Instagram has been one of the most popular social networking sites in recent years. The fact that it is free and easy to use has made many users enjoy this site as much as they enjoy blogging and posting pictures on Twitter. Unfortunately, there are many users on Instagram who have no idea how to effectively market their businesses. As a result, their followers lose faith in the brand and this may ultimately lead to increased sales. In order to avoid the damage that a few bad apples can do to your brand, follow these simple steps:
Make your Instagram profile visible to everyone. In order to gain the full advantage of Instagram, you need to have many followers. If you have fewer than a hundred thousand followers, you might consider making your account private so only friends and business contacts can see it. A good rule of thumb is to have one thousand followers before you start promoting yourself on Instagram. One important thing to remember is that you do not have to share every picture you upload, but be creative. For example, you can upload the photos of your products and events you have attended.
Determine your Instagram target audience. In order to get the attention of thousands of Instagram followers, you will have to make sure that you upload content that will appeal to them. The best way to do this is to consider your market. If you are running a fashion boutique, you should consider the types of clothes your target market buys and then upload pictures of those items. On the other hand, if you are a dentist, you can consider uploading pictures of the latest trends or beautiful people.
Do not post very frequent pictures. Most people who are on Instagram are there for a long time, so you don't need to keep uploading pictures to gain many followers. If you are posting pictures daily, you might as well just limit it to Instagram first and then expand it to Facebook and Twitter. Keep in mind that it would be better to have more followers on social media than on Instagram because it would be less cluttered and more personalized. So, if you only have a few thousand followers on Instagram, why not focus your efforts on that instead of posting daily pictures?
Do not make it too easy for your followers to follow you. Unlike Instagram, Facebook and Twitter allow their users to comment on their posts and those comments count towards their network. If you are able to get hundreds of comments each day, that would be great. However, if you are following many users and the only comments they leave are negative comments, they won't be able to follow you back or connect with you on other networks.
Do not try to sell your products to your followers. Instagram has a zero-seller policy, so you cannot advertise or promote your products to your followers. It's also against the Instagram Terms of Service to send private messages or surveys to people you don't know. Avoid sending sales pitches either. If you are promoting an affiliate product or an AdSense page, you can mention these things but you can't mention personal information such as phone numbers, addresses, email addresses etc. If you have too many fake followers and they complain about this, you could face a lawsuit.
Do not spam your Instagram account. The best Instagram marketing tips I ever got were from someone who had less than 5000 Instagram followers: "stop sending your Instagram updates with advertisements". People hate seeing adverts all the time, especially if they're related to their interests. One way to build up your new followers list is to simply make sure that your Instagram account is interesting and full of quality content.
Do not spam search engines to rank for keywords. If you want to rank well for certain terms, you should do some research first. Google does not allow you to manually manipulate search engines for SEO purposes so you should leave the keyword stuffing to sites like Wordtracker and Overture. I have been looking for a way to get so many followers on Instagram and have discovered that one of the best methods is to follow as many people as possible and hope that one of them takes an interest in your Instagram page. You can then offer them a discount if they join your page and you can even make it seem as if it was their idea. The trick here is to try not to spam the person too much as they will get tired of all the action and stop following you.
