Social Media Week

Instagram is one social network platform that has shown resilience in the face of competition from other networking sites like Twitter, Snapchat, and even its new owners, Facebook. Perhaps more impressive is when it overtook Twitter with its 300 million monthly active users.

Now that’s engagement you do not want to miss out on – whether for your personal or business brand!

 

That said, here are 5 tips to win big on Instagram:

1. Be Human. It’s all about you

People love to look at people so share photos of people on your Instagram account. For your personal account, share photos of you and your friends, family, and moments that you are having, while for your business account share photos of you, your team – at the workplace, at meetings, and other moments shared while at work.

Photos of only (abstract) things, quotes, etc can be tiring for viewers who come to your account to know about you.

 

2. Tag ‘em up!

One feature that can help increase engagement on your Instagram posting is the ‘Tag’ feature. Unlike Twitter that allows you to tag only 10 people, you can tag up to 30people on Instagram. Doing this notifies them and they are more likely to like, comment, or repost such a post.

 

3. The art of Hashtag-ing

This is one is quite tricky as we often get to easily abuse it. You don’t want to put one post and the caption is made up of 20 hashtags (even if you’re allowed to use up to 30) both related and non-related to the post.

My advice will be to:

• Use Key related hashtags – do a quick search to see the reach of one you’re uncertain of before using it. The more porpular an hashtag is the easier it is to find and engage with. For example a photo of you on vacation can have: #travel #holiday #happy
• Get on Periodical hashtags – These are those that get repeated on a weekly or seasonal basis such as: #wcw #mcm #throwbackthursday #tbt #followfriday #flashbackfriday etc. Two important things to note here are: if your brand can afford to do this and if you can be consistent.
• Temporary Comment hashtags – Just to have a neat account you can post with a short copy with one or two hashtags and then add a whole trail of hashtags in the comment box to get the engagement up and then delete; you can also reactivate old posts for engagement this way.

 

Extra – Tips and Tricks of the Instagram

 

4. Get Squared

One problem Instagram users usually face is how to get photos they’ve taken outside the app to site will without cropping (that takes away from the post). There are a few apps that can help solve this problem as they convert any photo into a square by adding either vertical or horizontal layers on opposite ends. One of such app is Square Instapic available on the Play Store and App Store.

 

5. Embed Your Photos

Republishing content is one pro-strategy to take your social media game to the next level. While Instagram allows you to publish your post on other social networks such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter (URL only), you can take it one step further using the ‘embed’ feature. This allows you fetch the codes that can be embedded on your website or blog. Why do this? The embedded Instagram post allows for a level of engagement including the ability for (signed in) users to Like and Follow your account.

Welcome to #travelbay. The most social and mobile way to #travel. Where would you like to visit next?

A photo posted by Travel Bay (@travelbayhq) on Oct 13, 2014 at 11:49pm PDT

SEE ALSO: 5 Pro-Tips To Up Your Twitter Game