Instagram is undoubtedly one of the most popular and powerful social media platforms currently. It not only allows people to share interesting photographs with other users but also makes a perfect and effective way to push your personal brand and business. The only question you could be asking is how to promote my Instagram account. Well, read along.

To begin, the effectiveness of your Instagram account hugely relies on how well you promote your profile. Luckily, various tips and tricks can ease this. Simply put, begin by creating an active profile, post interesting and intriguing content and use the right method to enhance your profile’s exposure for a successful Instagram profile.

This module will discuss everything about promoting your Instagram account through various methods including shout outs. This is such an intimidating process that can be quite hard to understand. So many people shout outing other accounts and some of them paying for shoutouts.

However, before diving into this, it is important if we outlined some of the basics of building up your Instagram profile.

 

1. Pick the Right Content

Are you wondering what your first step should be after completing your Instagram profile setup? Well, if you guessed content, you are right. When it comes to exemplary social media marketing, content is king. Picking the right content is perhaps a perfect answer to those seeking methods on how to promote my instagram account. This means that regardless of what kind of business you are running online, you need to focus on the creation of quality content that suits your audience.

 

2. Design a Strong Visual Style

You would like to think of Instagram as a digital magazine. This means that you can post content that share similar style and vibe. Through this, you can stand out in the feeds and Instagrammers will instantly recognize you.

You can achieve this through either of the following simple tricks. For photos, you can post pictures of the same subject, crop images in the same way or use the same filter and color theme in your photos. If your Instagram brand has a visual language, ensure that you bring all the aspects of your business look and feel to the folds of Instagram’s pages.

By doing this, your followers and potential customers will get a clear idea of your brands identity. It is also a good way of building and establishing an ambience for your developing business.

 

3. Professionally Showcase Your Brand Personality

If you need to promote your Instagram account, the first thing should be creating a clear distinction between your business account and personal account. The best place to start is optimizing your Instagram account to focus on the audience and not just the product.

This implies that selfies, travel photos, friends groups and other petty stuff should not appear anywhere in your Instagram business account. On the other hand, your brand’s Instagram account shouldn’t be solely full of products.

You can try Polaroid as it does an excellent job in separating the business from personal accounts. It feeds interesting content that overly invites both newcomers and fans alike to the accounts.

 

4. Make use of hashtags

With thousands of pictures being published every minute in Instagram, losing your image amongst the crowd is simple. This makes it hard for potential followers to come across your post. This is where hashtags come in handy.

As a rule of thumb, hashtags are a great way of enhancing discovery on Instagram. Regardless of whether you want to increase visibility or find exactly what you are looking for, using hashtags is the best way to undertake this.

The power of hashtags can be grabbed by adding some as descriptions of your picture. However, before doing this blindly, there are some slight rules to follow. For instance, don’t blindly use hashtags on willy-nilly. Ensure that they are brand related. That said, it is prudent to continually search for the newest hashtags in your business fold.

Instagram hashtags are either branded or standard. Using a combination of both is a good way to track engagement. You should also remember to monitor hashtags that your online business competitors use. This could be the best way of discovering new ways to reach your new potential customers.

 

Adding Hashtags To Your Instagram Post

Hashtags can be included in your post as either captions or comments. This will make your post discoverable on the similar or corresponding hashtag page. Follow the following steps to update a post with a hashtag.

• Take or upload a photo or video in your Instagram account
• Choose whether or not to add some filter or other editing options
• Tap okay to share. This will upload the photo in your account.
• Tap the three dots in the top right corner of the screen and select edit
• Add your planned list of hashtags.
• You can also do this by tapping on the speech bubble under the photo and typing hashtags as comments.

 

How To Use Hashtags

Whereas using hashtags is becoming a common norm in every social media network, there are some slight hashtag dos and don’ts that Instagram users should be aware of when anticipating to grow their Instagram accounts. Well, below are some guides as to the use of hashtags.

Do be specific when using the hashtags

When anticipating to grow your Instagram account, you should try and hone in a passionate community that shares similar interest with you. The more specific you get with your hashtags, the more it reaches your targeted audience, which directly translates to better engagement. If you haven’t developed your own business hashtag, you can find one or two that fits the photo.

For instance, if you are looking to promote your new baby products Instagram account, instead of using #parents, you can opt for #newmom. The first hashtag will be general to all parents with children of all ages while the second will be specific to your target customer, mothers of newborns.

 

Do use relevant, unbranded hashtags

Brand hashtags shouldn’t mention your brand name but represent your brand and what you stand for.

For instance, destination British Columbia created a hashtag #exploreBC. This tourism company uses this hashtag to share scenic photos of the Canadian province taken by employees and community. Seeing such photos from regular people on the official Destination British Columbia account prompted more followers to embrace the hashtag in sharing their own photos.

As a result, the company created a rapidly growing movement that supplies them with aesthetic, follower-generated content for their social media accounts.

 

Don’t go long or too clever with hashtags

If you are creating a branded hashtag, try to keep it short and sweet. Certainly, no Instagram user will be willing to type a hashtag with many characters. Besides, you don’t want to be too clever and offbeat when creating your Instagram hashtag.

Hashtags are supposed to make everything easier to find and engage. Long and complicated hashtags can be quite arduous. Therefore, try shortening your hashtag. If for example you want to use something like #avocadotoast, try something shorter like #avotoast.

 

Don’t have more hashtags than words

You shouldn’t even come close. Various social media users often make a mistake of using excessive number of hashtags. However, Instagram users need to maintain their hashtag use within the required limit of 30. Certainly, you shouldn’t use 30 hashtags on a single post. Even 5 are quite a lot. Focus on being specific.

 

Don’t hashtag everything

Hashtags, for sure, make your content discoverable to a wider audience. However, it is a fact that not everything you produce is going to fit that category. Therefore, if you post anything that isn’t adding any value to the wider conversation, it is prudent to post it hashtag off.

 

Tips To Help You Find The Right Hashtags

Check out what your competitors are using – by doing this, you can discover some new hashtags to add to your repertoire. Alternatively, you may decide otherwise and search for alternative hashtags to use.

Use hashtags that influential people are using – influential people in Instagram are already established with their target audience. Therefore, try learning from the best.

Consider related hashtags – to do this, browse through various posts containing hashtags that you have had success with. You can possibly find common hashtags that can be applied in future posts.

Use Instagram search function – you can type a keyword that is relatively relevant to your brand into the Instagram’s search bar and select the “Tabs” tab. Instagram will give you the list of all the hashtags with similar keywords as well as the number of posts tagged with it.

Always remember the golden rule of using hashtags; use only hashtags that are relevant to your industry, brand and target audience.

 

5. Encourage Interaction

You shouldn’t be afraid to let Instagram users and other followers know what you want from them. This can be done in several ways. You can use call to action phrases like “double tap if this is how you feel,” “share for share,” shout outs and other modes of interaction.

 

Free S4S (share for shares)

S4S is when somebody shares one of your images or shouts you out in the caption of one of the images. Shout out is one of the important for growth and if you don’t do them it will slow down your growth massively.

How to use S4S?

• Look at the image and the engagement of the image has.
• Share the image (keep in mind not to negotiate S4S)
• Screenshot the image and go to post
• Open up the image
• Write text into the caption and tag people so that the person you have followed will notified that you shout out him and share.
• Crop your hashtag, copy, and paste to the comments.

Remember having share for shares is really a good way to post content one that is not your own. The ability to post content that is proven to provide value with your audience is another benefit of using S4S. Try to do at least 3-4 S4S a day and 40-50 a month.

 

Paid Shout Outs

Native advertising is the page shout out that you paid larger accounts and much bigger than yours. It is very powerful and it’s the new big thing. Some pay a lot of influences or you can give free products. You can essentially share an image to your friends and post it in a certain dollar amount. They have to mention the origin.

As the name suggests, you will have to part with some cash to have somebody with a greater Instagram following to post your image. This will increase your Instagram reach, as the followers of the user will get to know about your products and services.

You should then caption the base shout out. This is where you repost or regram the person’s post without the image but mention you in a caption.

How to negotiate rates for shout outs

Don’t be prepared to just pay for whatever rates somebody gives you. This is because you can find you can always give the price. You need to look for engagement to see if the engagement for that account is healthy. The standard engagement is 2-3 percent, if you have 5% engagement it is very good. If you know that the account is legit, that’s the time that you negotiate the rights.

 

Tools That Help In Promoting Your Instagram Account

Most business accounts often rely on top quality content from search engine optimization to make themselves outstanding. This could be an effective approach for site promotion. However, this isn’t the only way to go as most customers prefer photos and videos as much as great articles.

To gain some advantage and promote your Instagram account, try using the following tools.

 

1. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is the amazing tool that could be used for the Instagram page to rapidly growth of followers. You can use Crowdfire as the web app on the computer and you can use it on your phone. This tool identifies accounts that you may want to follow based on several factors such as those following accounts similar to your venture.

Crowdfire also outlines the reverse situation. It identifies who you are following but isn’t following you back. It is recommended to do 1 day of unfollowing people that don’t follow you back and 3 days of following and repeat all the way following up 7,500 people. Through this way, you can follow and engage with the right accounts only.

How Crowdfire works?

• Go to crowdfire.com
• Sign in with whatever account
• If they going to ask to verify the account (say yes and allow them access)
• Start using Crowdfire. This tool is totally safe

Make sure that before you unfollow your synchronizing is up to date. In this way, you will know the real time that is following and unfollowing you.

 

2. SnapWidget

Most people use their Instagram accounts to promote their websites. However, you can do this the other way round. You can use your website to promote your Instagram account. This is possible by embedding your Instagram posts on your website using the SnapWidget tool.

SnapWidget provides a code for your website that displays your latest Instagram photo uploads. It also offers various ways to display your Instagram feed on your website such as photomaps, slideshows and grid design.

Watch more on how to use SnapWidget to embed your Instagram photo updates in your website here

 

3. KIK messenger

KIK is an instant messaging tool that you can use on your phone. You can download KIK on app store or the Google play store. In this tool, you don’t need to give your email account. You just need to have your username. It is highly recommended to engage people, get out what you put in.

KIK is the easiest way to engage with your followers, stay in the loops and explore more. You don’t require phone numbers, just pick a username and you are good to go.

 

Final Thoughts

As Instagram continues to surge its popularity, growing your brand is of immense importance. You should take a slice of this pie and get active by promoting your Instagram account. The guide outlined above are perfect answers as to how to promote my instagram account. Take the right steps by checking out the tips mentioned above.