Instagram Best Practice in 2019
Instagram is, no doubt, one of the best social media platforms to be on right now. This visually appealing social app has gained a lot of attention over the years, cleverly gathering the interest of brands and regular users to its ever-evolving platform. If your business wants to make the best use of Instagram this year, the use of a social media marketing agency will come in handy. In the meantime, these are a few you can start doing with it to get more benefits out it. Take a look at these eight Instagram best practice 2019.
1. Take advantage of the ‘mentions’ feature
The ‘mention’ or ‘tag’ feature on Instagram is great for drawing users’ attention and sparking conversation. Brands can mention users in their feed or in their stories. With stories, you can share both user-generated content and your own content as well as mention relevant handles. Your business should also interact with other individuals and businesses that mention you on their personal pages. The more your brand is able to engage with others on Instagram, it will increase the chances of other users seeing your feed and engaging with it too. Instagram is a social environment, so don’t be stand-offish; socialize all the way.
2. Use niche hashtags
Hashtags remain one of the most used features on Instagram because it makes it super easy for users to find content that will be of interest to them. Your business should use both niche hashtags and the very generic ones to the chances of being seen in a user’s feed. However, more focus should be on niche hashtags that will push your brand to the front of your ideal target audience. You can also use location-based hashtags to push content within such locations. There are quite a lot of free and paid tools that can be used to generate niche hashtags based on the industry.
3. Always use the locations feature
This is one of the most underutilized features on Instagram that your brand can really take advantage of. Always ensure that every post you make in the feed or in stories has a location tag. You can start first with using the location where the business is and gradually expand to other locations close to the business. If your business runs services or has products that are not bound by a single location, you can explore key locations in various cities that your ideal customers are likely to be. Instagram users often tend to search for things they are interested in with locations using hashtags.
4. Invest heavily in creating the most interactive Instagram stories
The Instagram stories feature has explored since it was first introduced. With over four hundred million people viewing Instagram stories every single day, according to social media today, it is now impossible to ignore the benefits of this feature if you are seeking to remain relevant to users. With this feature, brands can get their followers to become more engaged with their contents. There are quite a lot of content formats to explore with the Instagram stories. You can do fun polls, sample the opinions of your followers in a fun way, and get them to be involved in a product or service that is still in the pipeline by getting their feedback when you share each progress made. You can also do an interactive countdown to increase anticipation for a certain update on a product or service and so much more.
5. Create visually appealing feeds
We have seen increasing use of more visually appealing content on both Instagram feeds and stories. This is not surprising as probably many have realized the need to make their content more visually appealing in a social media platform that thrives mainly through visual content. The days of boring feeds are almost long gone. Users are now being more creative with the way their feed appears to wandering eyes.
There are various free and paid tools that your brand can use to create and post visually appealing images that look like a Mosaic wall painting or a magazine page. The other option is to make a more deliberate effort to post in a visually appealing way. Instagram usually stack posts in threes. So you can decide to post a certain design on each stack to create a feed that is appealing horizontally or create a feed that is also appealing vertically (this will begin to take shape when more of those uniquely designed images are stacked together vertically over time).
6. Use the feed to increase followership and use stories to keep followers engaged
Instagram users have the option of sharing content through their feed or stories. While this might seem fun for regular users, for brands, there’s often a divide on which to focus more effort on, and the answer to that is to focus on both. For brands that want to grow their followers, Instagram feeds is still a great way to get more followers when used with the location-based feature we mentioned above as well as using both niche hashtags and generic ones. Now, to keep these followers engaged consider placing more priority on stories. There are quite a lot of fun templates that you can download and use to create very interactive visually appealing Stories.
7. Use Instagram TV for longer video contents
The days of short Instagram videos are way behind us now with the smart introduction of Instagram TV; this allows users to have access to the longer video content without having to leave Instagram to watch the longer version on other social media platforms. What this means is that your brand can keep its followers and prospects entertained long enough to build a connection with them. This would, however, require you to be more creative in the kind of video content you push out.
8. Explore the Instagram stories ads
Like we mentioned earlier, the Instagram stories feature has been booming since it took off and Instagram, as usual, has created an avenue for brands to also advertise in stories. While this might seem like a brilliant advertising opportunity to quickly jump on, brands can still get it wrong with advertising here if they have the wrong content. As with the regular Instagram home feed, the stories section also would be an effective platform to advertise if you get the content right. The moment users sense that the content is purely advertorial, they are scrolling past it quickly. So, you will have to get creative about the kind of content you choose to advertise in Stories. User-generated contests will be the best option for advertorial content that will fit into the very relaxed atmosphere of the Stories feature.