Grow Your Website Traffic with Instagram Part 2: How to Use Instagram for Businesses

Instagram is the social media platform with the highest engagement rate. With over one billion monthly active users, it has a user base that continues to grow exponentially. Right now, it's considered the best way to showcase your brand. For this reason, Instagram is a top choice among modern, cost-effective website traffic growth tools.

Our last article summarized the features and benefits of IG for any brand. In Part 2, we share how to use set up your profile and use Instagram's tools to increase your business and your website traffic.

Profile Creation and Optimization

While the basics of creating an Instagram account are pretty straightforward, they should be taken seriously. Unlike other social media platforms that connect people, Instagram is heavily focused on visuals on a visual platform. Photos, videos, and Stories are the core content visuals to showcase your business.

Your profile serves a key role in sealing the deal with followers. For instance, if a user likes your content, they'll consider following you. One of the first things they're going to check out is your profile.

Here are a few things you need to be aware of:

Profile Picture

For an Instagram business page, use your business logo as your profile picture. Make sure it’s appropriately centered and fits the frame well. Also, note that the round-shaped image appears a lot smaller inside the app. Therefore, you may want to use your logo mark only without any text, depending on your logo's design.

Profile Description (Bio)

There is very little text content allowed in the profile, so you need to make the most of it. The character limit for an IG bio is 150. Do your best to come up with something sharp and memorable, but make sure it also fits your brand identity. Be sure to add a link to your website and change your username to something relevant to your brand.

Most importantly, be sure your website is optimized for mobile viewing since Instagram is built for mobile devices. To learn more about the best website builders for mobile, you can find out more here. We recommend top brands like Web.com and GoDaddy, for example.

Header

Your Instagram header consists of your 7 most popular visuals. (These will change automatically based on the number of likes and comments posts get). It’s essential that the images are high quality and touch upon topics related to your business. For instance, showcase your business from multiple angles and focus on its strengths. Try to include details about how your product or service offers added value and differentiates you from your competition.

Also, don’t forget to connect your IG and Facebook accounts. Since they share the same database, you can set up your Instagram posts to appear in your Facebook feed. You can easily also post ads on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager.

Content Generation, Strategy and Exposure

Depending on the business or industry, content strategies can vary. For instance, e-commerce businesses can benefit most from shoppable Instagram posts to drive direct website traffic. These include posts that showcase various products with a (preferably) discounted price.

On the other hand, consultants, agencies, and other service providers can take advantage of creating alluring post captions. These bring attention to the worth of your business by inviting, challenging, or incentivizing potential customers to take part your services.

Depending on the situation, your content generation, strategy, and posting frequency will vary. Be aware that there are a huge number of Instagram users, and that means huge competition. You may want to take an aggressive approach from the start. This can include posting frequently (7 to 10 times a week) and focusing on 2 to 4 topics. In addition, do your best to include at least one video per week.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories is a semi-separate feature to post images and videos with a lifespan of 24 hours. It has 400 million active users as of 2018 and is a great way to get exposure, especially for a new business.

Here are some of the benefits:

• Instagram encourages brands to share lots of Stories uploads since they vanish after 24 hours
• You can make use of your existing Instagram content and repurpose it here
• It helps connect your audience to time-sensitive special events that you may be hosting
• Post quality doesn’t matter as much since their lifespan is short
• Lower quality content helps to humanize your brand and get closer to everyday consumers

Instagram Business Account

Having an Instagram business account brings a lot of utility. For one, business accounts have a “contact” button that takes users to the “Contact Us” page of your website. This helps drive traffic to your site and can increase conversion rates.

Also, you get access to data analytics, known as Insights. This tool quickly lets you scan your efforts and understand how your strategy is working. More specifically, you can access information like recent top posts and lots of data about your followers.

Furthermore, a business profile means you can take advantage of IG ads. This is an advantage over a regular account which only lets you access ads via Facebook. Finally, IG’s new algorithm is changing how and when users see your content. This gives a slight advantage for businesses, which you can use to your advantage.

Growth Tactics

Remember we told you that Instagram is the current "god among social media platforms?” There is a flip side to think about: around 80% of Instagram posts get skipped by users.

If you Google ideas like “how to grow your business with IG”, you might find older articles (that is, from 2017 or earlier). You’ll likely come across suggestions like post consistently, reply to comments quickly, and follow your customers back.

The truth is that those tactics aren’t optional anymore. To stay alive in the online business world, you must take those minimal steps. It's the minimum you must do to get potential customers to move from Instagram and onto your business page, increasing your website traffic.

But to catch the eye of your target audience and make an impression, you’ll need to do more. Here are a few advanced tactics you can use:

Create Your Theme

Your Instagram page feed is what makes your brand. All the top businesses around the globe spend millions of dollars branding. This is branding: combining various shapes, colors, and objects to remind consumers what you represent.

Personalized themes make your content both familiar and memorable for your audience. This can give you the chance to get noticed among the sea of posts. Your theme doesn’t have to be anything complex either. It could be as simple as cropping your images in the same way for every post. Or it could be consistency in colors and filters or even a consistent visual aimed directly at your target audience.

Learn from Your Audience

Good businesses constantly innovate, but great businesses listen to feedback.

Create a schedule and dedicate time to analyze your previous efforts, successes, and failures. Try to find the weak areas and improve them. If something doesn’t work, drop it instead of pushing it. Don’t be afraid to change things up until you find your sweet spot.

Don’t Underestimate Emojis

Everyone loves emojis. They're fun, and they make plain text appear alive and warm while transferring emotions. They do all this without requiring anyone to read a full post. But did you know that emojis are similar to hashtags now? You can actually search posts by emojis.

An Instagram report has shown that over 50% of Instagram posts contain at least one emoji. In fact, they are searchable both in comments and profile names. Moreover, with over 2800 emoji icons to choose from, you have a lot of options to choose from. So you’ll definitely be able to find something to associate with your brand to increase brand recognition.

Combine Growth Tactics to Maximize Results

Remember that like most things in business, growing website traffic is a collective effort. Regardless of which growth tactic works best for you, they can always be improved when used in combination with others. Try analyzing your efforts consistently and make smart use of emojis. At the same time, maintain profile theme consistency and post CTAs.  These tactics all strengthen one another. They help create a snowball effect that can eventually bring more users to your IG page. With the right strategy, this can enhance website traffic with each successive Instagram campaign.

Conclusion

Instagram is a unique, increasingly iconic, and super fast-growing social media platform. It's tops in the industry right now for content and social engagement. Instagram posts come at a minimal cost and effort for the return on your investment. Taking advantage of the business opportunities offered by IG and its features is one of the best business decisions you can make right now.