I recently attended Stephanie Somebody’s “Instagram Debunked” course at The School in Sydney. She’s got 125K followers on Instagram so certainly has some insight into what works to build a solid following. But how does Instagram work for businesses - not just as a personal tool to post "selfies" and pictures of your lunch.
I was interested in this course as I love all things tech and have been wondering how Instagram fits into the social media landscape for businesses. Most people I speak to think that Instagram is only for companies who have “visual” businesses and that it’s really difficult to measure metrics like website traffic, conversions and online sales from Instagram. These are all valid concerns when you’re looking at which social channels make sense for your business, but with 100M monthly active users, Instagram should certainly be a social channel to consider.
Stephanie attributes her success to many factors that are actually very applicable to business strategy as well:
Value quality over quantity
Stephanie was one of the first people up on Instagram and as a result was featured a few times on Instagram’s Suggested User Page. This built her tremendous following very quickly. However, her experience is that the Popular Page is “amazing and awful at the same time” – amazing in that she increased her number of followers, but awful in that some of them were spammers and trollers. Now the Popular or Explore Page is controlled by an algorithm, which measures the amount of engagement on an image in the likes and comments and the amount of time it takes to get that level of engagement from when the photo is posted. This means that it tends to be “all about One Direction and Korean pop stars with puppies” and she’s actually found her number of followers is going down, but the quality followers are staying.
How does this rule apply to business? Don’t blindly look at your number of followers as a measurement of success. Who are your followers? Even if they’re not spambots, are they interested in your business or industry and engaged with what you have to offer?
Have a consistent style
Stephanie is very particular about the images that she outputs. Each one is meticulously crafted outside of Instagram to achieve her desired looks – and it all looks beautiful. This ensures that her “look” or “brand” is instantly recognizable. Most successful Instagrammers also follow this advice.
In the business world, this is essentially branding 101. Branding applies to your website, your marketing collateral, and your products—and it also applies in the social media world. Instragram makes it super simple to create content that’s instantly available to the public, but be selective and consider whether it aligns well with your company’s personality and brand.
Produce beautiful work
Stephanie “looks for beauty everywhere she goes” and takes photos of an entire lifestyle and look, including the back-end process and studio. Producing content that is interesting and valuable to you and your followers is a fundamental principle of inbound marketing. There are opportunities to produce beautiful work even in organisations whose offerings aren’t particularly visual. Take photos of your employees, your offices and your celebrations to highlight your company culture, build trust with customers and attract talent to your organisation. Look for relevant and remarkable content wherever you go!
Actively build your community
The most important thing you can do to build your Instagram community is to be active, engage and provide value.
- Respond to people’s comments.
- Notate your images and tag people and places.
- Use #hashtags, but use them sparingly. 2-3 are enough and definitely don’t #hashtag what’s trending to get extra likes.
- Be active in the community. Find users you admire and tell them so. See what people you are following are saying to others and join the conversation. In this way you get to meet an amazing bunch of like-minded people who are collaborating all over the world.
For many businesses it’s daunting to start building an Instagram following and it may work better to partner with an already successful Instagrammer and leverage their audiences. Obviously there needs to be some synergy between the Instagrammer and the brand. An example of this is Sass & Bide’s recent collaboration with Coco Rocha – one of the most prolific Instagrammers in the fashion industry with close to 400K followers.
Building a following for your business is no different from building a following for your personal account - people find you through people they like, rather than an overt promotion. And isn’t it always better to have others endorse you than to blow your own trumpet?
What’s different?
While Stephanie gets a large degree of satisfaction and success from her following and interactions online, she doesn’t have to report her metrics to a manager and she’s not held accountable by any other party. In order to justify the labour costs of the time investment required for embarking on an Instagram campaign for business, marketers need the ability to analyse and measure. Before you start a campaign I’d recommend signing up for one of these free services:
Statigram
Statigram helps businesses by enabling them to:
- Track account metrics
- Check which comments are unread
- View photos with highest engagement
- View time and day of highest engagements
- Read, respond and remove comments quickly and easily
- Create a contest landing page
- Track contest metrics and announce a winner
SimplyMeasured
SimplyMeasured provides you with a report detailing metrics such as:
- Most engaging filter
- Most engaging location
- Engagement as a percent of followers
- Engagement outside Instagram
- Cross-platform engagement from posts
- Top photo tags
Conclusion
Instagram shouldn't be immediately written off as a tool solely for personal use; however, it needs to be properly evaluated as a social media channel for all businesses - not just "visual" ones. Most of the business objections are being addressed through tools like Statigram, but it all comes back to the big question - understanding your target market - are they on Instagram? Are your existing and potential customers there? Is it worth focussing on this area of social media over other channels?
What do you think? Have you had success with Instagram?
