Instagram is a great way to grow and keep in touch with your community.
Before you get started it’s best to first understand why you want to use Instagram, who your community are and what's going to make them tap that heart.
Instagram Goals
With clear goals, you'll have much better success. Here are some reasons that people use Instagram to help their small business;
- Showcase your products or services
- Share news and updates
- Build your community
- Increase brand loyalty with existing community
- Increase awareness of your brand
- Showcase your company culture and values
Choose 2-3 goals to really focus on. Don't worry, these can change over time as you grow.
Setting up YOUR ACCOUNT
Writing your description. What you choose to share here should be personal, clearly describing what you do and hint at your values. Most include either (or both) of the below:
- Brand slogan or tagline (e.g. Paved With Gold “Nice Things 🔸 Good People🔸 Great Ideas🔸”)
- An outline of who you are and what you do (e.g. BleepBleeps “Cute, connected gadgets that make parenting easier”
Choosing your profile picture. Whenever someone views one of your posts or your profile they’ll see your profile picture. It’s important to show them something that’s recognisable. Unless it’s a personal account we recommend using your logo or an example of your work. Remember to choose one that works well with the circular frame without being cut off or with small text that’s hard to read.
Your one link. Instagram doesn’t allow links to be added to posts. Instead you get just one link in your profile. Naturally many use it to direct people to their website. But sometimes you’ll want to share links to a certain campaign or piece of content. You can do this by temporarily changing your bio link, and in the post mentioning “Link in bio”.
Sharing on Instagram
What to share?
Think about those Instagram goals, what your values are and the audience you’re trying to attract. This will help you think about your content themes and what you should focus on sharing.
Some example content themes to get you started:
- Behind the scenes - Getting to know the team or how your product is being made
- Followers & community - stories from customers and influencers that love your brand
- In the wild - Your brand at events, demos, showcases and talks.
- Useful - Content that helps your audience.
How to share?
Frequency - Try to share daily, sometimes you might not be able to but make sure you share at regular intervals rather than spamming feeds by posting all at once.
Mentioning and tagging - For more engagement you can mention and tag other Instagram accounts that you’ve featured in your post. Sometimes they might regram and mention you back too!
Hashtags - Adding the right hashtags will help your posts be more discoverable and is a great way to target followers with particular interests. We love finding unique hashtags like #capturemycraft or #signsofsummer. There’s a real magic to getting the right hashtags for your account, we'll talk about this more in another post.
Instagram styles we love
Mayku - Minimal and Knolling. Considered design.
Everything perfectly placed to showcase the simplicity of their product.
Flat15 - Home & Lifestyle. Aspirational living.
Gabriella's blog is all about luxurious interiors, and her Instagram really brings this to life.
Trakke - Outdoor. A sense of adventure.
The team at Trakke bake adventure into everything that they do. They've curated an awesome team of adventurers to showcase the toughness of their bags. (We're a bit obsessed)
BleepBleeps - Colour. Bright and Up.
One that we work on at Paved With Gold! Aligned with the BleepBleeps brand, we love showcasing great design and bright, bold colours. We’re using it to showcase the stories we've been creating on the blog and bring the community along as the BleepBleeps team create new products.
If Instagram makes you nervous, or all this talk of brand values making you sweat? Give us a shout and we can help you understand clearly what your business is about, who it's for and how to reach them.