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  • Build it and they will come?

    If you're talking about a website, it's not likely! Build it, keep it fresh, and tell the world.  That's the way you get traffic to your website.  And you can do it in as little as 15 minutes a week.

Instagram: It’s Not Just for Selfies

Getting visual with your small business is a great way to turn eyes onto your product. Launching an Instagram campaign provides a fun and free way to get engage your customers with visual content and not just boring text.

Yes, boring. Come on, you can admit it with me. Sometimes I scroll through Facebook and only pause to look at the pictures. Those text-only posts just slip right past me.

OK, do you feel better getting that out in the open? Me, too.

And apparently it's not just you and me. In general, 40% of people will respond to visual information better than text (source,) Specifically on Facebook, posts with images get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs than text-only posts (source.)

There are three major points to consider before launching any Instagram campaign:

  • What kind of pictures or images are you wanting
  • How will you get your followers involved
  • How will your campaign drive people back to your website (aka, your home base - see last week's post)

Choosing Your Instagram Campaign Images

Show What You Sell

If you sell products, this is a no brainer. Show your products! From Etsy sellers to General Electrics -- yes, even GE uses Instagram to show off their products and they do a beautiful job of it -- businesses of every size can showcase their products to great effect.

But if you are a service industry what can you do? Show your service in progress. From cleaning carpets to therapeutic massage, show your service in progress. Or show the after-service results. This is a great way for seemingly invisible services such as life coaches to display their wares: snap a photo of a client succeeding in their endeavors

Show How to Use It

With both products and services, you can demonstrate use or maintenance. Show how to properly season that steak your butcher shop sells. Or a series of photos that shows how a single hair style can be transformed into a dozen different looks. Instagram video gives you even more "how to" options.

Behind The Scenes

Just like Dorothy & Toto, everyone wants to see what's behind the curtain. Give your audience a sneak peak. Show your products as they're being made. Show the process of preparing your service (mixing hair dyes or sharpening the lawn mower blades of your lawn care business.) Even show someone just sweeping up after a long day at work. This doubles as a great way to highlight and praise your employees.

People Love Kids & Animals

The power of cute cannot be denied. Few things seem to get more likes that animals and children. Show a puppy asleep on a freshly cleaned carpet (which will undoubtedly need another cleaning soon) or a child with a stylish new hairdo and you are sure to rack up some Instagram attention.

View Your Business Through a Different Lens

Take photos from odd angles or with usual arrangements. A coffee shop could take a photo up through the bottom of the coffee cup looking at that barista. A sandwich shop could spell out their name in sandwich fixings. Take a photo of one of your products from an obscure angle and ask followers to guess what it is (see Engaging Followers below.)

Show a unique or clever way that someone is using your product. Fpr example, an office supply company could promote binder clips as alternative cable organizers.

Engaging Followers in an Instagram Campaign

Ask Your Followers to Repost

A contest especially for your followers can endear them to you even more. Offer a special prize or a discount for the first (or first few) people who repost a photo or comment on it.

Get Your Followers Taking Photos

There's no reason you have to take all the pictures. Get your followers onboard by asking them to post photos of themselves using your product or reveling in the results of your service. You could judge the winner by selecting the most creative (or some other "most") or you could let your followers' followers judge by giving out the prize to the person with the most likes on their photo. Be sure to use a custom hashtag (see below) so that contest entries can be identified.

Jump on the Bandwagon

Look for ways to attach your photos to the popular hashtags. #love, #cute, #selfie, and #girl are just a few of the tags that are commonly in the top trending tags. Check out http://web.stagram.com/hot/ for the current Top 100 tag list. Another common tag trend is #throwbackthursday (often shortened to #tbt) where you could post photos from the early days of your business. Current events like the World Cup, Superbowl, Oscars, or Grammys would also provide high traffic tags that you could work to associate with your business' photos.

Create Your Own Bandwagon

Start your own unique hashtag to promote a marketing campaign or your business. #javajoescontest (not currently in use, by the way) would be a good tag for Java Joe's Coffee Shop to use during their contest. Don't try to reuse someone else's tag, though. Jumping on their bandwagon won't result in the increased traffic that you're wanting.

Driving People to Your Website

Links Go Nowhere

To reduce spamming, Instagram does not allow links in comments to be clicked. That's right, post all the links you want on your photos but no one can click them. Not even from the web interface. And the likelihood of someone trying to retype your link on their phone, where most people do their Instagramming, is somewhere between zero and none.

You can, however, put clickable links in your profile. Slip the link in there and mention in the photo caption that there's a direct link to your website in your profile.

Cross-post Your Pics

While Instagram is popular, not everyone is on it. Cross-post your Instagram photos to your other social media outlets. Currently, Instagram allows direct posting to your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Flickr accounts. However, Instagram only cross-posts to your primary accounts. What if you want your instagram pictures to show up on your business' Facebook page or Twitter account? Using a tool like IFTTT (see previous blog post) can help with that and with posting those photos to other social media outlets or even your blog.

The Quick Takeaway

Instagram can be a lot of fun and a great tool for marketing your small business or organization.

 

Photo Credits: Instagram photos from General Electric and Shayne Faulve were set to "public" and allow embedding in websites. Photos were selected as examples of brands on Instagram.

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