How to Use Instagram for Your Brand's Social Media Marketing

Isn’t Instagram the worst place to conduct branding exercises and sell stuff? Well no, actually, Twitter holds the record for being the worst thing to happen to businesses on social media. It is so stuffed with bots that there is no level of engagement analytics you can trust. Instagram is a tough nut to crack, but it isn't bought and paid for by celebrities (even though they try), so there is still plenty of space for small and large businesses. Here is how you use Instagram for your brand’s social media marketing.

Make it 70% Real World and 30% Shine

There is an almost accepted feeling on Instagram that the best accounts represent life with a 30% shine to it. Be it women using nose and eyelash filters, to cars using Photoshop to add that extra sparkle.

If you are showing off any sort of product, you are supposed to add around 30% of glamour and shine. Don’t just show your boxes of nails, show your boxes of nails with shiny sharp spiked tips that twinkle against the sunrise of the exotic land that you have photo-shopped into the background.

Framing and Context

You may have wondered why the last example had a sunrise. Why not a sunset? Wouldn’t screws sparkle better in the starlight? Perhaps with a beautiful sky of stars behind your sparkling nails?

Actually, the sunrise was a very purposeful choice. Nails are used by people who work during the day. They are a get-up-and-go product, and a sunrise is better suited for such a product.

Framing and context is another way of saying your setting, atmosphere, your hidden meaning and your overt meaning. Liquor adverts are shown at night, not during the sunrise in the morning. Cars are shown running through brightly lit streets or on brightly lit roads. They are not shown on gloomy days because it suggests a gloomy time. Yet, funeral posts on Instagram are set during gloomy and rainy days. The framing and context of your posts is important if you want to create the correct image and impression on your viewer.

Growing Your Channel

If you are looking to grow your Instagram profile organically, then you are in for a long road because it takes years. If you are looking to get started right away, then you need a head start with something like a website that offers Instagram Accounts for Sale. Buy an account that already has a following, and even if you lose 60% of those followers when you take over, you are still in a better position than somebody starting out with 100 followers.

Instagram bases your worth and your future promotions on your history. They care a little bit about your content’s meaning, though it isn't nearly as sophisticated as how YouTube picks what it promotes. Instead, Instagram looks at how many people clicked like on your posts in the past, and if you have no history or a history with few likes, then Instagram will promote other accounts over your own.

Should I Buy Likes and Followers?

No you shouldn’t. As mentioned earlier, Instagram does judge your profile by how many likes and followers you have had in the past, but it looks at rank averages and median numbers. Suddenly, getting several thousand likes on your account will make no difference over the long term. It will be eliminated as an abnormality.

When you buy likes and followers, they don't follow the usual curve of likes and followers. They don't taper off as they would in real life. Bought interactions start and then they stop, and this is a problem because Instagram will just mark those interactions as abnormalities and will pay them no more mind. It isn't that they think you bought Instagram followers or likes, they won’t care at all, they will just continue to rank your profile based on your previous likes and interactions rather than the chunk you just bought.


by Web Desk via Digital Information World