video, a photo grid, front/ back camera switching, and flash settings.

Once you’ve taken your photo/ video, you will be presented with a range of image editing features, such as filters and brightness control settings. Once you’re happy with the final result you can proceed to sharing it in places as well as Instagram itself.

At this point you will also be able to write a caption that can include hashtags to make your creations easily searchable.

Instagram Ideas for Businesses

Now that I’ve given you a brief rundown of how the app works, we can take a look at some ideas that you can start running with today so you can begin to build up your followers and raise brand awareness.

Use the right hashtags

The first important thing (besides the quality of your photos) is making sure that your hashtags are good to gain views from people who might be searching within the app. For example, if you take a shot of a Ferrari, one of the first tags you might use would be #supercar or something to that effect. The main thing to remember is be as descriptive as possible in as many hashtags as you want.

In addition to this, your actual caption should be well-written to compliment your post images/ videos.

Make creative scenarios

One of the hottest food producers on Instagram right now is Oreo because of the creativity they put into their photos. All it takes is some outside the box thinking. Check out the kind of ideas they came up with:

If you’ve got products that allow some creative license, go ahead and make something that sticks to your brand values and entertains people. You could even do what Oreo did and create some stop motion videos to give some life to whatever product you are trying to promote.

For service based industries it might be better to act out scenarios and record them. Comedy does well on Instagram if you are good at being funny, for example you might be an insurance retailer so usually the topics resulting in a claim are usually quite serious, however, the more ridiculous and funny scenarios that lead to unusual claims could be worth using and filming to gain an interested audience.

Ask for user-generated content

The most effective way to get your customers generating content around your brand is to host a competition of some kind so try doing a video contest where people have to use a specific hashtag as part of the entry requirements.

If you have a product that is commonly used then this will be easy, however, you could make it so that people don’t have to own the product or use the service but instead illustrate an aspect of your company somehow within a time limit.

For example, a chair retailer could ask people to create videos of fun games to play at home that involve chairs and the winner gets a free chair from a specific range. This is of course one random idea I’ve picked out of the air, your business type will of course dictate this.

Here’s what Greenpeace is currently doing with it:

Embrace user-generated content

If you have premises that your customers visit, why not chuck up an Instagram hashtag prominently on a wall, a window, anywhere visible? It will let your customers know that they can find you on Instagram and that the official hashtag to use if they want to say something about you is #WhateverYouWant.

This works great for restaurants because as photo app users know, people love to take pictures of their food! You can even offer wifi like the big coffee brands do to encourage this behaviour in the hope that they will use your hashtag.

This will allow you to identify which users are your brand ambassadors on Instagram because all you will need to do is search for the hashtag you’ve specified. Don’t stop there though.

You could reward your fans with exclusive offers if they’ve been good and mentioning you enough without any explicit prompting. This could be done either publicly or through the Direct feature – a much more personal approach.

Go multi-channel

What happens on Instagram doesn’t have to stay on Instagram! The inventors have allowed us to share whatever we post with our audiences on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a whole host of other social networking sites.

As well as posting to your personal Facebook page, you can post updates directly to your business page where they will look almost identical to a normal Facebook image post. Twitter on the other hand will only present a link to your content on Instagram rather than displaying the image within a Tweet.

Going multi-channel means that one post could receive multiple likes and shares, which will help with exposing your brand to as big of an audience as possible.

Start Using Instagram

Now that we’ve gone over some ways you could utilise this great app for promoting your business, get using it! Make sure what you’re posting is aligned with your brand image and core values otherwise you could end up alienating customers and looking like a confused business.

Got any other tips of your own? Let me know in the comments area below.