Instagram Strategies for Small Businesses

Instagram Strategies for Small Businesses

By: Adriana Elmes

Instagram

by Adriana Elmes (Owner of Ashtangasana)

• 1 Billion users • 400 Million Story Views a day • 500 Million daily users • 80% outside of the United States • 72% buy because of what they see posted • People only see 30% of your feed 1 When diving into Instagram we need to think about our approach and why we are using it. What is our intention?

Probably to build your customer base and to keep engaging with existing customers.

be able to determine if what we have curated is actually working! Analytics will also be discussed here.

Setting up a business account is the first step.

Under your company name, write what you do, a short, easy bio of what your business does. This will be one of the first things they see in your profile. This bio has essentially replaced the “business card”.

Who is your Audience? How to Grow Your Audience?

We want to create relationships with out followers so they trust us and as a result decide they might want to work or buy from us. We We need to think about building our need to create this relationship so they get community, developing our brand on our feed, to know you, like you and trust you. So, provide and think about the design of our feed. As we them valuable, interesting, inspiring content and think about intention, feel, look, we need to then your followers will grow organically.

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Find other studios, juice bars, gyms that have yoga and go through their follower list and have the same approach. Engage those followers. The intention is to have them be engaged enough with your comment that they view your profile and then follow you.

You can search for hashtags that connect yoga and your community. Let’s say #grandjunctionyoga.

Create engagement with all these followers.

How to Design Your Feed There are two aspects to consider when planning to develop your Instagram campaign: Creative Strategy and Content Planning. In the back of your mind, the intention is to bring them to your website. So start with developing a community of followers by providing visually appealing and content that interests them and they find useful.

Since this needs to be a visual experience, the aesthetics of your feed is important to consider.

When designing the creative strategy, you need to ask yourself: What does my brand stand for? How can I express that in a photo?

What does my audience care about?

What makes my business unique on Instagram?

As we all wish to grow our followers, how can we do this? Hashtags are important and need to be strategic. When people search via hashtags, Next is the content you chose to showcase. they can find you. So, understand who your auWhat content aligns with my brand? dience is, what they are interested in, what they are looking for and use the appropriate hashtags.

What does my audience want to see?

Hashtags will be discussed later in the article..

What do you want to showcase?

You can find someone with similar content. You How do you get content to post? can then click on their followers. Say hello to their followers, comment on their photos, ask quesYou can repost other’s posts with an app such tions they will likely respond to. You can even inas Repost Instagram App troduce yourself to them which can gain a higher Photograph your own images response rate.

Use Stock images 2

change-up on a feed.

Find or create mini-videos Go live with Instagram’s Stories feature

What do you post? What theme are you showcasing?

Instagram’s Carousel feature Things to consider when designing your “look”. Instagram feeds that are eye catching tend to have a “feel” to the presentation. Images are not just thrown up on the feed. Does the viewer know what you are about, what you do by looking at your feed?

Product/Brand pics

Think about your Style:

Tutorials

In-Action or day to day shots Content you designed Behind the scenes of your business (peek) Inspirational Images of Your Personal Practice

Filters

Stories of Your Journey

Fonts

How do you stand out, as you are competing with professional and amateur photographers, influencers, etc. How do you arrange the feed to make the overall imagery, cohesive?

Styles Feel/Tone Color theme Depth/white space

Think about the main categories or themes of what you are posting. Chose 3-5 themes. For example, you might like pictures of you as business owner so people can place a face to a brand. You can use quotes, your own personal photography, pictures of you doing yoga, and then lastly promos for your studio. Think about what can help showcase your services or products?

Style of images – minimalist, graphic, vibrant Patterns throughout the thread, grid placement You want your feed to have a Look Book feel, like a magazine. You are doing this for your business so it needs to have a professional grade feel. Think about how the images will flow through the feel.

Schedule of Postings Depth will be, where is the subject in the picture?

Are they in a big field or are they close up, tor- Once you have your themes, think about alterso shot, in the photo? You will want to vary this nating the content. Each day chose a theme and throughout your feed. rotate through regularly. Break down your week: Lighting is a wonderful thing to play with. Where do you place shadows in your imagery? Do you have sun shining, allowing for a bright and cheerful feel? If you do mostly indoor shots, lighting can easily be manipulated. You can have soft, diffuse lighting in all your photos to create a feed theme.

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

Spacing is in regards to the focal point. Are they on the left of the picture, right or square in the middle. So vary location of the subject is a nice

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Photo of you doing something at studio Inspirational Repost a quote Yoga picture of you Video with a yoga tip Photo of you doing something at studio Inspirational

And keep rotating through. Think about finding a style or “look” to your thread and keep rotating through your themes. After a period of time, explore your analytics to see what people respond to the most. How are your followers engaging?

create moving imagery to capture attention. You can use a single image with animation added or use multiple photos to create a GIF, slideshow.

Instagram Stories

Throwing posts up each day does not allow for you to curate a visually appealing and a strategized approach. If you have a strategy, it is easiest to work with a scheduling platform that will help you lay out your feed. You can create posts for the week, month, or longer. You can also then see how the feed will lay out from day to day. I have used Later and Hootsuite. With Later, I can create timeslots where my audience is most active throughout my week or month. You then have the ability to click on all your images for let’s say a month, then drag it into the posting box. All the images will self populate in those timeslots. You then need to type in your caption and select your pre-created hashtags and you are finished.

Scheduling your Posts

This is a great way for your audience to get a peek into your day to day behind the scenes of your business. The more personal of a relationship you can create, the more they will trust a complete online stranger. You can gather together and create slideshows and GIFs out of past posts.

Instagram stories are snapshots that expire after 24 hours. Encourages people to look as they do expire. This is where you can show behind the scenes, create call to actions posts, limited time offering, promotions, discounts and testimonials.

Video and GIF files

Hootsuite is similar and can work with other soOn instagram stories, GIF files and videos get sta- cial media platfroms including Facebook, Linketistically longer views and engagement. Creating dIn, Wordpress, Forums, Pintrest, etc. a 1 minute or under video can be a fantastic way to grab people’s attention. Ripl is an easy was to There are other scheduling softwares one can ex-

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plore. They are a time saver and useful in being Algorithm Game for Engagement able to visually see how your feed will feel and be This is essential! To grow your following you need conveyed. to play the algorithm game. The game keeps changing but for right now, the more you engage Analytics with your followers, the better chance they will The analytics will help you see who your audi- see your postings in their thread. ence is, what they respond to. This is also where Tips for engagement you see who is engaging with your posts. Click on your profile image. Go to the upper right icon and • Interact 10 minutes every day with your check out the insights. You have three things to followers explore: Activity, Content and Audience. These • 3% engagement with posts or above, is good are all valuable in determining if your postings are • Reply to followers’ stories engaging your audience.

• Comment on other people’s posts, don’t 5

Instagram management: 70% of hashtags are branded. Posts with just one hashtag receive 12.6% more engagement. Posts with hashtags are 55% more likely to be shared.

just “like” • Post every day Timeframe of Postings

Hashtags are used to categorize or find content around a particular topic or trend. Think about your top topics for your business. Then find hashtags that reflect that.

You need to be observant of when people are looking at your content. In general, people will look at content between 9-3pm. But be cognizant of time zones. You can see in your analytics where the majority of your audience is from. Adjust your postings with your audience’s timezones in mind.

Creating a brand hashtag is effective to tie to your business. For me, using #ashtangasana is a brand hashtag. It can also be a slogan for your compaRelevancy of the Hashtag ny. Find something creative, unique to you. The Hashtags! A few facts from the service Later for other type of hashtags are community hashtags, such as #yogaeverydamnday, #yogaforeveryone, #yogigoddess. Bringing together likeminded individuals around a certain topic.

Look at your audience, competitors, influences, brand leaders and see what hashtags they are posting. Look for hashtags that are under 50,000.

Over 50,000 you will just get lost in the list of postings with that hashtag. You can also look for related hashtags by going into the search bar, then select tags from the dropdown menu. You can see the top hashtags that are related to your own hashtag.

For promoting your studio, always include your town/city in the list of hashtags as you are promoting to your community.

Best practices with Hashtags:

Instagram limits number of hashtags to 30.

Choose a few hashtags that really represent your photo. You don’t want a long slew of hashtags as that can come across as too promotional. You can always add more hashtags into the Comments section. This will be picked up in searches. You can also hide hashtags, in the caption/comment box, tap 123 key. Select return and then enter a bullet point, repeat five times. You hashtags are five lines down now and instagram only shows the first three lines.

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Reiterate...

Character count, keep them brief. Long ones are hard to read, hard to understand.

Tips for engagement

Characters used in hashtags. Do not use spaces or special characters.

• Interact 10 minutes every day with your followers

Save hashtags by category on a spreadsheet. Keep them organized so you can cut and paste them into your postings. Organize them by category.

If in a spreadsheet, you can keep track of comments to see which are most effective.

• 3% engagement with posts or above, is good

Suggested Headings

• Post every day

• Reply to followers’s stories • Comment on other people’s posts, not just “like” • Use a scheduler

Hashtags Category #Posts Date Comments

Recommended Tools: Photo Editing

Video Editing

Scheduling

Content Creation Tools

Snapseed

Continual

Later

Hyperlapse

Retouch

Splice

Hootsuite

Layout

A Color Story

DaVinci Resolve

Planoly

Unfold

by Adriana Elmes (Owner of Ashtangasana) “Supporting the business growth of Yoga Studios.” yogastudiotraining.com

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