With its approximately two billion monthly active users as of January 2024, Instagram continues to be one of the unquestioned heavyweights among social media platforms.
Oriented around photos and videos, Instagram has been supporting brands’ efforts to boost awareness, authority, trust, and – of course – sales among their target audiences, since shortly after the platform’s launch in 2010.
One thing that you might focus on in your organisation’s Instagram marketing efforts, is trying to attract more followers. But if your brand’s follower count on the platform has seemed stagnant for a while, here are some possible ways to change that.
Embrace video, not just still images
You only need to look at the seemingly unstoppable rise of TikTok in recent years, to appreciate that we are firmly in the age of online video marketing. Indeed, Instagram was sufficiently concerned by the threat that it went on to introduce its own short-form video-sharing feature, Reels, in 2020.
Today, Reels feels like such a natural part of Instagram, that it can be easy to forget its “copycat” origins. This feature is intimately connected to Instagram’s algorithm. So, if you want to get more of the right eyeballs on your brand’s offerings, investing time in the creation of top-quality and relevant (and Reels-friendly) video content can be an extremely good idea.
Use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to boost discoverability
There was a time when, if you wanted to discover certain types of content on a given social media platform, you had to look in the site’s “newsfeed”, or perhaps depend on someone using particular hashtags (if the platform in question even supported hashtags).
How times have changed; the biggest social networks have become powerful search engines in their own right, and Instagram is no exception.
Such steps, then, as incorporating potentially relevant keywords into your Instagram handle, profile name, and bio, as well as using alt text to enable the platform to more easily “read” your visual content and serve it to the right human users, could go a long way to boosting your brand’s visibility.
Keep up to date with the most recent Instagram features
You might imagine that a visually focused social media platform that has been around for more than a decade can’t be “that” multilayered or complicated. Sure enough, in terms of day-to-day use of the most basic features, Instagram isn’t overly complicated to get to grips with.
But are you keeping a close eye on the various new features, functionalities, and optimisations that are constantly being introduced to Instagram? Have your properly familiarised yourself with the wealth of both long-established and recently implemented editing tools, filters, and other options?
The chances are that even if you think your brand is doing well with Instagram marketing right now, there will be ways in which it could do even better, helped by the latest features.
To learn more about our knowhow and track record in social media marketing and other forms of digital marketing here at Jumping Spider Media, and how we could assist your brand too, please reach out to us today.