An Instagram Guide | The African Exponent.

1. Start Conversations

Think about how much you interact with those following you. A big reason to use social media is to make connections with and engage with your customers. It allows you to do so in a personal way. Instagram can make it very easy to start conversations with those following you and interact with them allowing you to answer questions and even humanize your brand or account.

You will want to try to optimize your captions to make them more engaging. Encourage those following you to participate in conversations and to engage with your content. Ask them what their opinion is and tag all relevant hashtags to ensure you are maximizing your reach.

Use the features provided on the account to ensure you are allowing people to participate in your posts. Use the “question” feature and even create “live” stories so they can see your brand new products and ask live questions about your brand. Buy real Instagram likes to give a new account a boost.

2. Post Regularly

You need to carefully monitor when you are posting. The time in which you are posting will play a critical role in determining how successful your engagement is. Think about when your followers are most active and try to schedule your posts during that time. Research the various times when you should be posting. You can look at this article by Benjamin Chacon as he shares a lot of helpful data on the best times to post for different days of the week. Conduct your research and test the best time for your audience.

3. Get To Know Your Audience

You need to learn about your audience. Instagram’s audience is very different. You need to leverage the analytics provided by Instagram to learn more about your audience to figure out who your audience is. Knowing your audience’s demographics and behaviors is key to understanding them and learning how to reach them.

Look at Instagram Insights For Information Such As:

– Location

– Follower growth

– Age

– Gender

– When they are most active

All of these insights are critical to understanding the kind of content you should be publishing and when you should be posting it. It even tells you information about what offers you should be handing out to your audience for better engagement.

4. Stay Consistent

A big thing that you should be doing when you are looking to maximize your Instagram presence is maintaining a high level of consistency with your posts. You need to ensure that you are remaining “on-brand” with everything you are doing. This means having a clear brand image, having consistency with the tone of your captions, and more. You want a recognizable brand and one that your followers will instantly see and know that it’s your post.

5. Consistent Branding

One of the best ways to maintain consistency is by sticking to a theme. You want to define your brand’s values and voice. From there, all of the posts you make should stick to them. You want everything to maintain a high level of consistency from your captions to your stories. Even your brand’s color scheme should be consistent.

6. Write Good Captions

You need to be using captions as a way to drive more people to your posts. You can use a lot of characters on Instagram. Don’t waste them! Take advantage of the extra space. Captions can be a fantastic way to tell stories about your images and create more emotion. You want to provide relevant and valuable details in your captions to drive engagement.

7. Hashtags

You should be using the right hashtags when you are posting. Research the hashtags and try to figure out what hashtags belong on each post. While you don’t want to cram every hashtag you can think of into your posts, you do want to make your posts searchable by adding relevant hashtags. For instance, if you post a photo of shoes for working out, you’ll want to add #workoutshoes to your image. That way, people that are searching for workout shoes will find your content.