Instagram is a strong and entertaining social media platform that allows you to reach hundreds of new consumers every day!3
What is Instagram about?
Instagram has over 1 billion users, and mastering easy ways to get targeted followers may greatly enhance your business’s income. Instagram is a platform that smart marketers can’t afford to ignore with more features and marketing opportunities than ever before.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, both Stanford undergraduates, launched the Instagram app in October 2010. They obtained a $500 000 investment from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, two well-known Silicon Valley businesses. Their goal was to capitalize on the boom in smartphone-based photo sharing. Systrom and Krieger predicted the end of point-and-shoot cameras and the rise of smartphone-based sharing. Instagram had a million users two months after its start and has 10 million users less than a year after its inception in September 2011. It was bought by Facebook for a billion dollars in April 2012, and user growth accelerated.
Who is it for?
As of January 2023, almost 31 percent of global Instagram audiences were aged between 18 and 24 years, and 30.3 percent of users were aged between 25 and 34 years. Overall, 15.7 percent of users belonged to the 35 to 44 year age group according to the report of Distribution of Instagram users worldwide as of January 2023, by age group by Statista. According to the Sprout Social Index, Instagram is among the “big three” social media platforms. With 49% of consumers and 59% of marketers planning to use it, it is not hard to believe the changes it is going to bring in the statistics in the next 12 months.
How Stories and Reels work?
What are Stories and Reel?
Instagram Stories, which debuted on August 2, 2016, enable Instagram users to upload photographs and videos to their Story, which is accessible to followers of the user’s Instagram account. A gradient border surrounding the user’s profile photo indicates recently-posted Stories. Instagram Stories, like Snapchat Snaps, expire after 24 hours.
Reels has a full-screen portrait format, like Stories, but can be up to 60 seconds. The videos also remain on your profile whereas Stories disappear after 24 hours unless you save them to your Highlights. But the biggest difference is in the in-app editing tools, which allow users to add effects and music and to splice multiple pieces of video. Unlike Stories, Reels appears in both the general Explore tab and search results, as well as in its own tab on the user interface. This makes it far more likely to reach non-followers.
Let’s discovery these two function now!!!!
How to be visible?
You may spend all day posting beautiful images and adorable designs to Instagram to advertise your company, but real success comes from having a strategy in place. The posts from certain businesses may appear to have no rhyme or purpose, and that’s because there isn’t. You, however, are unique. That must be done properly.
- Organizing your marketing goals and roles
- Assembling your Instagram team
- Determining your brand voice
- Envisioning your look
- Gathering post ideas
- Researching your competition
- Determining post content
- Creating a content calendar
Play with your content
Content is the core of Instagram reels and stories. Content helps both marketers and consumers to take things to another level so it is important to understand the content and make it user-friendly and extra-ordinary. Here are some of the contents that work on the Instagram for both stories and reels by Peppercontent:
What should we write?
- User-generated content: Sharing the pictures of the brands used by the consumers and creating the community of hashtags, following the behaviours of customers tagging brands, putting up hashtags in your stories, highlights and bios with call to action is the effective way of using user-generated content.
- Content that tells a story: Storytelling is one of the most effective ways of reaching out to people and it could be centered on any theme such as unique products, interesting and mostly relatable events.
- Memes: Humour is what people are fond of on Instagram. From a little satirical political debate that could relate history, science of finance to regular funny unexpected events could make a whole lot of entertainment.
- Behind the scenes content: Sharing exclusive unedited scenes make audiences drawn to you. It seems like they truly know you: nothing hidden. It is a great way of connecting brands with the consumers in a genuine way.
- Tutorial videos: Life hacks videos and tutorial videos are found on any social media today. You can watch the videos of teaching how to cook foods, cut hair or play guitars, use new gadgets, and more. Instagram has become a huge platform of tutorials for everyone.
- Experimental content: Merging content and experience is what makes the users connected to the posts. Recording everything like going on adventures and solo travelling and sharing such experiences can captivate people and trigger their interests.
- Inspirational quotes: People are always looking for something to motivate them and inspirational quotes at times can help a lot with that. It does not matter if it is simply about personal growth or going to gym.
- Open-ended questions: This helps to spice things up on Instagram. Posting a question or conducting a survey has never been easy and the results are not bad either.
- Contests, games and challenges: This one is mainly popular to engage with the followers participating directly. Creating giveaway contests and rewarding quizzes are really popular.
Communicate more on Instagram!
Instagram replies are a fantastic approach to build on current client connections and reach out to potential new ones.
- To easily connect, like comments. When someone leaves a remark with an emoji (🔥🔥🔥) or only one word (“Awesome!”), you might not want to have to reply to eac2h one in full text. To save time, you can choose to like it rather than leave a comment.
- In discussions, express your professional personality. Speaking with the locals is another way to show off your company’s distinctive identity. Thus keep in mind to react in a way that fits your brand. When responding to individuals on Instagram, for instance, you should convey the lighthearted and laid-back vibe of your company.
- Referring to clients and collaborators. Don’t forget to include @username in the text if you’re mentioning a specific individual in a caption or remark. As a result, clients and partners can continue to interact with you and get notifications.
- Avoid using jargon. Use simple words that customers can easily understand. Don’t use jargon or jargon when responding to customers as this can confuse them.
- Move private chats to Direct. You can direct the conversation to Direct if you wish to reply to a comment in secret, such as in response to a special order or customer service issue. As an illustration, you may say in response to a comment, “Thanks for your query.”
Keep track on these metrics!
Instagram metrics are performance indicators that show you how your content is doing and how your audience is interacting with it. Its stats include information such as the quantity of viewers or interactions for your content.
- Impression – The frequency of views of your content.
2. Reach – The frequency of views of your content.
3. Engagements per Followers – Your content’s engagement in relation to the number of your followers.
4. Follower growth – Your follower count’s upward or downward trend
5. Comments received. – Your content’s engagement level
6. Most engaged Hashtags – The effectiveness of hashtags.
7. Referral traffic – The effect of Instagram on the volume of visitors to your website.
8. Instagram Stories metrics – How well-liked and interesting your Instagram Stories are
Save these tips your Instagram!
1. Find, follow, and interact with your ideal customers
2. Create content that appeals to your target audience
3. Fill out your bio strategically
4. Post high-quality photos
5. Use hashtags
6. Offer discounts
7. Make sure your feed is cohesive
8. Craft some killer copy
Examples of best practices (tourism accounts that excel)
Instagram has been one of the influential and outstanding marketing tools for tourism businesses. Some of the best practices of it in Tourism sectors by top companies are below:
- Brush and bubbles with quite a few followers has amazing innovation in painting and prosecco classes in London. There are creative contents of art and behind-the-scenes experiences. They promote various beautiful activities and creativity.
- Cappadocia is a mine of beautiful content and featured landmarks. It is famous among influencers who travel to Turkey to take pictures and share them. In return, the followers are encouraged to do the same.
- Santorini is all about beauty and this channel has successfully been able to portray its location based on that. As you can see, the famous hotels and spots are popular among people. Their Fan Feature story highlight shows some amazing pictures and how great their experiences were.
- Withlocals is very famous for authentic experiences whether that is food or other things to do.This channel is connecting travellers with locals as well as promoting the hidden gems around the world. It also shares hundreds of attractions, activities, restaurants, food markets, bakeries that you won’t want to miss. People can reach out and be featured in their posts too.
- Contiki mainly inspires young travellers. This channel helps explore new cultures and destinations through the people who already have been there.T. It’s a one of a kind experience with diversity. It is a platform for those who are willing to share ideas or experiences and Contiki is more than happy to mention anyone on their feed.
Your own impressions
Both reels and stories on Instagram have a great influence on audiences. Using reels and stories have been a daily routine for people whether that is just sharing sunsets or promoting businesses. In my opinion, stories are much more fun and highly interactive than reels. In stories, people can engage directly as polls can be created, surveys can be conducted and embed links but disappear within 24 hours, however, can be saved as the highlights. Reels, on the other hand, are great for promoting innovation, business and lasts longer. Without any doubt, instagram as a marketing tool also provides limitless opportunities. With the right approachable manner and experiments, it’ll be easier to find the proper way to the brands. Moreover, if all the mentioned guidelines are used wisely and proper actions are taken into consideration, it can have a huge impact on promoting businesses.
Sources
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183585/instagram-number-of-global-users/
https://business.instagram.com/blog/how-to-communicate-effectively-with-
https://buildfire.com/instagram-tips-small-businesses/
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-metrics/
https://www.peppercontent.io/blog/content-that-work-on-instagram/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/325587/instagram-global-age-group/
Hi,
Me as Instagram user was very interesting to read your post. It was good to know how the algorithms work there. Also, I liked that you add some story of Instagram creation in the beginning.
In overall the post was very informative and useful. Thanks.
Hi,
Interesting to see how there is so much more to Instagram stories. It’s my favourite part of Instagram. Very educational post. There are great tutorials linked and inspirational Instagram accounts. Definitely will follow a few of them as they have very fun content.
Hello, thank you for this post! I’m not a current user of Instagram, but I had an idea about it before. It’s nice to see how much has changed. Very good explanations, I finally understood the difference between stories and reels 😀