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How can you improve your reach on Instagram?
There are 80 million Indians on Instagram. Across the world, 34% of it's users are in the age range of 18-34, making it the most preferred social media networking site of the millennials. If you have an Instagram page, then you can use the following to improve your reach.
Hashtags: Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags on each post. Users can follow hashtags that are of interest to them, after which they will see posts related to that hashtag in their feed.
How can you find hashtags related to your business?
Start with a few keywords that you commonly use for your product. Search in Instagram for that keyword. It will show you related keywords as below. Select the keywords you would like to use.
See what your competitors or influencers in your industry are using.
Using the hashtags strategically in your posts, you can reach out to new people. Include a mix of popular hashtags in your post that relate to your business - extremely popular, moderately popular, niche hashtags and branded hashtags.
Extremely popular hashtags will get your post in front of a large group of people, but not all may be interested in your brand.
Moderately popular hashtags will get you more relevant visibility, but with a smaller group of people.
Niche hashtags are very specific to your business's category, product, location or ethos. These will drive a better quality of users to see your post, but this number is typically much lower.
Finally, branded hashtags are the ones relating to your business name or tag lines.
Here is a quick infographic to help you.
Stories: Instagram has stayed relevant with it's user base by introducing new features. Instagram stories is one such feature that allows businesses to get creative when engaging with their customers. Stories are visible only for 24 hours, which entices your followers to see them. Stories are also featured at the top of a user's page, which allows your business to show your post to every follower. While you may think that stories are only good for promoting limited time offers or posting something candid about your business; you could use them for so much more! As you can see in the screenshot below, you can create countdowns, quizzes, questions, hashtag challenges, emoji sliders and start a conversation with your users within the story.
If you have created an Instagram profile for your business, then it is best to create or migrate it to a business account. A business account gives you more features like adding contact information, adding a category for your business and accessing insights for your posts.
Converting a personal account into a business account is simple and can be done through 'Accounts' in 'Settings'. The most important advantage of a business account is access to insights for your posts. You will be able to know more details than just the engagement of that post. The insights tell you the reach of posts, profile visits, how your audience found you and demographics of your audience. These metrics are critical to deciding your posting strategy.
Instagram is a great platform to interact with your followers and gain new ones. Use it consistently to build a relationship with your followers.
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