Social Media for Business
Instagram

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Why is Social media Important for Business?


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Social media is important for business due to marketing. Social media had started off as something where people could interact with one another over the internet. People were able to send messages to one another and talk about their thoughts and feelings. If you think about the base of social media, it is an online marketing tool. Users are marketing themselves to other users to gain followers to see the information they are sharing. Social media has evolved into more of a marketing platform for businesses. Today businesses are looking to gain customers through marketing. Social media outlets are allowing businesses to create accounts and purchase advertising space to market their brand. Today 69% of the population is using social media. This makes social media a key component of business marketing. Social media allows the business to connect with customers and create brand awareness. Businesses are able to post promotional information about products, respond to questions, and link customers back to their site using social media.

What is Instagram?


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Instagram is a social media networking program that allows users to share photos and videos from their smartphone. Users upload images and create captions for the image and add hashtags to tag the image to specific groups in Instagram. Users can search for new content in Instagram by searching based on the hashtag. Anyone that has loaded an image or video with the searched hashtag will be brought up in the search. Users can view your profile and follow you to have new posts added to their feed when they log into the application.

History of Instagram


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Instagram was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched on October of 2010. Instagram was initially launched on IOS devices and wasn’t made available for Android devices until April of 2012. Instagram had gained popularity at a fast rate. In one year Instagram had acquired 10 million users. In 2015 over 40 billion photos had been uploaded on Instagram since it launched five years earlier. In 2017 it was reported that Instagram has over 800 million active user accounts. Facebook had caught on to the popularity of Instagram and had purchased the company for one billion dollars in April of 2012.

How businesses can use Instagram to drive business


Instagram had allowed businesses to create marketing profiles starting in 2016 to drive their business. Instagram has also given businesses the option to purchase add space on their platform to further market themselves. Here are some tips to start a business profile and how to set one up.


Step One

Create Account

Create a business profile for your business. To create a business account with Instagram all you have to do is create an account with Instagram at https://business.instagram.com. Here you will create your profile and choose a category type of the business that Instagram allows you to choose from. Once you have walked through the account set up your profile is active.

Step 2

Add Biography

To activate your account, a profile image is needed. It is recommended to use your company logo for the profile picture. Once the profile picture has been uploaded you are able to add a biography to your account. For your biography you want to include details about your business and what your goal is for the business to provide to customers. At the bottom of the biography you will want to include a link to your website. The link should also follow up with an additional link to your website with new promotional material. Updating the links for new promotions will ensure that people will be able to select the promotion link and be forwarded to your site.


Step Three

Create merchant account on Facebook

Since Facebook had purchased Instagram in 2012, they had merged their business features with Facebook. You will be guided through this when you are creating your business account with Instagram. It is important to have the merchant profile set up with Facebook due to allowing you to create price tags associated with the pictures posted. This allows users to click on the shopping bag icon to see the price of the product. If the user selects the image again, they will be forwarded to the product page on your website.


Step Four

Post

To post on Instagram you can either post on a phone or on Instagram’s website. Typically, users are taking photos with their phone and uploading through the app. When creating a post, you will click the plus icon at the bottom of the screen and choose the image. You are then able to add a caption to the photo or video you are posting. While posting it is important to not have the descriptions be to lengthy. You want to have key reasons why the consumer will want to purchase the item you are marketing. You will also want to add categories that users can search by using hashtags at the end of the post. Once a user places a hashtag and types in a topic such as “#jewlery” a drop down of recommended categories will show with how many people are following the category. Choosing the hashtags that pertain to the category will ensure followers.

Step Five

Post

To post on Instagram you can either post on a phone or on Instagram’s website. Typically, users are taking photos with their phone and uploading through the app. When creating a post, you will click the plus icon at the bottom of the screen and choose the image. You are then able to add a caption to the photo or video you are posting. While posting it is important to not have the descriptions be to lengthy. You want to have key reasons why the consumer will want to purchase the item you are marketing. You will also want to add categories that users can search by using hashtags at the end of the post. Once a user places a hashtag and types in a topic such as “#jewlery” a drop down of recommended categories will show with how many people are following the category. Choosing the hashtags that pertain to the category will ensure followers.

How to monitor your traffic

It is important to monitor the traffic of your social media profile to ensure success. Instagram has features that allow you to gain insight to what is working for your profile. There are other programs available such as Hootsuite that give you analytics on your social media posts.

Instagram

Instagram has features for businesses to see how many people are viewing the post based on likes and follows. With having a business account on Instagram, it allows you to see insights after the content is posted. Insights allows you to see the percentage of people that viewed your profile that don’t follow you. The insights give information based on if the profile was accessed through hashtags and how many people viewed the post.
Below I have a demo of what the Insights pannel looks like in Instagram.


Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a website that allows you to link your social media account to their website. The website allows you to see in depth analytics on your social media posts that allow you to see when users are accessing your account and what hashtags are working for you. Hootsuite allows you to manage your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts all in one place. You are able to make one post that goes to all of the accounts that you have linked to Hootsuite. This allows for you to save time and gain knowledge of what hashtags are working for you. Hootsuite offers a free 30-day trial and then costs $9.99 per month. The website allows users to create posts ahead of time and have them post at a later date. This is useful due to finding with the analytics that your posts on social media may not be touched until an earlier or later time in the day. This ensures all posts go out during high traffic times to gain the most traffic.