Introduction
Instagram for Business is a platform where you can market your products or services, share contact information, sell directly on the platform and engage with your community.
The platform has already over 200 million business accounts, and it’s a place where you can get real time insights by tracking your account performance using real-time data and learn what’s working well with your audience.
By Instagram, 90 % of the users follow a band on Instagram, and 87 % say they take action after seeing a product on Instagram, so it’s a powerful tool to spread your business’ awareness and get new customers.
How to start
Setting up your Instagram Business Account:
- Go to your profile and tap menu in the upper right corner. Tap Settings and privacy > Account type and tools > Switch to professional account
- Pick a category that best describes your business, then select Business
- You’re done!
Types of ads
How to turn your post into an ad
- Tag your products in an image, video or carousel post, then boost it to create an ad
- Select your goal
- Help build brand awareness and strengthen relationships with customers by sending people to your profile.
- Send people to your website id you want to increase online sales, drive traffic to specific pages or encourage people to make a purchase or book an appoitment
- Drive people to your direct messages so they can start one-on-one conversation. You can answer questions, offer personalized services or manage customer support.
- Define your audience:
- choose who sees your ad based on your current customers’ interests or demographics if you want to be seen by a specific audience, are location-specific, know who you want to reach or want to reach different groups of people with different offerings.choose automatic audiences if you’re unsure of who to target or want to see who interacts with your ad.
- Set a budget and duration
- Your budget affects how many people see you ad
- Duration determines when your ad ends and how it’s delivered.
- Your ad will appear in feed, stories and explore on Instagram. Instagram will automatically adjust your post so it’s always correctly formatted.
CHECK OUT: 7-minute lesson to learn how to build your own test-and-learn strategy
How often?
The guidelines for posting frequency I found suggested that ideal times to post on Instagram is 3-5 times per week and Stories 2 times per day. Posting frequently on Instagram increases your chances of showing up in the Explore feed, being featured on another account or appearing in the top search results for keywords you commonly use. Posting regularly is a great way to test out what resonates with your audience.
Target group
On their page, Instagram claim to have a responsibility to foster a safe and supportive community for everyone. By Statista, the biggest user age groups worldwide are 18-14 (30.8%) and 25-34 (30.3%), following with 35-44 (15.7%).
Usage in the tourism business
In my opinion, Instagram for Business is a powerful tool to reach people all over the world. It’s a great way to showcase the different tourism businesses with visuals and stories, share customer testimonials and telling what’s happening in the behind the scenes, for example. If you don’t want to sell your products or services directly on Instagram, you can direct the people (customers) to your webpage or bookings or anywhere you want.
Sharing and engaging with customers looks easy there, and it’s already shareable within Instagram’s own tool. I’ve seen tourism businesses sharing their customer’s experiences in their business’ Stories, and I think it’s the great way to showcase that ‘this place has customers, let’s go there, too!’
ChatGPT in creating content
You can utilize ChatGPT in content creation by using it to
- generate ideas for getting inspiration
- writing posts or captions with specific styles or tones
- fix grammar or get suggestions how to edit the post
- find relevant hashtags
- describe products or create advertisement texts
- generate questions or quiz to the followers to grow the engagement
Communication with followers
On Instagram, you can communicate with your audience in several ways. You can call them to action with using stickers on your Stories, have DM’s open and share your contact information. It’s easy to share your customer’s posts or stories on your business’ stories, and you can comment and reply to your customers in their or your own posts. Other ways to engage with your customers is to have a questions or contests for your followers.
The data Instagram for Business offers
Recent highlights: announces any notable increases in account performance in your selected preset or custom timeframe within the past 90 days.
Overview: showcases the number of accounts reached, accounts engaged, total followers and approximate earnings (if applicable) for your selected preset or custom timeframe within the past 90 days.
Accounts reached: number of unique accounts that have seen your content on screen at least once and demographic information on the accounts you’ve reached, including top countries, top cities, top age ranges and gender breakdown.
Accounts engaged: number of unique accounts that have interacted with your content and demographic information on the accounts you’ve engaged, including top countries, top cities, top age ranges and gender breakdown.
Total followers: view trends across your followers when you have at least 100 followers. Includes growth (gained or lost followers), top locations of your followers, age range, times they’re most active on Instagram.
Content you shared: the content you’ve posted and boosted across feed, stories, and video for your selected preset of custom timeframe within the past 90 days.
Content interactions: actions people take when they engage with your content, such as likes, comments, saves, shares and replies.
Ad: provides more information on your post if it’s been boosted.
Plays: number of plays, which are counted when a video starts to play automatically or because someone clicked to play the video.
My impressions
If I want to check a business or a brand out, I usually go first on Instagram or Facebook, because I’ve noticed it’s easier for the businesses to update those before their webpages, and I’ve started to think that webpages in general are a bit outdated, but that might just be me.
I’ve started to lessen my social media usage, and I’ve noticed that it’s hard to scroll Instagram pages on Internet browser by phone or computer, and the platform always prompts to log in or install the app. It’s annoying if you only want to check few things like latest updates or special offerings or Stories what’s going on currently (events etc.). But I don’t go on Instagram that much, maybe once in a two weeks, once a week… But I totally get why it’s a great place to showcase and spread brand awareness and sell and engage with customers. I’ve bought items I’ve seen advertised on Instagram, and joined events because of the seen ads, etc, so I’ve experienced being a customer there.
The brands I’ve actively followed on Instagram regarding the tourism field is Ranua Resort, but I don’t know is it exactly a good example of the social media platform use. And usually I mute brands’ Stories because I don’t want to see them spamming on my Stories.
Tutorials
Best Instagram marketing strategy for small businessess 2024 (proven and & profitable by Adam Erhart
Sources
Hootsuite Blog: How often to post on social media
Statista: Instagram global age group distribution January 2023
Hi!
A very thorough guide you’ve made. I don’t use Instagram, but this was very easy to follow. I dislike that I cannot use it without making an account, even on desktop. I’ve mainly seen Instagram posts by social media people, so all your info is new to me, and I can see how it could be used for businesses as well. I was going to mention that maybe brands don’t spam your feed like people do, but I see you mentioning it in the last paragraph, so oh well. 😅
Thank you for the comment. Instagram lets you visit the posts on browsers usually, but if you want to continue scrolling forward or see more, it prompts you to log in, so it’s pretty annoying at times.
Hi Hanna!
I personally use Instagram a lot, but this business side is new for me- so that’s why I choose this topic to read.
There is quite a lot of text, but it is easy to read. The guidelines are well structured.
The example images are good and I like the video as well 🙂
Thank you! It was a huge topic but I tried to cut it down as much as I could. I had fun crafting this post, at least.
Hello 🙂 This post was great introduction to Instagram. I have used Instagram since the day one it came and challenged Facebook. I like the option when posting on stories, that my post will disappear after certain time. These instructions were easy to follow and tutorial video was good add. I think I could create my own business content with following these steps in this post. Thanks 🙂
Thank you for the comment! That’s great to hear that my post is helpful 🙂