How to Optimize Your Instagram Account for Growth

Based on active users, Instagram is the second most popular traditional social network, behind Facebook. It is used by the average individual to view the images and videos that friends, famous people, and corporations have posted. Instagram is used by businesses because customers interact with products there ten times more frequently than they do on Facebook or Twitter.

Business accounts can be “boosted” through reasonably priced paid promotion, which ensures audience growth regardless of what you post. Instagram has some business tools to assist businesses to improve their websites and expand on Instagram. It’s crucial to capture the interest of the intended audience if you want to demonstrate Instagram’s capacity for growing followers. Following the guidelines provided below will assist social media marketers to achieve their company goals.

6 Ways to Optimize Your Instagram Account

1. Make sure you have an Instagram Business or Creator profile

Do you remember when everyone on Instagram had the same kind of account by default? Instagram used to be just a silly tool for sharing selfies with duck faces and bad filters. It has developed into a full-fledged advertising platform with powerful marketing capabilities.

The three different account kinds on Instagram are Business, Creator, and Personal accounts, as we already mentioned. A personal account is a typical Instagram account. It’s the account that is automatically created for new users when they join up. The creator account is generally used by celebrities, content creators, photographers, artists, and influencers. Retailers, small enterprises, brands, organisations, and service providers are the main users of business accounts.

You have to switch from a personal account because the Business and creator accounts come with a bunch of extra features and tools that you can use to grow your business. These include Instagram Shopping, Instagram Ads, and Instagram Insights.

You may learn about the demographics of your audience, post impressions, post-performance, and follower growth from the data alone, which is really helpful. Action Buttons can be added to your profile. These enable users to contact you straight from your profile, stop by your store, or make a reservation.

Additionally, you can include a contact button that lets users send you an email, SMS, or direct message on Instagram. Last but not least, Instagram Business/Creator profiles have access to paid advertising opportunities.

2. Optimize your profile for search

Similar to Google, Instagram’s search function returns the most pertinent profiles depending on your search word. According to Instagram, a number of variables, including the accounts you follow and are connected to, affect the search results.

Instagram likes play a significant role in determining relevance and keywords are extremely important. In order to appear in pertinent searches, it helps if you can add keywords to your Instagram profile.

Name and Username. A smart strategy to increase your likelihood of appearing in pertinent searches is to include a primary keyword in your name and username. For instance, see how the search term “interiors” in the image below returns profiles with the term in their username, name, or both. This might not always be possible for usernames since you usually have to stick with your actual brand name. However, you might be able to tinker with the profile name in your bio.

Bio. A wonderful area to include keywords that you want to rank for is in your bio. This area can be used to describe your company using pertinent auxiliary keywords. If you want to target the keyword “salon,” for instance, you might also include auxiliary keywords like “styling,” “makeup,” or “makeovers” to your profile.

Profile Picture. Every individual who views your Instagram page is initially drawn in by your profile photo. Additionally, it will be shown next to each comment and post you contribute. It’s crucial that yours appears fantastic because of this.

It needs to be distinctive and expressive of your company. Aim to have the same profile photo across all of your social media accounts. Your brand’s presence will be strengthened by this consistency.

3. Engage with your community

When using Instagram for business, you shouldn’t make your profile into an unending advertisement. You should become social because Instagram is a social networking site.

It’s crucial to reply to someone when they take the time to talk to you and to demonstrate that you’re paying attention. Building a vibrant community on Instagram can be accomplished by answering comments. You may respond to comments on Instagram posts from within the Buffer platform thanks to its interaction capabilities; you don’t need to type long responses on a small phone screen.

Additionally, engagement prompts are a fantastic method to promote conversation. Try out interactive Instagram Stories stickers like slider rankings, polls, and quizzes.

Use the caption of your posts to pose queries and invite discussion in the comments. Even though it can seem corny, treat it like a typical discussion. How strange would it be if you spoke to someone rather than with them?

Not everything has to come from you just because you’re utilising Instagram for business. A wonderful method to show your fans some love and encourage more people to interact with you is to use user-generated content (UGC), which includes any type of content produced by a fan or contributor. Ask for permission to repost some of the greatest content to your own channels while encouraging your community to share special occasions and interactions they have had with your company on Instagram.

4. Choose the Best Time to Post

Posting at the wrong moment would reduce Instagram engagement. If you post on Instagram when your audience is most active, you will gain more followers.

Spend some time watching, tracking, and analysing Instagram to find the optimum times to post that will draw in viewers. By examining the highest-performing posts from the most recent month’s data, the “Greatest Time to Post feature” automatically determines the seven best times to post. Discover your individual optimal time to post on Instagram because each Instagram account has distinct followers who are located in various time zones. This will improve engagement and the number of followers.

4. Post consistently

Maintaining a consistent publishing schedule makes it easier for you to appear in the timelines of your target audience. Instagram searches for content that is current and pertinent to each person’s interests in order to display them the content they are most likely to love.

The Instagram algorithm continuously analyses each user’s activity and adjusts their timeline as necessary using machine learning. People can’t like what they don’t see, so publishing frequently will increase your visibility in users’ feeds and increase the likelihood that they will interact with you. They’ll see your material on their Instagram feed more frequently the more they engage with it.

To ensure that your account never goes dark if you get busy, you may stay on top of your content by batch-scheduling posts. Plus, scheduling makes it easier to experiment with posting times.

5. Include relevant hashtags

These will make you more visible to Instagram users who are searching and using the discover feature. Do some research and select 5–10 pertinent hashtags to add to the comments box beneath your image. Alternate them and evaluate which benefits your brand the most. Don’t forget that posts with at least one hashtag receive 12.6% more engagement.

On Instagram, it’s also possible to follow hashtags. You can find out what kind of material is regularly featured on a hashtag’s feed or story by following the top hashtags you’ve researched. You can use this to polish your content and increase its exposure through hashtags.

6. Analyze your results

Examining your Instagram analytics on a regular basis is one of the greatest Instagram for business suggestions we can offer you. You must keep track of how your material is doing if you want to grow your following on Instagram, maintain engagement with your audience, and market your brand.

Although only available on mobile, Instagram’s built-in analytics tool, Instagram Insights, is a good place to start. Additionally, you’ll have to open up each post separately to check on important statistics like likes, comments, shares, and saves. You will require third-party applications, such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and others if you want to delve deeper and examine the analytics on a desktop. You can use them to monitor trends, evaluate post-performance, and create unique reports based on the parameters that are most important to you.

Final Thoughts

It’s simple to persuade your pals to like pictures of your upscale brunch or to watch a video of a cute puppy. Although setting up a corporate account is more difficult, 90% of Instagram users follow a number of companies from their personal accounts. While we don’t advocate copying your preferred businesses, you should consider what makes them inspiring and use that as inspiration. Create an Instagram marketing plan that is unique to your business using this inspiration and the advice we’ve provided here.