How Can Instagram Help Develop Your UK Business?

Our latest series is all about helping your business make the most of Instagram marketing. From growing your following to getting creative with your posts, we’re here to help with a content strategy as well as some top tips for maximising engagement and advertising opportunities.

6) Get your own style

Consider creating style guidelines to help you with your captions. For example, you could frequently use a certain hashtag or emoji. On our Instagram page, we love the red double exclamation mark emoji – this is because it attracts attention and the red fits with our Total Merchandise style. You could also use the same filter on every photo. All of this creates uniformity and can also make your brand distinct from other pages.

7) Be real with your engagement

As well as expecting people to engage with your content, your followers probably would like you to engage with some of theirs, too. From following back, to liking, make sure it isn’t a one-sided Instagram relationship. We recommend that you don’t use a robot system to automate your engagement; just comment and like content that is relatable to your brand or that you think is interesting. This increase of engagement on your side to your follower’s content should see an increase in engagement on your own content from your followers.

8) Create a hashtag for your brand

Captions are almost as important as the image on Instagram. You can create your own style by making your own brand hashtag. This could be as simple as using your company name as a hashtag on every image, e.g. #tm or #totalmerchandise, or you could find a hashtag that represents your brand and encourages other people to share photos that fit in with this style. For instance, athletics brand Lululemon encourages users to include the hashtag #thesweatlife in their athletic pictures and it has led to thousands of posts shared with this hashtag from the Lululemon community.

9) Use Instagram stories

Instagram is rivalling Snapchat with its ‘stories’ feature; if you have an Instagram account make sure you utilise them. After all, there is an average of 250 million average daily users of Instagram Stories, so it’s a trend you’ll want to jump on to. You can post attention-grabbing photos and lots of fun content, and feel free to be creative as the content expires after 24 hours.

10) Use influencers

Influencers are huge at the moment. There are even businesses, such as Influencer, whose sole purpose is connecting brands and influencers together! Consider getting in contact with one of these companies or an influencer directly to help you either put together a campaign or let them take over your account for the day with sponsored content. This leads to a huge exposure to the Instagram community, and their fan base will be taking a look at your brand.

We hope these top 10 tips help you with your business Instagram!