10 Reasons to use Instagram for Small Business

What makes Instagram so popular among entrepreneurs? This is not only the accessibility of the social network as an advertising platform but also a lot of opportunities for business development.

1. Show brand image

You can make customer relationships more personal. You can do this by posting photos and videos with the participation of your team and satisfied customers. Fill the feed with events of working days of employees, messages about events, reviews of grateful customers…

2. Be recognized as an expert

Develop your expertise – bring useful information about the product or services to your audience. Let them see you as an expert – this increases brand confidence. According to BuzzVoice this can be done by posting useful tips in pictures, show reviews, test drives, the production process in videos.

3. Collect data

Encourage dialogue by using the Survey feature in Stories. This will allow you to conclude the work of the company, to learn the opinion of consumers about your product, their preferences, to plan the range, to conduct various promotions… Business accounts also have access to analytics, in which you can find useful statistical information, such as the number of impressions and demographic data of followers.

4. Direct traffic to the site and your other pages

In “bio” you can add active external links to direct users to your site, blog and accounts on other social networks. These links can add value to your audience and offer more useful content.

5. Increase sales

With the help of Instagram, you can inform about sales and promotions, notify about the expansion of the range and the development of new services. A beautiful presentation will expand the reach, and an attractive offer will increase the number of purchases. To increase the popularity of your posts, you can buy 50 Instagram likes.

6. Engage the audience

Stories is a unique Instagram tool. Short videos are fixed in the header of the account and are always in sight – important information will not be lost in the stream. With their help, you can announce hot promotions, one-day sales, publish answers to frequently asked questions, post viral content, hold contests, involving the audience…

7. Real-time videos

Instagram can broadcast live. This can be useful for educational projects, bloggers, travel agents and many other companies who are ready to show fascinating moments and interesting events happening here and now. You can also conduct live quizzes, chat with followers in a question and answer format and interview interesting people involved in your business.

8. Build relationships with partners

The meaning of social networks is to make connections. And Instagram is a great place to find like-minded people with similar interests. You can expand your network of contacts and collaborate with a brand or an influential person to increase your reach. Partner’s advertising content can be placed, for example, in Stories, to attract more clicks and conversions, and under the same conditions, get up with ads in his account

9. Attract new users

Give users the ability to easily find your Instagram account – use hashtags and geolocation tags. You can create branded hashtags and track their usage.

10. Stay in trend

Share your interest in the current situation in the industry and society. Create materials for a particular holiday, a high-profile event that affects your audience. This can be, for example, the start of sales or the threshold of the FIFA finals. Use trends to conduct promotions, give out gifts and bonuses. Being trendy helps to attract new customers and demonstrate your interest in the affairs of society.

Connect advertising

Saturation of the channel with interesting content will give you a significant advantage over your competitors: it will increase the attractiveness of your Instagram account, attract the attention of new users, draw them into a sales funnel and turn them into loyal customers. However, working with an account alone may not be enough to reach a new Instagram audience that does not yet know about you, but shows a direct or indirect interest in your products and services. Such users can be found and attracted through targeted advertising.

Personal account vs Business account

Initially, Instagram appeared as a social network for exchanging impressions through photos with friends and relatives. Users had the same personal account and functionality: users posted photos with descriptions, liked and commented on posts of other users.

The platform gained popularity, the number of users grew every year, and gradually, business representatives began to register their company accounts on Instagram for commercial purposes. They experienced a lot of inconvenience on their personal account type:

The inability of the user to contact the account owner from the account

The phone number can only be indicated in the “About Me” section or in the text of the post. Therefore, users to contact the owner of the account, must first rewrite the number somewhere, then dial on the smartphone. Inconvenient.

Lack of statistics

You can only watch the number of followers and thus track whether your account is growing or not. Content can only be estimated by the number of likes.

The inability to communicate with users

All communication with users occurs in the comments, or in instant messengers. Even if the user is interested in the product, and the price is not indicated in the text of the post, not everyone will bother with correspondence to find out the price.

Lack of formal promotion methods

It was at a time when personal accounts were the only ones that gained mass-following and mass-liking services.

Business account

No one foreshadowed the popularity of this social network at the launch stage, and even more, so that it would turn into one of the main channels of communication with users for many companies in the world. The benefits of a business account on Instagram.

Statistics

In Instagram itself, you can see how many followers interacted with the contacts section (called, looked at the address), analyze your followers when they are online, which posts they interact with most. An analysis of these statistics will help you understand which hashtags bring more views and which posts are not liked by your audience and, accordingly, you should adjust your posting to these statistics.

Convenient customer contact

Followers will not have to rewrite a phone number somewhere to make a call. In a business profile, they just need to click on the “Call” button under the profile header. You can also add a button with an address or email.