It is nearly the end of 2020, and Instagram has already ruled the social media charts. It has become the top social media trailblazer offering smart tools to marketers and users. With over a billion active Instagram users every month, it has set a benchmark for its competitors. Thus, many businesses are leveraging it to promote their businesses online and influence their social media followers.
According to Forrester’s survey, social media engagement is measured by the number of likes, comments, and shares. Instagram takes the lead with a rate of 4.21%, higher than its parent company and social media channel, Facebook. Instagram has also sidelined the social media users’ favorite channels, TikTok and Snapchat, giving them a run for their money.
Instagram ensures businesses and social media influencers get the right set of tools and features to increase its audience reach. To stabilize this dynamic channel’s presence, they need to focus on building original, relevant, and mass-appealing content for the target audience.
Here is how you can achieve your marketing goals for 2020 through 2021.
Stay upfront with your Instagram bio.
Instagram bio is the first thing your users will notice when they check your profile. Let your bio help you generate leads for your business and gain conversions. Make sure you provide captivating and engaging information about your business or brand in your bio. You can use emoticons to give a bullet-like style to your bio. You can also use relevant hashtags for what kind of content you will be sharing on your profile. Or you can use the ones that reflect your brand’s authenticity.
You can add links to other social media channels or your Instagram profiles using ‘@’ to increase traffic. Make sure you add smart URLs as these are not clickable. To add a clickable URL of your website or product demo page, you can use the ‘website’ field – below the bio.
Increase engagement with relevant and robust hashtags.
If you are on Instagram, you know how important hashtags are, especially if you want to ace the game. You can use the “Search” icon to discover the trending hashtags relevant to your profile under the “Tags” tab.
As per Sprout Social, if your Instagram post includes hashtags, you can see a potential increase of 12.6%. You can also use hashtags in your story, captions, and bio to increase social engagement. Remember not to overuse the hashtags. Instagram has set a limit of using 30 hashtags per caption. You can use Instagram marketing tools to help you select the right set of hashtags for your post and profile. You can focus on building a hashtag strategy for a delicate balance of popular, content-relevant, and self-made hashtags.
Derive more leads with Instagram Stories and Highlights.
Instagram stories is the coolest Instagram feature fetching maximum engagement rates. It is a powerful tool to add images, cool gifs, links, fancy texts, short video clips, polls, and other engaging features to impact and increase your followers.
Most brands and businesses leverage this feature to connect and engage their target audience. Stories have visibility of around 24 hours. There are a variety of apps that offer templates to create interactive Instagram stories and posts. Profiles with above 10k followers use the swipe up link feature to share business or website URLs.
Another fantastic way to stay connected with your followers is by utilizing the story highlights. Adding your stories to highlights will stay on your profile indefinitely. With the latest features, you can even archive your stories and highlights.
Keep eyes open to DMs and comments.
The key to a successful Instagram marketing strategy is to create constant interaction and engagement with your followers and prospects. Instagram has Direct messages(DMs) feature to do that in the right way. If you have a Business or Creator profile, your Instagram inbox will offer segmentation based on your followers and audience. Ensure you have turned the notifications on to receive messages from all Instagram users. You can also set custom responses by manually configuring shortcuts to enable auto-replies.
With comment sections, you can run promotional campaigns with tags and hashtags. Ask your followers to tag their friends to run a comment campaign to increase engagements. For an interactive Instagram community, you need to continually connect to your followers and target audience for the maximum scope of conversions.
Widen your strategy with Instagram ads.
Instagram Ads are the most effective ways to endorse your profile and make the most out of it. It is a dedicated advertising platform that offers marketing solutions to run targeted ad campaigns. Paid Instagram marketing strategy allows businesses to choose various formats for ad campaigns. They can leverage formats like photo, story, video, or carousel ads that help them boost engagement, followers, gain leads, and potential conversions.
If you have connected your Instagram profile to a Facebook page or account, you can run these ads through Facebook’s Ads Manager. As per Adespresso, the average CPCs (cost-per-click) is around $0.50 – $1.00 for 2020. The cost can vary highly according to ad requirements and industrial sectors.
Conclusion
To be a digital influencer on Instagram in 2020, it is necessary to focus on maximum engagement. Implementing these tips and understanding this social media game’s dynamics will surely help you ace your Insta-game!
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