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7 Ways to Grow Your Brand On Instagram

Posted by

rstapholz on September 17, 2021

Are you looking to make the most of Instagram and want to use it to grow your business? Here are some clear tips you can engage with to do just that.

1. Finding the right time to post

The time you decide to post your content is going to have a big impact on how it performs. The decision of when to post becomes overwhelming for most because there are 24 hours in a day and seven days a week, which means they have a lot to choose from. If you want to avoid going through all that, it is a good idea to do a simple online search because it is going to help you in figuring out your content schedule.

Many social media management tools and social media blogs have already done the research and determined the best time to post on Instagram. This allows you to start posting on Instagram feeling confident without spending a lot of time and resources researching on your own. You shouldn’t depend on what they have recommended; it is a good idea to put in a little time because the audience is different. There are times when the time is opposite because of the nature of the audience. The data should become the foundation of the schedule, then you adjust the times you post then see which times work the best. Fine-tune your schedule until you end up with something that works well.

When you are starting out you can buy Instagram followers, be sure to take this into account with your analytics. Buying Instagram followers can be a great way to give your brand that initial push and really kick things off. Trusted sellers such as Social Plus are a great place to start.

2. Being smart with hashtags

Hashtags are great when you want to reach new audiences on Instagram. But it is not enough to just choose random and popular hashtags. The hashtags are going to do so much; the good thing is there is a type of hashtag that is going to help you grow your followers on Instagram.

This type of hashtags is known as “niche hashtag”. This is a hashtag that focuses on a specific interest. A photographer in Los Angeles can use the hashtag #losangelesphotographer in addition to the popular #photographer (this has been used on more than 168 million posts). When you put niche hashtags on your posts, you are going to gain followers who are interested in your content and also increase awareness of your brand.

3. Going beyond the typical post

Don’t limit yourself to photos, there are a lot of features on Instagram that will help you create a great experience for your audience. When you use features like IGTV and video, your followers are going to have more ways of interacting with your brand.

IGTV is great for trying out long-form content on Instagram and you will know how your audience prefers engaging with your brand. Don’t feel like you have to start by posting seven-minute-long videos. Start by posting a video a week, then seeing how followers interact with the video compared to your normal posts. The findings from this will help you update your strategy and make sure you are up to date.

4. Make use of geotagging

Location is one of the most important things when it comes to real estate, but it is also important for your Instagram strategy. The geotagging feature is good because it allows users to store content at a specific location and tags. The coordinates are going to be linked with your content. This is going to make the posts more visible to users searching in that given location.

Geotagging features can be used beyond the standard posts. You are also given the option of geotagging through Stories or Stickers. Are you curious about where the brand is talked about the most? The Instagram explore feature to search your brand name or physical storefront if you have one. Go to the “place” option. Through this, you get to know more about the followers talking about you are from. You will know the reach of your brand geographically.

5. Upgrading your photos

Instagram is mainly driven by visual appeal, which makes it important to ensure your photos are high quality especially when you are competing with other brands. You don’t have to have a professional camera to produce quality photos, your smartphone is good enough. Your phone can produce quality photos, provided you use it correctly. Most people on Instagram use their phones to take photos and videos, you don’t have to be a professional photographer to do it.

There are some tips you can find online that can help you improve the quality of your photos. The camera on the back is a good place to start because it is easier to steady your camera and the quality is also better. Lighting is also important, make sure it is not too bright or too dark. It is best to use natural lighting because it isn’t too overpowering.

Play with different angles to make the photos eye-catching to users as they scroll, and also balance your photos using gridlines. Don’t over-edit your photos before you post because people can easily tell that the photo isn’t real. You don’t need to do a lot of editing when it is a good photo.

6. Partnering with other brands

It might seem counter-intuitive to work with those you consider your competition, but working with others can help you gain access to a different audience. When you partner with a brand on Instagram, you are introduced to a new audience through their followers, which is going to grow your reach.

If you have never partnered with another brand or are new to Instagram, don’t worry. It is not hard to reach out, and it is going to be the most important step. Start by identifying brands that your audience is most likely interested in. Make sure you double-check their brand value so you can be sure that their values align with yours. When you do this, you prevent issues coming up later that could harm the partnership.

Once you find a brand you think is a good fit, reach out to them and find out whether they might be interested in partnering. If you partner with another brand, take advantage of the new exposure by creating content that is going to showcase both of your brands. You can create a hashtag specific to the partnership, or a giveaway to get the interest of the followers. The goal of such a partnership is to promote both brands, which results in new followers that could be converted to customers.

7. Gathering feedback using Stories

Most people love feeling the brand cares about their opinion, and this same can be said about Instagram users. Instagram has made it easier for users to easily get feedback, and one of the tools is Stories. Polls are great when gauging interest or the question sticker when you want suggestions from your audience. You get to learn more about your audience. The engagement is going to improve when you give your audience the content they asked for.

When you get feedback from your audience, use it to improve your Instagram content and engagement. This will help you gain more followers on your account. Consistently ask for feedback. Instagram changes fast, and it is important to stay relevant by asking for feedback from your audience.

Top Tips For Using Instagram For Business Success

Posted by

rstapholz on June 8, 2021

Business

Instagram is one of the most powerful and underutilized marketing tools available in the marketplace. It happens to be one of the most popular social media platforms that’s out there. Because of this, it should hold a prominent place in your comprehensive marketing strategy. However, despite it being extremely user-friendly and innovative, there are certain things that you will need to know to get the best results from it. Here are some of the tips you should be using.

Post Regular Content

You will find that people begin to follow your account when they enjoy your content. Because of this, you want to post it more often. When you stop posting content, they are likely to un-follow you. After all, they are following you for the content you publish. Thus, you want to try to streamline content in a way that meets their expectations. Try to produce sufficient amounts of quality content to keep them entertained and engaged.

As someone who is an expert in your relative field, you should be able to craft quality content by leveraging your experience. However, you also want to ensure that you are making everything count. Instead of constantly posting captivating content or your best quality content, you can mix in photos of quotes, and other things. That way, you don’t find yourself running out of content and the content you do publish can hit harder. While you don’t necessarily need to post every day, you do want to try to post a minimum of every 4 days to ensure you are regularly engaging with your audience. You can buy Instagram followers to really help pump things up.

Posting any less than this is likely going to result in you losing followers. Keep in mind, you don’t want to post sporadically. People like to know they can count on you posting content regularly and on schedule.

Don’t Stick To The Same Content

You will find the Instagram platform is full of beautiful imagery. Because of this, you can try to get creative with your content. Ideally, you want someone that has a good camera eye. That way, they can examine it to ensure that it is of the best quality before publishing.

While you should be able to effectively reuse content if you are spacing it right, you don’t want to post the same thing over and over. However, you could potentially make subtle changes that will enable you to use the same subject in various contexts for the same result. You can alter things by posting a quote one day and then posting a video the next.

Your followers are looking for something with your content. They are either following you for interesting topics, entertainment, or educational content. Try to post a variety of different types of content to maximize creativity. However, Hootsuite suggests you don’t forget that you are posting on a business account. Therefore, you shouldn’t be using the platform to engage in topics of opinion. Keep everything related to your business or the industry you are operating in.

Reward Your Loyal Followers

It can be extremely difficult to keep your audience engaged in your content. Along with focusing on posting high-quality content, you should be looking to find ways to incentivize anyone that is following you. You can do this by offering special Instagram-only deals, promotional codes, or even competitions to keep them regularly tuned in and engaged with your account. This can help to ensure that you get regular eyes on your account and it will give everyone that follows your account good reason to consider sticking around. However, don’t turn your entire account into a freebie giveaway account. This will only draw those seeking freebies to your account. Instead, use this periodically for the best results.

Include The Right Hashtags On Every Post

You want to try to be certain that you are using the right hashtags on every post. Much like Twitter, Instagram uses hashtags to categorize the content. That way, people can find things and topics they are interested in. This can make your content much easier to find for others. For instance, if you are looking to showcase your cooking experience, you might want to include hashtags for your #bestrecipes according to Web Design Meath.

If you aren’t using the right hashtags or if you aren’t using hashtags at all, you will make it increasingly difficult for people to find your content. You want to ensure that you are using hyper-relevant hashtags, as well.

Be Extremely Social

Social media has its name for a reason. Being social is one of the most important parts of the process. You want to do more than regularly post content without following up. You need to be engaging with your audience and interacting with them routinely to grow.

You should be commenting, liking, and interacting with every visitor that finds your account. You could potentially hire a company to assist in integrating your social media accounts to ensure you can manage the accounts as efficiently as possible. You also want to be directing traffic from your social media to your website and vice versa.

Digital Digging

Posted by

Editor on December 18, 2015

Empowerment

By Cynthia Brian

âWith our thoughts, we make the world.â
~ Buddha

My first gardening calendar was published in the year 1993. I had worked with a renown photographer for over eighteen months shooting fabulous photos from my garden throughout the seasons, taking copious notes of what to do and when to do it, traveling to numerous zones to note the monthly cycles. Â I wrote my copy on an Apple desktop, the photographs were transparencies, and the finished product was a beautiful, printed, shrink-wrapped gift of beautiful flowers with monthly tips worth saving. Over the years, people have shown me the tablemats, collages, and other creative things that were made with that calendar. Since the back up to all of my work was on floppy disks, I no longer have access to my unedited insights. Thankfully, I have the photos and the published calendar as a souvenir of my efforts. Â This loss of my creative writings caused me to ponder the digital mania that has descended upon humanity in our yearning to eliminate paper archiving. We tend to keep everything on our computers, designating Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest as our memory banks.

My fear is that our history will be relegated to oral rememberings as technology rapidly changes. Since computers became a household necessity, weâve stored our data on floppies, CDâs, DVDâs, flash drives, portable hard drives, and now the cloud, but will future generations be ever able to access any of this as equipment evolves and changes? My iphoto folder has now surpassed 20,000 jpegs. Digital photos from 2009 and earlier that were not printed are no longer accessible since Iâve upgraded computers multiple times and those earlier back up disks are not compatible.

Earlier this year, I made a book of my favorite garden photographs throughout the seasons accompanied by my favorite garden quotes. The book was a gift to myself as a reminder of my years of dedication, hard work, and love of nature. As I perused snapshots from a quarter century of gardening bliss, I was able to see how much I had accomplished with the help of Mother Nature. Â How happy I am that I had not only digitized photos, but also printed them for posterity. When we first moved to this area, our lot was a hillside of wild grasses, poison oak, and blackberry bushes. It is now an oasis filled with lush landscaping, orchards, vines, trees, fruits, herbs, flowers, birds, bees, butterflies, and wildlife. Â One of the mottos I have always lived by is âwhat you think about and talk about comes about!â For me, Iâm always thinking about gardening. Today, all I have to do is look around to see that my personal world was created in my thoughts.

As the end of the year approaches, I encourage you to invest in archiving your precious memories of family, friends, pets, plants, and places you love not only on your apps and gadgets, but in the old fashioned way, printing. Donât allow your legacy of a life well lived become obsolete as technology races forward. Do some digital digging and store a hard copy of your treasures. Plant and grow your memoirs.

May you shine with happiness for the holidays. Thank you for a fabulous year of Digging Deep and Gardening with Cynthia Brian. I appreciate you.

Cynthia Brianâs Mid Month Reminders and Tips
â« REFRAIN from collecting and eating mushrooms unless you are absolutely certain they are edible. A good friend recently collected a variety of mushrooms based on information she perused in a foraging guidebook. Fortunately she took them to a mycological expert for positive identification. Eighty-four of the eighty-five fungi she had in her basket were poisonous!
â« CLEAN storm drains, gutters, and anywhere where water could clog or cause problems when the rains come.
â« DECORATE for the holidays with branches, leaves, berries, twigs, pinecones, and natural cuttings from your back yard. Utilize surprising colors, like purple, not just red, greens, and blues.
â« COVER tender plants from frost and cold temperatures with burlap. Patio furniture can be protected from the elements with plastic, but use burlap or fabric on plants and shrubs. Citrus is especially susceptible to frost bite.
â« CREATE a charming birdhouse with corks! With the festivities of the holidays, collect corks to make a home for your feathered friends.
â« SPRAY paint the un-carved pumpkins and gourds silver, gold, or bronze to add pizzazz to a front porch or entrance. For recycling at its best, after the holidays, add to the compost pile
â« BAIT for snails and slugs during this wet season.
â« HARVEST cabbages, Swiss Chard, and kale. Massage your kale to tenderize and eliminate bitterness.
â« TUNE in to StarStyleÂ® Radio on December 30 for a full hour of LIVE garden talk with Britainâs rose expert from David Austin Roses. 4-5pm PT. Â Bare-root plantings start in January and this show will give you lots of information!
â« MAKE a photo album of your garden pictures throughout the years as a gift to yourself and future family gardeners.

Itâs too late to seed or re-seed your lawns. My new grass is coming in slowly because of the extreme changes in weather. In spring, we will revisit planting a waterless turf when soil temperatures rise to 50-70 degrees.

Happy Gardening and Happy Growing.
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Â©2015
Cynthia Brian
The Goddess Gardener
StarstyleÂ® Productions, llc
Cynthia@GoddessGardener.com
www.GoddessGardener.com
925-377-STAR
Tune into Cynthiaâs Radio show at www.StarStyleRadio.net
I am available as a speaker, designer, and consultant.