Instagram for business is a marketing strategy that has proven extremely useful. Want to up your ‘Gram game but do not know where to start? Try these clever apps to boost following and achieve Feed Goals!
Visual Appeal
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or in Instagram’s case, the uploader. So, one must make sure that in order to captivate other users’ eyes, you must make eye-catching visuals. One of the most popular apps in improving photos is VSCO. It is an app that lets you put filters and customize the mood and temperature of your content.
Another app that you can use is Snapseed, where you can manipulate the composition of your photos more and be more succinct in which part you want to highlight and emphasise. After that, why not go over the top with Over. It is an app that lets you be more creative with your photo by layering an inspirational quote on your vacation posts, or other graphics in a plain picture. This could add more character to your photos without being too tacky. Did we forget to mention that these three apps are free in the App Store and Google Play
Scheduling and Planning
In Instagram, prioritising the look of a single photo is not enough, most accounts have now taken it to the next level and considered the cohesiveness of all the photos on one’s feed. Photo editing Apps for Instagram that achieve this uniform effect, can drastically increase the engagement of your followers and the brand retention for brands. Some aim for a more minimalist look for their feed while others opt for pops of colour or even a vintage look. It depends upon your branding, your style and also your skill as a creator.
One tool is Later’s Visual Instagram Planner. This can help you organise and plan your feed ahead before uploading it in Instagram. You just drag and drop your photos to the interface and you can arrange them accordingly. This tool is available on mobile, too.
Contest Goals
One of the techniques in gaining popularity in Instagram is having giveaways. Contests are great user-generated content and can yield to more following. One free web tool that you can use to manage contests is WooBox. When you have a photo, video, or a hashtag contest, WooBox can help you in tracking and approving entries, setting age limits and in choosing the winner. You just connect your Facebook account and it will lead you to a dashboard that can help you organize promos and other events.
Just like WooBox, Wishpond also helps you manage your entries. It helps you to create destination pages for your contest and track the activities of your contest. You can access Wishpond’s sweet tools for $49 per month, but if you are still not sure, you can have a glimpse with their free 14-day trial.
Get your Analytics Right!
With Instagram’s new algorithm, timing is essential. Not only does Instagram look into your engagement stats but also on how quick you get them. So, if you really want to be on top of the Instagram empire, you must know when to post.
Instagram Insights, can help you see when and in what time do your followers go online. It is a free tool for those with business profile, which can provide the demographics of your following. Insights is the chart icon located at the top of your feed. Tap it and you will know who your followers are and when they are active. The next thing that you will need to do is organise it in a spreadsheet and run experiments adhered to your present data.
If you have extra budget, for $19 per month, you can have your own Instagram secretary with Later’s Best Time to Post. After accessing your analytics in Instagram, this tool will instantly estimate when are the best times to post in the platform. All you need to do is enable your calendar settings and the Best Time for post optimisation.
Tell Stories
Instagram Stories is the new playing field in the platform. It is a great way of attracting new followers for when your Story becomes trending, you could be recommended at the Explore feed. One app that can boost your Story-telling is Storeo. It is an exclusive app for iOS users that will slice a full video into 15 seconds each, instead of captivating the whole moment using Instagram’s camera.
Another great app is Boomerang that can help you create funny loops which resemble GIFs. Another iOS exclusive app, Canva, can help you create stunning graphics for your Stories where you can overlay texts, illustrations and other presets in their template collection.
Pixelgarde is a tool that can help you erase personal data when sharing photos and can edit metadata like geotags, dates and others. This is very useful when you want to share old photos in your Stories without scrolling towards the end of your gallery. It’s free but if you want to remove the app’s watermark, you would have to shell out a mere $1.99.
The Power of the Hashtag
What better way to have a wider reach than by using hashtags. One must understand hashtag etiquette and know which ones are relevant to your post and your brand’s image as well. Using generic hashtags can be overcrowded and can bury your post under millions others.
One web tool is Display Purposes, where you can find different niches significant to your branding. Just type in related hashtags to your post and it will display the most commonly used hashtag in that category and weed out spammy hashtags.
Another tool is Focalmark, which is similar to Display Purposes, but ranks the hashtags in accordance to engagement and authenticity. It also has different filtering categories like types, styles, location and what camera you used. Focalmark is free for iOS and Android users.
An Android exclusive, Autohash, is a more visual application. Just upload a photo from your gallery and it automatically lists all possible hashtags based on the objects in your photo.
One way to promote your Instagram account is through sharing it on your website. The more exposure your Instagram has, the more chances of earning more followers. Juicer is a tool you can use to curate all your social media platforms and hashtag handles in your website. They display it creatively, too. After you have created your account in Juicer and added your accounts that you want to appear in your website, you can just copy and paste the embed code to your website or use their WordPress plugin if your site is hosted by WordPress.
Another tool that you can use if your site is hosted by WordPress is Feed Them Social. Just download the WordPress widget and add your accounts, and Feed Them Social will create a shortcode to embed in the HTML of your page.
In another way around, you can also send traffic from your Instagram to your website. You can redirect your followers to your website or other social media accounts with use of Linktree. Once you have associated Linktree to your Instagram account, a link will be sent to you that you can put in your bio section. After that you can customize your Linktree page and arrange the buttons however you want.
Another app is Linkin.bio, which is a destination page that resembles your Instagram profile with a shoppable feed complete with unique links with each of your posts. Since you can only put one URL in your bio, this app works wonders for online stores and multiple brand partnerships. This is free if you have a Later paid plan or at $16 per month in web, iOS or Android.
Following and Engagement
You can also use a new and recently explosively popular option to get more Instagram followers called FireFollow. This tool essentially outsources the very act of link placement, traffic pushing, and many more to generate more followers to your Instagram account. You can also push specific posts and generate more Instagram likes when you have critical posts that revolve around your larger marketing campaign.
To increase your following count, you should analyze more than just your following. How is your content performing? When you analyze the performance of your posts, you would know which type of post gets more engagement and which does not. One tool is SimplyMeasured. It is a tool that you can use to measure the reach of your hashtag campaigns, track your following and monitor the performance of video content. It also creates comparison with your competitors and analyzes which posts have higher engagement rates. SimplyMeasured has a free demo but for more analytics, you must register to a paid account.
One free tool is Later’s Instagram Analytics. With this tool, you can analyze the performance of your posts and which has the most engagement with your followers. It identifies which posts have accumulated the most number of likes and your average likes per post. It also manages your comment count for each post for the last three months.
With these tools, you can assess what types of posts to upload and what your followers like the most. Instagram is now the new Olympics of visuals. And if you want to win the gold, these tools are not just your saving grace but also your creativity and unfailing passion to entertain your followers visually.
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