4 Instagram Marketing Techniques That’ll Improve Your Site’s Traffic

With over 500 million regular monthly users, Instagram is an underappreciated marketing tool that can make your website’s traffic rocket. As an app that began life as a photo sharing tool, it’s since played a significant role in accelerating the careers of Internet celebrities, brands, and bloggers alike. As such, understanding a little more about fundamental Instagram marketing techniques is an essential way to reach out to your target audience and draw in more visitors.

 

Stay relevant and find the right hashtags

When you first start posting to Instagram, the temptation to go wild and share every photo that relates to your business can result in you looking spammy and people un-following you

So, you need to post photos that are relevant to your business. Let’s say you’re posting a picture of a product. Think about some of the hashtags a potential client, shopper, or reader will associate with them, and then add those to your posts. That way, your content remains relevant, and you attract the right type of attention.

Using relevant hashtags also encourages those who shop with you and those who share your posts to use them too. This means free and automatic exposure, which is a profoundly satisfying Instagram marketing technique for those who love word-of-mouth-style advertising.

 

Make sure your photos are aesthetically pleasing

If you’re new to Instagram, always start with high-quality images. Picture the site as a virtual version of a shopping center. When you walk through a shopping center, you feel less inclined to step into the stores that look messy and half dressed. The shiny ones, on the other hand, you gravitate towards.

Instagram is no different. If a user is searching for a hashtag, they’ll bypass the photos that look average and head straight for the ones that are visually appealing. According to Jeff Bullas, more than 80 percent of pins receive a repin, whereas fewer than two percent of tweets receive a retweet. Those statistics suggest that your prospective visitors are visual creatures, which means creating great images should remain high on your list of priorities.

One way to achieve the ‘right’ shot is to use the square setting on your iPhone or digital camera. You should also use the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds states that the object of your focus should fall within a certain third of the photo to remain visually appealing. It’s a tricky technique to master, but practice makes perfect!

 

Focus on consistency and post at least seven times per week

Posting frequently throughout the week is more efficient than blasting out a load of posts at once and then abandoning your account for a while. One study reveals that there is such a thing as oversharing too. Most big brands post once or twice daily, but if they go beyond ten posts, they begin to lose followers.

Making sure to post on a daily basis is the best way to increase your followers. If you’re living a hectic life and worrying you won’t find the time to create a daily post, you have a few options:

• Pay someone to manage your account.
• Set a reminder on your phone.
• Use an app such as Hootsuite to schedule your posts and dedicate half-an-hour or so each week to doing this.

In the interest of remaining pragmatic, using Hootsuite is probably your most reliable option. You’re relying on yourself rather than another person, and the temptation to ignore a daily alert isn’t there.

 

Forget about Snapchat stories, use Instagram stories instead

While multiple businesses and news outlets do use Snapchat to broaden the public’s awareness of their brand, doing so isn’t as effective as using an Instagram story. In fact, if you choose to post an Instagram story, you’ll gain 35 percent more views than if you use Snapchat.

Instagram stories come with several benefits:

• You can share several photos at once without falling into the spam and unfollow category.
• If someone is following you, they’ll see that you created a story at the top of their screen when they open the app.
• It’s an opportunity to share multiple products in one post if that’s what the aim of your marketing strategy is.

However, there is a slight caveat: don’t include Instagram stories as part of your daily activities. Major brands appear to employ their use once per week, possibly with the aim of not diving into the world of promotion overkill. That aside, stories are a pretty novel feature at the moment, which means you want to keep them as a special treat for your followers rather than an experience they expect on a daily basis.

As with any social media channel, try and test your Instagram marketing tactics before making a full commitment. You can even buy Instagram likes to get the ball rolling and make your profile look more prestigious from the outset. Once you know what works for you, try to push it to its limits and keep on experimenting with new techniques.

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