Four ways to level up your business on Instagram
So you decided this would be THE year you got your Business Instagram account sorted?
Perfect, here are four ways to level up your content and ensure you’re working the gram like a pro.
1. Nail Instagram for business basics
Ensure you have a business account and not a profile account (it’s in the settings menu)
Your profile picture needs to be a clear logo
Make a conscious decision about your brand look & feel ensuring whatever you do it’s consistent - filters, fonts, brand colours (but don’t agonise over beautiful feeds because people don’t tend to look at your feed in full! They look at individual posts in isolation most of the time)
Follow and engage with people especially influencers, customers or clients
2. Increase your reach using Instagram Stories
If you aren’t using this feature to get in front of as many of your followers as possible then you are missing a trick!
You should know all about the algorithm and that your posts are unlikely to be published to the feeds of ALL of your followers. But if this is news to you, you can check out how many impressions each post is getting on average in your insights.
But stories are different in that they are designed to suck you down a rabbit hole and view tile after tile after tile. Which means you are MUCH more likely to have your story content viewed by your followers versus posts published to your feed.
If you’ve been living under a rock you might not know that stories disappear after 24 hours but that you can access these in your archive and add them to a pinned highlight at the top of your profile even after they are gone from public view.
When it comes to content, make sure you vary your Instagram stories and include video - yes of you - still images with text, gifs and stickers. There are TONNES of free Instagram Story Apps out there to make your content stand out - I personally use Unfold which you can check out on my Instagram.
3. Create Instagram Highlights that help people get to know you
Highlights are the perfect way to make sure your potential clients & customers know what you are about without forcing them off the app to your website… don’t get me wrong, we want to get them to your website but most people are lazy and won’t leave the app. So let’s give them what they want.
Highlights should be short and snappy, aim for no longer than ten tiles and remember that only your first five highlights are shown on your profile without scrolling left to right to see more.
Highlight ideas:
About you
Services
Before/after
Reviews
Work with me
Latest releases
Free stuff
4. Edit your caption font & add line spaces in your Instagram captions
So there are three things about Instagram that are somewhat restrictive: you can only type in one default font, you can’t link to anything from your posts, if you want to enter a line space to write a new paragraph it’s a pain in the ass.
The link thing can be resolved by using Instagram Shopping if you’re in e-commerce but otherwise you need to direct people to your one and only link in your bio.
But it’s not unusual to see people busting out some text hacks and leaving other users scratching their heads wondering if they missed the memo.
It’s nothing flashy, essentially you can write your captions into a third party tool and then paste into Instagram. It pays to note however, that most of the fonts available on font changing websites are not readable on android…. so while it may stop people scrolling and grab their attention, you are possibly missing out on communicating with a chunk of your market & followers… and if I can’t read your posts, I’d be unfollowing.
Instagram line break (there are apps for mobile available as well)
There you have it, four ways to level up your Instagram for business and keep up with the cool kids on the gram!
