5 Tips To Help You Master Instagram

Instagram is a great way to show off your business and connect with people and grow your network. Whether it’s through the images of your products, educating your followers, or just sharing what inspires you, it can help you grow and sustain your audience, and possibly produce new leads.

But there are some secrets that many marketers don’t want to share when using Instagram for business purposes; here are 5 tips:

1. Use hashtags to find your audience.

Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post. There are apps that you can use to see what popular hashtags are relevant to your industry such as Keywordtool or Hashtag Expert.

I recommend having a couple of sets of varying hashtags to cycle through based on your niche or the topic of your post. Once you create your list you can save it in a Trello board and when you’re ready to use them just copy and paste them into your caption or the first comment of your post.

Hashtags create more visibility for a campaign, and help you reach your target audience. When used to promote an event, the hashtag not only connects you with your followers, but your followers with each other.

2. Use hashtags in your Instagram stories.

You should always try to add 10 hashtags in your Instagram story! It will help you reach more people. There are a couple of ways to introduce hashtags to your story.

– You can list them out no hiding, no shame…..

– Hide your story hashtags behind a sticker or gif (who doesn’t love a gif) AND a gif will increase your reach too!

– hide or minimize their appearance by changing the font color to match the background picture.

3. Use hashtags in your Bio.

You should include hashtags in your bio if they are relevant to your business and match a search that your ideal customer would use to find your content.

Using hashtags in your bio is another way for your account to be discovered. I have seen a 3x increase of reach on my own account by using them, so it’s worth trying out!

4. Popular hashtags, yay or nay?

Using popular hashtags is a great way to increase your engagement but don’t forget it’s not all about the likes. In my opinion using 1 or 2 of those popular hashtags is okay, but you really want to get niche specific (under 300k).

Using popular tags (500k +) can get you quick and fake likes that could lead up some annoying follow-unfollow activity-seriously who needs that!

Don’t take it personally if you do end up in a follow-unfollow scenario, chances are no one is making any judgement of your account, the majority of it is automated.

Using niche specific and relevant hashtags helps you connect with people who are looking for exactly what you’re posting.

5. Share content from other accounts.

I love this feature on Instagram! Sharing is a great way to get more Instagram followers and to share the love! Find an account similar to yours with a similar audience and you share their post in your Instagram Stories. Many times they will reciprocate with a share of your post on their own story!

I hope you have found these tips helpful for your own Instagram page. If you are a vegan or environmentally conscious business I have created a list of 90 Hashtags that you can download for free!

Once you have implemented these tips, let me know how they worked for you!