Why Instagram? Do you need Instagram in your business? I personally believe you need one income producing platform where you spend probably 80% of your time. And the other 20% you spend on branding consistency, just ticking the other platforms yes boxes, so that you have a full online social media great presence. If you had to spend 20% on all five different platforms, I don’t believe you do any of them well.  The other thing to take into account where are your ideal customers are.  

Here are some interesting stats for you.

If your customer is a man between the ages of 25 and 34, they are the highest amount of users worldwide as of July 2020. Coming in at number two is females between the ages of 25 and 34, which is 16.6%. The third position goes to men 18 to 24. And then females 18 to 24.  So you need to know where your ideal client spends most of their time and focus on that platform.

Instagram is picture based whereas Facebook involves more interaction. If you’re going on to Instagram and you’re going to give some of your time to Instagram first consider what is your intention? For me, my intention is branding consistency, I want to make sure that I look good on Instagram so that if somebody stalked me they will see my brand and recognize it. I don’t go on there hunting for clients. I just tick all these boxes.

So firstly

Instagram is an app-based thing, meaning that when you’re on Instagram, it works better off the app on your phone. And you could do a lot more on the app than you can on a desktop. And that is frustrating for us, older than 34 people. But that’s how it works. The number one thing to do with Instagram is first set up your username and there needs to be consistency. Because if I’m searching for you, on Google, on YouTube, on Facebook and Instagram, we cannot have multiple names, it’s going to make it really difficult for people to find us. So your username is incredibly important. We need consistency. And of course, you’ve got to know how to then take that URL and share.

Then we have number two

when you’re setting it up you want to find your Facebook. So because Instagram and Facebook are one family it’ll actually ask you if you would like to follow your Facebook friends.  Now Instagram is kind of like Facebook, but a little bit a little bit stricter with this one. You don’t just want to follow everyone. You only want to follow people that are right for your algorithm. Those are the ones that you want to be following.

The third

one is your profile picture. If you have a look on the app on your phone, it’s tiny, which means you want a big face in it, not a faraway face, because it’s really, really hard to find you. Now, if you don’t like your face, that’s okay. I’ve got my logo. And I’m happy with my little logo, and my logo will go everywhere instead. One thing you do want to do the same as on Facebook, go and stalk your username, and your name. There may be others with the same name as you.

Fouthly

You want to go complete your profile. It will take you through that process where it will ask your name, your username, put in your website, and then your bio. And your bio is one of the most important things. So your Facebook bio is a little bit important. your Instagram bio is the most important. It has to say who you are, what you offer, why we should choose you over everyone else. And it’s only 150 characters or less. And emojis inside it is really important.

Number five

You want to create your business page. You don’t have to create a business page, you can still run it on your organic page. It’s obviously going to encourage you to do paid ads. And you want to make sure that you verify your business page so you have it verified and you put your call to action buttons in them.

Sixth

Is branding consistency. All right now, Instagram is all about the tiles, those little boxes, squares. They’re all tiles and you can either view it as a long scroll-like Facebook, but most people view Instagram as a tile meaning where you can see six to nine blocks all at one go. So it has to be pretty. So when you’re doing your branding, you want to make sure that if you’re using filters, that they are the same filters, and there are a whole bunch of apps, there’s a couple that is free.  You want to make sure that your branding is consistent. I’ve got a little theme going which is one bitmoji one real-life natural picture, one bitmoji. So that bitmoji is my little cartoon character. Now that suits my branding, and I use it in my branding. So people are familiar with it.

Number seven

you then want to go in and obviously write your captions and you’re going to use hashtags. When it comes to the hashtags, you’re looking for small hashtags that have less than 50,000 posts. And then you’re also looking for niche ones, specific ones, or personalized ones.

Eighth

You then want to follow and engage with your cheerleaders –  just like we do on Facebook.

Number nine

Is getting them the hell off Instagram. You could put a post on your Facebook saying ‘have you checked out my Instagram account?’ In your newsletter, you can say ‘have you checked out my Instagram account’  You can do it on any of your social media platforms or communication platforms.  You should put an Instagram icon on your website with a clickable link to Instagram.  We want to be sending people to Instagram and from Instagram to other platforms.

Instagram is all about connecting people not collecting people. So in the olden days, which was las犀利士 t month, it was all about collecting people. And it was all vanity measures. ‘How many followers have you gotten?’ Instagram changed that when they started hiding likes, they wanted people to not focus on how many likes you got, but more on engagement and building relationships. And that’s why they did that. What it did was then people started to post more, there were more authenticity, more connection and more growth. So more actual, real relationships.

The trend at the moment is not overly edited. Now everybody’s doing it more subtly, they still use filters so that there’s branding consistency, and it looks professional. But the filters are actually a little bit more subtle.