Instagram quickly outgrew its first impression as a fun app for kids and has become a serious content marketing, selling, networking and audience building tool for individuals and brands. It's one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet, with over 200 million active monthly members sharing 60 million images and 1.6 billion likes per day.
Step 1Know your audience
It's important to first define your target audience, who are the people who can help you build your Instagram following and purchase potential followers and likes. 1. Who do you want to see your content? Do you want to share your fun, unique, creative and highly visual photos with your friends, family, co-workers and followers or do you want to boost your followers' Instagram feed? 2. Who do you want to connect with? Do you want to connect with brands that are looking for potential customers to help build their Instagram following? Or do you want to connect with individuals, companies and photographers that want to reach you and offer you followers? 3. How will you engage? Do you want to ask others for their followers? Do you want to pay for followers?
Step 2Create engaging content
Many brands send all their products to market and forget about creating content on their own. This is a big mistake, because brands with engaged audiences are much more likely to get customer acquisition success and increased sales. For example, the official Instagram account for Virgin America had over 11.8 million followers at the time of this writing. Every day, the account shares photos that create interest, share thought leadership pieces and highlight the brands partnerships and innovation. And they are not just "pretty" photos either. The account is not afraid to share social issues or advocacy campaigns and challenge conventional thinking. Once you've set up your account, your best bet is to try to engage with your audience on an ongoing basis.
Step 3Interact with your followers
About two-thirds of all Instagram users follow brands, making it an excellent tool for content sharing and interaction. It's also an easy way to get the conversation going when you're having trouble landing customers. If you're having trouble getting users to share your content, take a look at your engagement rate, which is the ratio of your comments, photos, videos and other interactions (such as likes) to your total audience. If this number is low, you may have a problem. If it's high, it's a good sign. If it's in the middle, you'll want to try something different. Here are some ways to boost engagement: • Tell people what you're posting or linking to. • Start off a conversation.
Step 4Engage influencers
Influencer marketing is a great way to generate traffic and likes from your followers that will bring new subscribers to your page. It's a great way to expose your business to new customers at an affordable price. Many companies employ influencers to post on their behalf. However, influencer marketing isn't easy and it's important to research influencers that you think would be the best fit for your brand. Many social media sites have a tool that allows you to search the top people on that social platform based on your niche, keyword and interest. This is helpful because you can get an idea of what influencers are doing on the platform that may be of interest to you.
Step 5Develop a strategy
Stick to it. While you can spend hours on social media, the key to increasing your followers, likes, comments and share is consistency, not commitment. Create an Instagram marketing plan by researching competitors, target market demographics and influencers who are doing well with Instagram and gather insights that lead you to develop strategies to compete with your competitors and establish a competitive advantage over your peers. When your strategy is clear, you will quickly find ways to be more successful, making your time more valuable and giving you more time to do the things that matter to you. This will result in you being more productive, increasing engagement and building an audience of followers who really care about what you have to say.
Step 6Use hashtags
Hashtags are just another tool to use on Instagram to grow your audience and reach. There are over 80,000 hashtags in use on the site, and hashtags are searched for more often than posts themselves, so having a few key ones in place can pay off. Be sure to use hashtags related to your business, product, or service. And pay attention to the kind of hashtags you use. For example, some Instagram users will search hashtags related to the #mealprep, #wedding, #vegan, #DIY and other such tags, because the Instagram page owners themselves use those. If you want to increase the exposure of your posts, consider using a hashtag that would generate interest from those users. Use different hashtags for posts about products versus ones about your events.
Step 7Get Instagram verified
Verified accounts are made up of businesses, celebrities, brands and people who are popular on Instagram and want to protect their account. If your profile is set up to allow external connections, you will be able to request verification and then the app will send a notification to let you know the account is approved. If your account already has followers and likes, you can request verification immediately, without the app sending a notification. As you begin to grow your Instagram following, keep in mind there's no one-size-fits-all strategy for how to grow your audience and reach. With Instagram's diverse demographics and content, you will need to put in the effort to educate yourself and be ready to adjust and optimize your strategy as needed.
Step 8Create a custom profile
If you're not already on Instagram, it's time to go over to the "people you follow" section, scroll down to the bottom and click "edit profile." Scroll down to the "Instagram" tab at the bottom of the page and click on the "create new account" button. Instagram allows for a maximum of 10 lines of information, so no phone number is needed. Step 9Find a photo Instagram users can only see photos people share from their own accounts. So, you should include pictures of what you're eating, what you're doing at home, what you're doing at work, pictures of friends and family and lots of photos of food. There are different types of photos, so choose one you love. Uploading pictures of your own property doesn't count.
Step 9Get more followers
The best way to get more followers and likes on Instagram is by getting your existing followers to encourage more of their friends and followers to follow you. If you have more than 50,000 followers on your Instagram account, consider organizing a group or join a group that already exists. For instance, @eco-socialmedia and @anhelicoptermedia groups have more than 500,000 combined followers and have a combined collective follower count of over 1.5 million. Create compelling content Think about what interests you the most on Instagram and see if you can incorporate those topics into the feed. Creating a curation of content, be it images, videos, text or both, will engage more people in your content.
Conclusion
As a real estate agent, you can promote your business on Instagram and become a part of this social media power and scale machine. Now is the perfect time to start using it to reach new customers and prospects. Use these 10 tips to market yourself on Instagram and grow your business. (By Julie Wardy, CMM, National Training Director at Veritaseum.
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