Instagram boasts 1 billion users with 95 million shares every day. Instagram recognizes reduced attention spans and trades on providing high quality images that scroll by rapidly. Insta users are not shopping for products, rather they are looking for visual stories, experiences or even adventures they can take through your pictures and storytelling. For businesses on Instagram, the challenge is to use pictures to give your followers an experience that involves your product or service. The photo should tell the story, but you will also need to include interesting descriptions of the photo that support the story.
Hashtags
It is important to use #hashtags on Instagram. This allows people to follow the #hashtag to find your story. While it is always fun to create your own #hashtag and test how far you can propel it, Instagram also has #hashtags that exist in the space and that you may be able to attract a new audience simply by including a relevant tag for your business and story. Regardless of whether you invent your own or use ones that others created, #hashtags should help to tell the story.
It’s a Visual Story
Instagram’s constant need for photo storytelling makes it a natural platform to engage with your customers, inviting them to submit their own photos which tell the story of your products or business services. It is important that you stay on top of the general trends or stories of the day you are posting. Incorporate colors, images and textures that put the story into the context of holidays, seasons and current events. Be creative in how you connect your story to your image. Consider images that communicate holidays that are subtle. A festive bow in a child’s hair communicated Christmas for Target. They incorporated the red shopping cart, but otherwise said nothing about the holiday as they told the story they wanted to push that day.