So you’re ready to dive into sharing exciting content with the world? Instagram is the right choice for virtually every business. Instagram lends itself heavily towards recently posted content, so keep in mind that you’ll want to dedicate resources to posting consistently when you get started.

The process is relatively similar if you already have a personal account but keep reading because there are a few differences in setting up a business account. If you don’t already have a personal account, you’ll need to download the app on your mobile device.

• The App Store
• Google Play Store

While it’s possible to view content on the actual website, you won’t be able to upload anything via your desktop. Instagram is designed for mobile use.

Setting Up Your Instagram Account

Once you’ve downloaded and opened the app, Instagram will be present you with two choices:

• Signing up by phone or email
• Logging in with Facebook

Choose the first option to ensure your profile isn’t linked to any personal accounts. Make sure you use the business email or phone number you’re commonly using for talking with customers. Next, it’s time to start entering your account details.

When entering your “full name,” make sure you’re using your business name — not your actual name. This way, you’ll be able to start building brand awareness. This name will be displayed on your profile for everyone to see. 

The username itself will be what follows the “@” symbol.

If you can’t use your business name as your username because it’s taken, try to keep the name as close as possible to your business name. For example, use the first part of your business name and indicate what you do. Don’t stress it, though, because you can always change your username later.

Optimizing Your Instagram Account

Fortunately, you’ve already made a great choice in terms of optimizing by choosing a business account. Instagram allows business accounts to include a contact button for followers to message the owner via direct message, SMS, or email. Instagram also provides business accounts to “boost” content with a few clicks.

Once you’ve got your business account set up, it’s time to fill in the details. Choose the right profile picture, such as a logo or other familiar image, to start optimizing your profile. Keep in mind that the app automatically crops profile photos into a circle. If you need to work with a designer to ensure your logo fits appropriately, do so.

Your profile photo is a massive part of making an excellent first impression on new visitors. If you choose not to use your logo, make sure your profile photo is consistent with your other branding and marketing. The next step is writing your bio. There is a 150-character maximum, so keep it brief.

Don’t include keywords or hashtags here because bios aren’t searchable. However, if you have a specific hashtag associated with your brand, encourage visitors to use it. If you have a website, make sure you include a clickable URL to help drive traffic to that website. Use a tool like Bitly to keep the URL shorter and less cluttered.

This will also let you track how many website visitors were referred through Instagram — an essential factor to consider, especially if you’re putting money into your business account in the form of paid or boosted ads. 

Whenever possible, include some info about why people should follow you. What can they expect to see?

This is particularly important when creating an entirely new business account because you likely don’t have very many posts made. If you ever need to edit your bio, click “edit profile” to do so.

Managing Your Instagram Settings

Once you’ve optimized your profile, it’s time to look at your account settings. Visit your profile and click on the three stacked lines in the right-hand corner. Once you’re there, click on settings. This is where you’re able to make changes in terms of your password, notifications, and other vital elements. There are a few settings you should look at right away:

Story Settings

Story settings let you manage who can see and reply to any stories you post. It’s highly encouraged to allow followers to see and respond to all of your stories, as this will increase engagement and enable you to convert some visitors into customers.

Private Account

This setting allows you to choose between a public or a private account. You will automatically have a public profile, and if you’re looking to increase brand awareness, don’t change it to private.

Switch to Business Profile

Instagram allows you to identify your profile as a business profile — gaining access to in-depth insights and the ability to promote content. When you’re switching to a business profile, you’ll need a Facebook business page. Log into Facebook and make sure you’ve enabled Instagram to manage your Pages.

Once you’ve done this, select a Facebook page to connect with your Instagram page. Instagram will start pulling information over from Facebook for you to edit. Take care of this and you’re be ready to start leveraging the power of your Instagram business profile!

Comments

The comments section is handy if you hide comments with specific phrases or keywords. For example, if you keep getting spam mentioning a competitor you can hide words and phrases they frequently use in their attacks.

Adding Additional Instagram Accounts

Instagram includes a feature that allows you to add five additional accounts. The best part? You don’t have to log in and out to change over accounts. You can also have several persons logged in an account all at the same time. This is great for anyone working with a marketing manager to handle the account. Click add account and enter the information for each additional account you have.

Editing Photos and Adding Filters

If you’re looking to spice up your feed, don’t forget to add filters and make some edits to your photos and videos! The process of editing and adding filters only takes a couple of minutes, so it’s well worth the effort. Instagram offers a range of built-in tools and filters to make your photos look phenomenal without much effort or time. First, let’s focus on adding filters and editing photos.

Start with a good photo that has proper lighting and composition. Remember, you always want to take quality photos. Sure, Instagram likes when you post often, but the quality is equally, if not more important. There’s a variety of apps available to help you edit your photos, including:

• Snapseed
• VSCO
• And much more
  

These will allow you to apply effects and adjust brightness, contrast, and saturation. Keep in mind, whenever you’re uploading a photo to the app, it’ll automatically crop your photo into a square. This is important to consider when you’re taking pictures. After you’ve spent some time editing, choose a filter. Don’t pick anything that makes your photo unrecognizable, but choose one that makes it look a little nicer.

If your photo is dull or lacks brightness, try adjusting your photo lux. This balances the exposure and provides a bit more illumination to make your image more vibrant. Once you’re done, hit next and publish!

Now onto videos. Instagram lets you upload videos that are one minute or less in length. Of course, you can opt to use professional editing tools, such as Splice, that enable you to cut together multiple clips — adding titles, music, and other exciting features.

Boomerangs, a separate feature, allow you to put a spin on traditional videos — using bursts of photos to create a short video that makes a huge impact. Tap the camera icon to open the in-app camera, then switch from the standard setting to the first setting to the right to access this.

How to Write Instagram Captions

You might see celebrities or other popular accounts post images without any captions, and while they still receive thousands of comments and likes, that’s not the case for most businesses. You need an excellent caption to increase engagement and bring a little context back into your post. So how do you write Instagram captions?

Elicit Emotion

You want to leave a lasting impression on your audience. That’s why it’s crucial to take some time to think before writing your caption. You can even run it by a couple of friends to see what they think. Keep in mind, the algorithm will show your post more if you have a high number of likes and comments.

Feel Free to Write at Length!

I know everyone will tell you to keep it short, but at Lee Stephens, we realized that the posts with the highest conversion rates and the highest amount of engagement are the post in which we have a lot to say. Weird right? It’s the chicken and the egg problem. We’re not sure if people engage with those posts the most because the imagery is awesome and they want to know more, or they like reading long-form copy. I believe it’s a combination of the two with a lean toward long-form text being a good thing.

Always Add a Call-To-Action

In marketing, it’s crucial to use a call-to-action on any given content. This extends to social media. You can either direct your audience to your bio link or ask them a question/tell them to comment with an opinion. This will give you more comments than you would otherwise receive.

Aligning Business Goals with Instagram

Before posting tons of images and videos, think about what you’re looking to achieve while using the app. Some of the most common objectives include but aren’t limited to:

• Increasing Brand Awareness
• Building an Online Community
• Driving Traffic to a Website
• Announcing Upcoming Events
• Boosting Product or Service Purchases
• Creating Relationships with Influencers

Think about whom your target audience includes. Do you want to target young men and women in their 20s? Or are you looking for people who are getting ready to retire? Maybe you’re looking to target people who work in a specific industry? 

It all depends on what you’re looking to achieve. Instagram focuses on visual sharing — creating a whole host of opportunities. You’ll want to figure out your target audience quickly as this is one of the most critical aspects of your strategy.

While posting content, remember always to keep your strategy top of mind. Your objectives should guide you by taking photos or videos, creating captions, and choosing your target market before you publish your ads if you’re doing any paid advertising.

Brand Awareness

What exactly is brand awareness? What does it mean to create brand awareness? Starbucks is a great example. You’ve probably met someone who goes there at least once a day and doesn’t enjoy coffee anywhere else, haven’t you? This is what brand awareness does. It makes your product or service essential to consumers — ensuring they return to your company again and again.

Brand awareness is essential because it keeps people familiar with you. Companies with high brand awareness are often known as “popular” because it’s true. Everyone knows and loves them. When it comes to marketing, creating brand awareness is invaluable for:

• Growing Customer Base
• Achieving a Greater Social Impact
• Improving Ability to Expand Product Extensions
• Enhancing Trust in the Marketplace

The last point — enhancing trust in the marketplace — is essential because consumers rely on research and word-of-mouth before they can trust a brand enough to purchase their products and services. Brand awareness establishes trust — helping you create and maintain relationships with consumers has never been easier.

So how do you build brand awareness with Instagram? It’s not going to happen in a week, or even a few months. Brand awareness takes a lot of time and effort to build your audience. You can’t expect to run a few social media ads and get results. You can, however, expect to make a few sales. Brand awareness is about creating an image of your company that people will remember.

• Be Personable – Whenever possible, insert some personality into your posts on social media, especially Instagram. People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Pay attention to your audience and what gets them excited. Build your brand based on this and aspects of your personality, and you’ll notice a huge impact.
• Keep Sociability in Mind – As mentioned above, people do business with people they know, like, and trust. This means you have to act as more than the company owner. Be accessible. People want their questions answered and their problems solved. Post things that aren’t directly related to your products and take the time to interact with your audience.
• Experiment with Storytelling – Similar to being personable, storytelling gives your audience something to connect to — humanizing your brand alongside your products. Keep your story truthful, whether you’re talking about the biography of your founder or what made you start your business in the first place. Everyone loves a good, authentic story.
• Provide Valuable Content – Provide valuable content that your audience can leverage in their day-to-day life. If you’re a clothing company, offer a free guide on pair outfits for casual business settings. If you’re a cleaning company, offer a free checklist on handling spring cleaning. This will make it easy for consumers to share and like your posts.

Engagement

Engagement is one of the most important social media metrics. But does engagement guarantee sales? High engagement doesn’t guarantee sales on its own. However, engagement does help build brand awareness, which, over time, will increase your sales. It’s easy to measure engagement in the form of likes, shares, and comments.

A healthy engagement rate is crucial to growing your account. This should be one of your priorities while you’re posting content on Instagram. But how do you increase engagement, significantly when it’s constantly fluctuating alongside algorithm changes? It might be difficult to maintain engagement, but here are a few ways to boost it:

• Engage with Similar Accounts – Go through Instagram to find a few similar accounts in your industry or niche daily. Before you post a photo or video, take some time to look at what others are posting. Spend a few moments each day liking or commenting on their content, and you’ll usually find they’ll do the same for you.
• Be Strategic with Your Hashtags – Try to use a mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords. Why? Short-tail keywords typically have more posts/people searching for them, but long-tail keywords usually have people interested in searching for them. There are benefits to both, and it’s vital to include both in your strategy.
• Post Photos of People, Including Yourself – Photos of people get approximately 38% more likes than photos without people. It’s important to post photos of people, including yourself, to increase engagement while also remaining personable to your audience. It doesn’t matter what your product or service is. There’s always a way to weave people into your strategy.

Conversion

Once you’ve started to increase engagement rates, it’s time to consider converting some of the people who are engaging with your posts. So how do you do that? First and foremost, consider how users consume content on the app. They’re likely sitting down scrolling through tons of different images and videos. When it comes to conversion, it’s all about standing out.

Your content will look similar to others if you’re using built-in filters and editing tools. Try to use some different tools to help boost conversion rate as you make your content stand out from the rest:

• GIPHY Cam – What’s better than a good GIF? Not much. They’re growing in popularity for a reason. This app is available for iOS and Android. You’re able to record content and create your GIFs right in the app. You can even add effects to help make them a bit more noticeable and striking.
• Perfect Video – Perfect Video is a user-friendly app that allows you to perform video editing, including trimming clips or merging multiple videos into one. The features are much more advanced compared to Instagram’s built-in features. You can even add subtitles or watermarks as part of your branding strategy.
• Autohash – Autohash is used for generating hashtags for the content shared on Instagram. The tool works by scanning the image and automatically generating the appropriate hashtags. The app even sorts them by popularity in different categories; helping you get the maximum visibility for every post.