Instagram is gaining popularity as a mobile social platform. At present, Instagram has about 80 million users, which is likely to increase in the coming years. This popularity has increased the platform’s importance in social media marketing. If you are planning to put your business on Instagram, here’s how you can give your business extra visibility and improve customer engagement:

1. Set up a separate business Instagram account

If you plan to promote your business through Instagram, it’s important to have a separate account meant only for it. Remember, your business is all about what you offer and your audience. It has got nothing to do with your personal details or photos. Since the idea is to improve customer engagement, here’s what you can do:

• Include the link to your website

This is a great way to improve website traffic. Include the link to your website under the name and description at the top of the Instagram page.

• Stay recognizable

As a brand, it’s important to have your own identity. If you fail here, remember, all your efforts will go down the drain. Avoid such situations by choosing an account name similar to that you have used in all other social media platforms. Your interactions and engagement in the account go along with the profile image. Therefore, make sure that your profile image is identifiable and professional.

• Provide a catchy and informative bio

If you want people to follow your brand, make sure that they are enlightened about what you offer. Provide an attention-grabbing but informative bio with all necessary details. At the same time, try to make it light and interesting.

2. Show off your products

Information in the form of visuals tend to stay in people’s mind more than words. Use this to your advantage with Instagram, which is an image-centric platform. Post photos of the products you offer and that can really help to boost your sales. Here are few tips to make the users follow you through your Instagram posts:

• Do not annoy them

Remember, Instagram is just a platform to promote your business and not to sell your products. Therefore, you must try to grab attention without being annoying. Try being creative with the photographs of your products. Let the customers feel how great a product is through the images and make a decision, instead of you insisting them to buy your products.

• Be creative and professional with photos and product description

Product photos and description play an essential role in the decision customers makes with regard to purchasing the product. As I said before, Instagram is not a market place but just a medium to promote your business. Therefore, your product description should not sound salesy. Instead, try to post photos that are unique, striking and full of personality.

• Let your images reflect professionalism

An improperly cropped or a blurred image isn’t going to impress the audience. Instagram automatically makes your image square (612×612 pixels). Consider this while choosing a photo to post. The best way for an image to show professionalism is through its quality. You can maintain the quality of your photos by saving them at double the resolution size. For example, if you save your photograph at 1024×1024 pixels dimension in Photoshop, it won’t lose its quality when reduced to Instagram’s image dimensions.

3. Show what your products can do

You can showcase different ways to use your product. Also, you can improve user-engagement by asking your followers to post photos of the innovative ways in which they use your products. If the followers feel that they are getting attention, they tend to engage more with your brand.

4. Give your followers the “behind the scenes” experience

The “behind the scene” look may not be aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a product launch or a photoshoot. But, it adds to the content for promoting your business. Your followers may be excited to have a glimpse of what happens at the backstage and therefore, you must post photos regarding the same. This helps to build a close relationship with your followers.

5. Create lifestyle photos that scream your brand culture

Instagram is not a place where you can make direct sales, pushing your customers to buy your products. Instead, you have to influence your audience and make them feel that your product is what they need, by adding value and appeal to your posts. You can do this through lifestyle photos.

A life style photo consists of real background and models to create a scenario for your product. It lets the customers visualize how well the product works for them if they were using it. Famous brands like Nike and Adidas had already tried this and saw about 8 times better interaction on social media.

6. Offer incentives

Majority of users follow a business or a brand depending on the freebies and discounts they offer. Therefore, do not hesitate to provide special offers, discounts and bonuses whenever you can. This is going to improve customer engagement.

7. Promote events

Hold events and promote them through Instagram. This is going to hugely benefit your business, earning you more followers. You can inform your Instagram followers about the location of the event by geo-tagging and invite them over to join you. Yes! Geo-tagging is a rarely used tool in Instagram; but, did you know that posts with geo-tagging get 79% more customer interaction?

8. Strategize to expand your audience

Posting outstanding photos alone cannot earn you enough followers. It’s also important to devise strategies to widen your audience and earn potential customers.

• Use hashtags

With lots of feeds being created on a daily basis, your post may go unseen or forgotten quickly. Using hashtags can help to improve visibility of your posts since those containing the same keywords gets grouped together and remains discoverable. However, make sure that you do not use more than five hashtags for one post since such posts seem to have had fewer engagement. You can look for popular hashtags and use them in your posts. It is okay to create your own hashtags if you want; but, make sure that you use keywords and phrases relevant to your brand.

• Share your follower’s content

Make your followers feel good by sharing their posts on your profile. You’ll see them coming back to see their posts on your feed and may even suggest their friends to do so, thus improving customer engagement.

9. Nourish customer relationships

Remember, you are not here to make some followers and be forgotten. The motive is to convert your followers into loyal, potential customers and you can do this by adopting techniques to boost engagement.

• Open up conversations with your followers

When you post a product photo, you can add a catchy caption to it that compels the followers to engage and respond. Include a call-to-action or ask a question to start a conversation with your followers. While adding a caption, be careful not to repeat what’s in the image. Make it interesting so that once the customers see the photo and then, the caption, they start seeing the product from a different angle. Also, make sure that the captions are not too long. Make it short but attention-grabbing that makes the customer want to participate.

• Hold contests

Holding contests help you to gain followers and improve user engagement. This, you can do in 4 simple steps:

1. Decide what the prize will be

2. Post a catchy photo of the prize along with details of the contest in      the caption. 

3. Post a second reminder few days later

4. Announce the winner

• Respond to notifications

Remember, the response shouldn’t be one-sided. Whenever a follower mentions your brand in a comment, you must respond to them. Thank them when they appreciate you and answer their queries without fail. This is how you can engage them and build a relationship of loyalty and trust.

10. Keep track of your Instagram success

The best way to succeed is by learning from your mistakes. Therefore, it is necessary to keep track of your business’ growth in Instagram. Analyse your successes, keep track of the audience and repeat the content that is working. Find the followers who interact with you often and target them to make them your potential customers. Analyse the timings when the customers are more likely to be engaged in your feed and schedule posts accordingly.

Since Instagram is a part of Facebook, this photo-sharing social platform has active user base that businesses can utilize to their promotional needs. To start your Instagram marketing campaign, you can either hire experts in-house or assign the project to an independent team.