Instagram for Your Brand: The Virtual Billboard for Your #Business

Instagram for Your Brand

Any social network that tops over 100 million users is worth your business’s attention.

With such a high number of users gathered for one basic purpose (to view and share photos), you can be confident that there are both loyal followers of your brand who would engage with your images and the potential to expose your business to a new audience.

 Instagram makes this process easy by focusing on the quick editing and sharing of photos with following, commenting and liking capabilities within the app itself.

The platform is a worthwhile pursuit for any business, but especially for a business that’s part of a photo-friendly genre like floral arrangements, photography or other areas that are visual-intensive. These are the companies that stand to benefit the most from a social network like Instagram, because it allows you to create a virtual billboard with hundreds of little advertisements for your brand.

Social networks take time to manage, but if you’re looking to expand that part of your business (and perhaps you’ve been focusing on something like Pinterest or Etsy for most of your social media efforts), consider adding Instagram as a complimentary traffic generator and marketing tool.

Here are a few more reasons to do so.

1. A picture is worth a Thousand-and-one Words

Statistically, images get a lot more interaction on Facebook than other forms of media, including links and text. If you use Instagram to quickly share photos to your timeline, this can increase engagement significantly and draw attention to your Facebook page.

If you want people to take an interest in your products and your brand, advertising them through an image is likely to be considered more dramatic and attractive to the average user. Instagram lets you do that quickly and in a way that doesn’t seem too sales-pitchy.

Of course, Instagram is much more than a simple way to share interesting images with your audience. It also offers several different types of filters that really make your photo pop, such as the “Lo-fi” filter (which happens to be the filter of choice for 14 percent of brands).

However, to make your images even more eye-catching, there are also plenty of apps you can utilize in addition to your Instagram if you’ve got some extra time on your hands.

2. Promotes Customer Engagement

This is partially contingent upon the following you have before building up your Instagram account. While Instagram can increase your loyal following and bring it new customers, it’s far more effective when it comes to engaging people who are already on board with what you’re doing.

Since people are more likely to engage with images on social media, they’re also more likely to share those images, which will eventually result in new people taking an interest in your company.

Whether the end goal is to sell a product or simply build your brand, Instagram is a safe bet to for getting a higher level of engagement out of a familiar crowd.

Nike is a prime example to follow when it comes to customer engagement as well as product promotion. They give their customers and fans alike the opportunity to not only design their very own pair of running shoes, but share their creation as well via Instagram, Facebook and/or Twitter. And to sweeten the deal, Nike even offers these creators the chance to purchase their masterpieces on their site.

3. Event Promotion

If you’re planning an event, Instagram can be a great way to generate awareness by providing sneak peeks at new products, backstage and behind-the-scenes photos, as well as sharing information about when and where the event is going to be held.

The reason being; you’re going to have an easier time getting someone to look at a photo as opposed to a reading a paragraph of text. Make sure that Instagram plays at least a small role in promoting all of your business’s public events. It not only tells a story to your audience, it shows them as well.

Last year, Toyota launched their campaign #ToyotaGiving to raise funds for community and nonprofit organizations. Making a stop in Chicago, Toyota invited guests to write a statement (on a blackboard) that described what they did to better themselves as well as their own communities. They then encouraged them to share those statements via Instagram and Twitter, using the #ToyotaGiving tag. For every tweet that was tagged in a post, Toyota pledged to donate $2 to a nonprofit partner. By the end of the campaign, over 4,000 posts were generated, and the proceeds went to 11 different organizations.

But they didn’t stop there! The #ToyotaGiving campaign was so successful, that they continued the campaign, supporting several different organizations, with the most recent being After School Matters.

4. Ease and Effectiveness

Nowadays, there are plenty of ways in which you can create exciting, unique and memorable content for your small business. With cameras on smartphones being so powerful now, Instagram might just be one of the best combinations of ease and effectiveness when it comes to social media use.

If you’re looking to boost your social media presence and even improve the engagement on some of your already existing accounts, Instagram lets you do it with a minimal time commitment and provides the added bonus of being able to expand your audience.

A “no-brainer” if there ever was one.