Market With Instagram

Chapter five of Essentials of Social Media Marketing is all about Instagram. Instagram has 1.22 billion+ active users, mostly younger people and slightly more females than males. It launched business profiles in 2016 to allow businesses to share their products and market on the app. These business profiles allow for a username, website, profile picture, bio, and special business profile features. The Instagram professional dashboard gives businesses access to account performance, insights, promotions, branded content approval, shopping, and saved replies. 

There is much similar visual content that Instagram shares with other platforms such as Facebook. These include photos, videos, hashtags, comments, likes, captions, and links. All of these are useful when marketing to an audience and keeping your business up to par. Additionally, Instagram has things like Instagram shops, reels, lives, stories, and even TV. These interactive portions of Instagram aid in spreading the image of a business. 

Influencers are a huge part of marketing a business. They can be seen as a strategy played by many businesses on Instagram. A business will hire a famous influencer to show off its products in order to get a larger audience. This is very common on Instagram specifically. 

Instagram uses similar tactics as Facebook and other platforms when it comes to advertising. Using hashtags, posting at optimal times, posting visually appealing content, and engaging with the audience are all examples of these tactics. 

In response to COVID-19, Instagram added many features to accommodate businesses and users of the platform. For example, they added Instagram Shops for businesses to sell online during the lockdown. They only allowed credible sources to post about the situations with COVID-19 to prevent false information from being spread. They even added a notice at the top of the page for educational information on the virus. 

Do you use Instagram? Do you use it for personal or business reasons? Are you supportive of any small or large businesses on Instagram?