The Power of Instagram

Most businesses, organizations and start-ups have an Instagram account, as they should. Most businesses hoping to stay relevant these days must understand how to use Instagram. But from what I’ve seen, not enough businesses (start-ups especially) know how important it is to master the platform. Here’s why having a good Instagram account is so important for your business as well as how to take the first steps to owning your Instagram game.

Instagram — selfies and business in one place

My Instagram experience

Being CMO for Venuepark, once of my tasks is to curate and manage our social media accounts, which includes Instagram. Let me tell you, since starting with this position, Instagram has taught me more about marketing than I thought possible. More than anything, using the platform has taught me about the almost scientific meticulousness and calculated strategy necessary when managing a powerful and engaging Instagram account.

Before I go any further, I’m not saying that Venuepark’s Instagram is the gold standard for good accounts. We can certainly make improvements to our content and generally improve the overall user experience. Mastering Instagram for business is a steep learning curve and we’re carefully working our way up that curve. With that out of the way, I do feel confident in saying that our Instagram is doing rather well. As a matter of fact, we recently finished piecing together a new strategy with which we hope to boost our account even more. The guiding principles behind that strategy will be outlined below, but before that, I want to address the importance of Instagram for business in general.

Instagram has taught me more about marketing than I thought possible

Why Instagram?

Instagram is important for business — end of story. Don’t just take my word for it, though. Check out Hootsuite or Hubspot and you’ll find countless articles discussing how important that platform actually is. However, depending on how a given business functions, Instagram will need to be approached and adapted accordingly. For that reason, I’m going to be using Venuepark as an example of how Instagram benefits a business. NOTE: This information is based on where the company is currently situated in it’s evolution. We are making the final preparations for our launch, at which time our social strategy will once again be updated, which includes making changes to our Instagram.

• Provides a platform for visual content. A lot of what we do is based on visuals. As a matter of fact, we depend on visuals to promote ourselves. This is important because textual content is becoming less and less important whereas visual content is continuing to rise in importance.
• Gives us the possibility to humanize. I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again — humanizing your brand is important. In an effort to humanize our brand, we’ve been working on using Instagram to this end. A different example of a brand that humanizes exceptionally well on Instagram is Social Chain.
• Excellent platform for engagement. Instagram is a brilliant platform to use when engaging with fans, followers and partners. Engagement is crucial — never forget that.
• Opinion leadership. Combined, the members of Venuepark know a great deal about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and many other things that modern entrepreneurs should know. Instagram is the perfect platform for us to share knowledge and opinions.
• Helps us stay informed. Instagram helps us all stay up-to-date on news, competition, developments and trends thanks to the fact that it’s incredibly easy to find content we want to follow.

All of the above, that’s our Instagram efforts in a nutshell. Of course, there are certain things I can’t reveal just yet (believe me, I wish I could) but in general, we use Instagram as the first point of contact for new followers and leads. It’s proven incredibly useful and has garnered us a lot of interest and potential partnerships gearing up for our launch.

So, how should you approach Instagram? Read on to find out.

How to create an Instagram feed perfect for your business

As I said, Venuepark’s Instagram feed isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. After researching and planning, we figured out what content works for us. However, chances are that this will be totally different for your business. Nonetheless, the steps to figuring out how your feed should look is relatively universal. I’ve outlined those steps below.

• Determine appropriate content. Venuepark is a venue and external service listing website. Would it make sense for us to focus our content on cars or healthy diets? Not really. In the same vein, your Instagram account should be a source of relevant content for your target audience.
• Find a good balance between sharing original content and sharing content by others. Focusing only on one of the two will not serve your account well. At the end of the day, a realistic balance has to be found between sharing original content and relevant content by others. TIP: The goal here should be to make your original content stand out. Blogs/vlogs are a good place to start.
• Find sources that create content you deem important to share. We follow countless accounts on Instagram, all of which post meaningful and actionable content, which we share regularly. This all while crediting the original creator, of course.
• Share on multiple platforms. Currently, our most important content platform is Instagram. However, we share the majority of our Instagram content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and The Collection (our own library of original and shared content, which can be found in our Instagram bio).
• Ensure content quality is high. Of course, posting interesting content is great, but don’t forget — Instagram is a VISUAL platform. Posting low quality pictures or pictures that are badly cropped will ruin your feed.
• Analyze competition. When determining how to design your feed and what content you want to share, there is no shame in looking at what your competition is doing. Learning from others is the best way forward.
• Experiment. Don’t be afraid to try what others are afraid to try. After all, if you don’t try, you won’t know.

Conclusion

Everything written so far is essentially a basic guide on how to use Instagram with efficiency and effectiveness, based on what I’ve learned from being Venuepark’s CMO. Of course, learning to understand analytics, marketing trends, feature roll-outs and every other aspect that is linked to doing business on Instagram is equally important. Nonetheless, the tips in this article should serve as an easy introduction to the topic — I hope it helps!