The Wonderful World Of Instagram

Over the last few years, Instagram has become a platform used by many businesses, with one in three UK based small businesses saying that thanks to Instagram, they were able to grow their business.

Instagram has evolved a lot in recent years, with the addition of many excellent features along the way, enabling businesses to grow their brand and online community. As a marketing platform, Instagram provides the right tools to help increase your fan base, customer reach, organic traffic and conversions. But most importantly, it allows you to create more of a personal connection with your customers.

Drawing inspiration from both our client projects and the industry’s social media gurus, we’ve broken down the best features to help grow a small business on Instagram.

The Best Features To Help Grow Your Business

1. Instagram Live:

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen a lot more businesses using the Instagram live feature. In our most recent blog post ‘The Most Effective Social Media Trends For 2020’, we spoke about the trend of sharing stories and how this enables businesses to strengthen their online communities and connect with their customers on a personal level. 

Thanks to the Instagram Live feature, connecting with your customers has never been easier. From live tutorials to sneak-peek behind the scenes, Instagram Live’s are a fantastic way to strip back and bring your brand to life with a more personal approach. 

Due to recent events, we saw the live-streaming sector grow even more significant, with an increase of 45% between March and April, as brands stepped up their online presence.

During the lockdown, we saw many brands take to Instagram Live with weekly Q&A sessions, ‘how-to’ tutorials, fitness workouts, and well, the list goes on. By adopting and implementing more Instagram Live’s into their strategies, they saw a significant increase in their following and engagement levels. 

Taking on board the success rate that many brands have had with Instagram Lives, it’s evident that this feature is an effective way to grow a small business on Instagram. 

If you are not sure where to start, why not try a Q&A and give your audience the opportunity to meet the team behind the brand. Or, collaborate with an industry influencer – always a great strategy to increase brand awareness.

2. IGTV:

IGTV has the ability to help promote your product/service, boost brand awareness, educate your audience and offer the opportunity for higher levels of engagement and conversions.

For those of you who don’t know, IGTV is a tool which supports video content ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes, with larger accounts being able to upload up to 1 hour long videos. It’s a useful alternative to the classic Instagram videos on your feed, especially if you want to share extended content, which offers more value, for e.g. promoting your products, product reviews, how-tos, user-generated content etc.… 

Above is an example of how our client Kennington Osteopaths use IGTV to interact with their followers. As an Osteopath & Physiotherapy clinic, they focus on creating how-to workshops that offer educational advice on problems that their clients may be experiencing.

3. Poll, Question, Quiz and Countdown Stickers:

Instagram Story Stickers are an effective way to grow a small business on Instagram by openly interacting with your followers and gathering customer feedback.

– Poll stickers:

Image via The Current Daily

One of the easiest ways to get instant engagement is to use the poll sticker. This feature is a fantastic way to gather customer feedback on a product, for example, if you’re an e-commerce business, you could post a photo of two garments next to each other, and ask which product your customers like the most – simple, but effective!

– Question stickers:

Image via Hootsuite

Question stickers are also trendy and offer the opportunity to interact with your customers and build relationships with them. With question stickers, you can also share your responses with your followers, which can help create excitement, and show your audience that you are listening to what your customers have to say.

– Quiz stickers:

Image via Later

Quizzes are perfect for opening up to your customers and sharing a little bit more information about your brand. You can use it as a way to ask customers about new products, test your customer’s knowledge with questions about your brand, or you could create a light-hearted trivia quiz just for fun!

– Countdown stickers:

Image via Later

You can use countdown stickers in your Instagram Stories before the launch of a new product, a big sale, or an exciting announcement!

With the countdown sticker, you can set a reminder for your audience at any day or time. This super fun, interactive feature can help you create a buzz around an upcoming brand event, and drive more organic traffic to your website. For example, you could create a countdown sticker for an upcoming sale. Once your audience gets the sale reminder, you can then change the link in your Instagram bio, giving your audience a faster route to the sale page and ultimately boosting site traffic and conversions.

3. Instagram Story Highlights:

Instagram Story Highlights is a permanent feature that sits at the top of your page under your bio and is often used to represent your brand story and identity. They are a collection of Instagram Stories which your audience, both old and new, will see when they first visit your page.

When putting together your Instagram Story Highlights think about first impressions and how you want to represent your brand to your customers. What’s going catch people’s eye and make them want to click that follow button?

4. Instagram Shopping:

Image via The New York Times

For those of you out there who run an e-commerce business, Instagram Shopping is about to become your next best friend!

With this exciting new feature, customers can browse and purchase products directly through the app with the new checkout feature, making your products more accessible than ever before.

With the goal of this feature being conversions, it’s important that your images are high-quality, and your copy well written. Just remember, the more visually appealing you are, the more chance you have of turning a follower into a buyer.

We can help:

If you’re not sure how, or simply don’t have the time for social media, then we’re here to help. We offer assistance with building social media strategies, managing social media channels, and the creation of paid advertisements.

Feel free to contact us via our online form, or give us a call on 0207 112 9117.