Instagram, for a long time considered a secondary social network in terms of importance, is now arguably THE channel that your brand should focus on.

Why? Well, for years it’s been growing it’s user base, passing the coveted 1 billion monthly users mark in June 2018. It’s also probably the most innovative of all the social channels, with new features coming regularly and then quickly becoming popular.

To make sure you get to grips with Instagram, I’ve put together a guide of the channels’ most important features and some tips for utilising them effectively.

Stories

Stories was one of the most talked about and popular updates from a social channel when it was released in August 2016, even though the idea behind it wasn’t exactly original. Stories has become Instagram’s most crucial feature, and one that all brands need to use if they’re to grow their profile.

If you’re new to stories, the main thing I’d suggest first is to play around with the different stickers you can use. There’s loads, but from what I’ve found the best are the ones that encourage engagement, like the Quiz & Poll stickers. You can have lots of fun with these stickers, as can your audience, and using them frequently should mean users will keep viewing and more importantly engaging with your stories content. Once their viewing your content regularly, there’s more chance they’ll recall your brand messages.

Also, don’t forget to save your stories and create highlights that’ll categorise your best ones. These can act as a great introduction to your brand for new users coming to your profile and may encourage them to follow you.

Feed Posts

Don’t put all of your eggs in the stories basket. You still want to produce content for the feed, as you’ll likely get high levels of engagement as long as the posts you produce are of high quality.

When producing content for the feed, make sure you think about the image/video first and foremost. It must be eye-catching and interesting. A dull and boring image will just lead to users scrolling past your post. Also, try and use a mix of still images, videos, and carousels. Doing this means your content won’t be samey to your audience.

Hashtags

Always, always, always add hashtags to your posts. Posts with hashtags included in them are much more likely to reach a wider, more relevant audience. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, it’s advisable to add more than one or two hashtags to your post, you can add up to 30 but I reckon the sweet spot is between 10-15.

Before adding hashtags to your post, do a bit of research into them. There’s loads of great hashtag monitoring tools out there (Brand24 for example), or you can just check out a few manually by typing the hashtag into the Instagram search bar. The number of times the hashtag has been used will be displayed, and you’ll be able to see the most recent posts that have used it and the most popular posts. Looking into hashtags before you use them will help you determine how active they are and what sort of engagement posts that use it get.

Finally, you’ll want to make sure to create your own brand hashtag, which users who want to engage with your brand can start to use when they post about your products or services, which leads me to my next topic…

Reposts

As your community starts building on Instagram, you may find that users start posting content featuring your product or service in positive ways. For example, perhaps a family is posting about a holiday that your brand has booked them on, or a user has bought your brand of nail varnish and has posted about how pretty it is. You’re going to want to use this content and repost it on your own feed/story. These posts act as testimonials for your brand, pushing out positive messages from people who’re actually using your products or services.

You can also encourage and incentivise your audience to post this content, perhaps you could run a competition where users have to enter with a picture of them using your product, whatever you do, it’s well worth it, as reposts are likely to be one of your most engaging content types.

IGTV

IGTV isn’t necessarily something that you need to look at as soon as you start using Instagram, but once your audience is established, it’s something that you’ll want to at least dip your toe into. For those that don’t know, IGTV is Instagram’s answer to YouTube, a separate app (that since launch has been incorporated more and more into the main app) that allows brands to post long form video content (unlike YouTube, the videos are primarily vertical).

The app got off to a slow start, with brands not exactly jumping on it, but over time users have started to adopt it and, with video becoming an ever more important part of a brand’s social media content strategy, IGTV is now well worth utilising. For more on IGTV, read this complete guide from the team at Later.

Shopping

Social media these days isn’t just about likes, comments and shares, you can also sell your products directly through your social channels. Instagram is probably the most effective at this, due to Instagram Shopping. Basically, if you have a post or story that has your product in it, you can tag that product, users click on it, find out how much it costs and if they want to buy it, go right ahead and do that! If you have a large, engaged following on Instagram, you’ll likely sell quite a few products through the channel, so it’s definitely worth looking to get it set up asap.

Reels

Over the years, Instagram have become quite adept at taking the key feature of another social media channel and incorporating it into their app (see Stories, IGTV etc). The latest example of this is Reels, 15 second video clips that you can record and set to music. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s basically Tik Tok!

Like all new features on Instagram, Reels are worth a test. Create some for your brand, post them and then work out how they’re performing vs your business as usual content. If users are interacting with them a lot, then I’d suggest adding them to your Instagram content strategy. For an in-depth look into Reels, read this guide from the team at Later.

Summary

There you have it, a guide to some of the most important features that your brand needs to be using on Instagram. If you have any questions, or want some help with your Instagram strategy, leave a comment below or get in touch!