Instagram Marketing
Instagram marketing is how brands use Instagram to connect with their target audience and promote their offerings. It has recently become popular as an exciting way for brands to express their culture, hire new employees, engage with customers and show products in a new light.
Like Facebook and Twitter, everyone who creates an Instagram account has a profile and information. Users can interact with each other by following, unfollowing, sending private messages, commenting or liking photos or videos. The in-app filters and editing options offered by Instagram make the app unique as it is the first app to offer in-app editing in this way.
Instagram users can upload photos and videos to their profiles and edit them with various options. Instagram has introduced dozens of native filters that users can apply to photos. These preset filters add a variety of adjustments including lighting, giving the photo a warm or cool tone, increasing or decreasing saturation, and more. Additionally, users can edit images directly on the platform instead of using a third-party image editor. If they don't create a special filter, they can use Instagram's features for editing various details, brightness, composition, warmth, saturation, sharpness and more.
How to Use Instagram for Business
Marketers have quite a few social media platforms to choose from, each offering different features, opportunities and nuances. Marketing is all about understanding where your audience lives and on which platforms you can reach them.
As Instagram marketing has grown in popularity in recent years, the value is clear. If what we listed above didn't convince you of Instagram's appeal, this: the photo app recently celebrated 1 billion monthly active users. More importantly, these users are incredibly busy, logging more than 60 percent of each day.
Instagram is the key to e-commerce success
With this display format, Instagram has a great opportunity for e-commerce companies to test their products. Whether it's through regular photos, videos or Instagram Stories, millions of businesses know that creating a visual presence on Instagram can greatly increase their e-commerce.
It also happens that Instagram users are more engaged than other social media users. Although the trend of Instagram engagement seems to be declining, the platform continues to generate higher engagement rates for businesses than both Twitter and Facebook.
But Instagram users aren't engaged — they're typically online shoppers. According to a recent study, 72% of Instagram users reported making a purchase decision after viewing clothing, makeup, shoes, and jewelry on Instagram.
The customer mindset makes Instagram users the perfect audience because they are highly focused and convert quickly.
Another reason Instagram is so important is as an e-commerce platform. As we mentioned in the previous chapter, Instagram recently announced a ton of new tools to organize things – and of course there are more! Most of our online shopping experience will soon be available on Instagram, either through links to Instagram Stories or through shoppable Instagram posts.
It's no secret that Instagram dominates when it comes to buying conversation and engagement, where social engagement features are most welcome.
Because of its beauty, Instagram brings new and exciting ways to interact with users: from emoji animations and interactive stories to Instagram captions, the platform knows how to keep conversations busy.
We all know that the key to having an engaged community is relevant, honest conversations.
To increase engagement, you can use Instagram Story features like question stickers – which can help you find out what your followers think about your brand.
