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Putting your business or brand on social media is no longer an after-thought; social media for business is now a necessity.
What can be confusing, however, is knowing which platform you should focus on.
Facebook? Twitter? Linked In? Pinterest? Snapchat? Instagram?
You can cover all your bases and have a presence on all platforms, but unless you have the resource to give every platform the same amount of effort and maintenance, you’re going to end up with a bunch of pages that look half-assed and unattended. Half-assed isn’t good for business.
If you had to choose one platform, evidence suggests that Instagram is the best choice for your business.
Here are 13 reasons why Instagram is the best social media for business:
Intuitive to product photos: while other social media platforms support visual media, the entire Instagram experience is built around a visual experience. This makes for intuitive product reveals, behind-the-scenes footage, customer experience photos, and other visual forms of advertising.
Easy to connect with influencers: Influencers are people on Instagram who you can use to advertise your product to a specific audience. If you’re a skincare company and come across a beauty guru on Instagram with 15,000 followers, connecting with that person and forming a collaboration is as simple as sending that person a DM or commenting on one of their posts.
And then, there are dedicated services helping connect you with relevant influencers for your business like Heepsy. Heepsy alone offers the chance for you to communicate with over three million Instagram influencers!
Free advertising: Instagram now boasts over 800 million users. While you obviously won’t reach all 800 million users, simply putting your business on Instagram exposes it to people who wouldn’t otherwise see it.
Straightforward user-generated content: on a traditional business website, posting photos from your customers is a process: they have to send the photo in, you have to incorporate it somewhere on your website, etc.
On Instagram, sharing photos/videos of satisfied customers is as simple as using a Regram tool and tagging the original uploader. Weekly uploads of happy customers are a fast way to build social credibility and convince potential followers and customers to give you their business over another business with less social credibility.
Willing customers: consider these three stats:
- 80% of Instagram users follow a business
- 75% of users take action after seeing a post (visiting a website, clicking a website, etc.)
- 60% of users find new products on Instagram
Higher engagement rate compared to other platforms: successful social media for business is all about engagement rate. More people interact/engage with content on Instagram than on any other social media platform. See the tables below:
More striking is that this higher engagement remains true regardless of the number of followers a channel has, with 10m+ follower channels still receiving 6x more attention than other social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
This is good news for businesses as they can expect a high engagement rates from their followers/customers as they continue to scale.
Access to a global audience: 80% of Instagram users are from outside the US. This is great if you’re trying to expand your audience to a global market.
Ability to target people based on their interests: people express their interests on Instagram through hashtags. If you understand what hashtags your target audience is using (learn how to do that by reading this article), you can get your content in front exactly the kind of people who would buy your product or follow your brand.
Ability to target people based on their locations: if you’re a local business, Instagram allows you to target only people located in your area through geotags. If you don’t know how to to do that, you can read this article on Instagram location targeting.
Ability to target people based on their connections to competitors: if you were to go to a competitor and ask for their customer list, they would refuse and kindly ask you to leave their office. That’s because if they gave you their customer list, there would be nothing stopping you from reaching out to their customers and convincing them that your business provide a better product. Well, a list of your competitor’s Instagram followers is the next thing to a customer list, and it’s completely free and available. You can easily reach out to your competitors followers in bulk by using an automation tool like AiGrow.
Product/business feedback: people online aren’t afraid to express their opinion. While this is always a good thing, for aquiring feedback about your business and its services it’s super helpful. Take note of what your followers and customers are saying about you in comments and DMs. An easy way to keep track of this feedback is by using a tool like Hootsuite.
Easy way to stay relevant: showing up in your customer’s feed each and every day is a great way to not be forgotten in the eyes of the public and your customers. It’s also a lot less annoying than getting spammed with emails.
Adds a human element to your business: there’s a reason we do thorough research before we buy something from a company we’re not familiar with. We want to know that there’s someone behind the logo; that our money is going to something we know and trust. Social media for business is no different.
Instagram is a great place to way to show your followers and customers that you are more than just a faceless corporate entity. Simple actions like personalizing your captions, responding to comments and DMs, and posting behind-the scenes footage can be the difference between someone trusting your business enough to buy something and going somewhere else.
If you want to learn how to use other social media channels to advertise your business, read this article.
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If you have the resources, the more social media platforms you can manage for your business the better.
If you’re limited on resources, Instagram is the best social media for business in terms of ROI.
For those looking to accelerate their business success on Instagram, consider using a tool like AiGrow.
With AiGrow, you can:
- target users based on hashtag-use, location, and competitor-connection with automated Likes, comments and DMs
- send, receive, and manage your Instagram DMs completely from your desktop
- automatically send your new followers customized DMs to welcome them to your channel and provide a next-step
- schedule your posts for days, weeks, or month ahead from your desktop
