Why Instagram is Massively Important for Your Brand and Why NOW is the Best Time to Get Involved
When it comes to social media marketing for business, a lot of companies and brands will tend to focus on Twitter and Facebook. In many ways, these are the ‘big two’ and it’s easy to overlook the others.
It’s important that you don’t forget the other social media platforms however as one of the central tenets of good social media marketing is to ‘be everywhere’. And more to the point, you specifically need to make sure that you aren’t missing out on Instagram.
Why? Simple: because Instagram is actually the second biggest social media platform on the web and is bigger than Twitter! If you are ignoring Instagram then, you are missing out on one of the largest audiences on the internet.
Another very important reason not to overlook Instagram is that it also happens to have some of the very best engagement on the net, as well as some of the very best ROI!
How to Use Instagram to its Full potential
The thing that makes Instagram so impactful is the simple fact that it is a visual medium. As they say: a picture can tell a thousand words and this makes it much easier to get an emotional response from your posts and to thereby encourage people to want to want to buy from you.
What’s more is that photos also take a fraction of the time to post compared with written content! In terms of the amount of time you put in versus the potential benefit, Instagram is pretty much unparalleled.
Your objective then, is to identify what the ‘value proposition’ of your brand is. What is your promise? How are you going to make life better for your audience? Once you can answer those questions, you can then focus on demonstrating this in your photos – showing people who are very fit and healthy, who look stunning in great clothes, or who are powerful and successful. This way you can inspire your audience and motivate them and ultimately show the promise of your products and services.
Instagram’s New Features
On the downside, engagement has reportedly been decreasing slightly over the last year or so as users have gone up. Simply put, it is harder than before to stand out as the platform has become more crowded.
But you shouldn’t let that put you off because there are now more ways than ever before to engage with your audience. Last year, Instagram announced ‘Instagram Stories and live video. Stories let you send short-term images for your viewers to enjoy that brings them along with you on your adventures and that helps you to stand out in the homefeed. Live video meanwhile gives you a way to interact directly with your audience in a live format that lets them speak with you directly. This is huge for engagement and can help you to drive more traffic to your sites than ever before while building a much closer relationship with your viewers!