Social media was, for a while, “just for fun”. It was a way to personally express yourself and meet people online. But as it grew in popularity, it became a quick way to become somewhat famous. Soon “stars” rose simply from their online notoriety. Today, social media is a fun means of keeping in touch with friends and family, and it’s fundamental to business.
Not Just For Fun Anymore
From networking to the monitoring of market trends, effective advertisement, and even political advancement, there’s a lot that can be done with social media. Imagine a television, a computer, a billboard, and a radio in one device that can fit in your pocket. That’s the modern smartphone. Basically every echelon of advertisement is available.
If you want your business to have the most impact and reach the most people locally—as well as internationally—you’re going to want a strong social media presence. That presence should be defined by strategic “friend requests” and the like. You want to work with other businesses, and you want to work with potential clients savvy about your business.
Finding Your Social Media Voice
Some social media platforms will end up being more successful in a marketing sense than others. For example, MySpace.com is essentially defunct today. Meanwhile, YouTube and Facebook are still going strong. But Facebook as a platform is waning among younger markets. There is a huge pilgrimage to Instagram going on right now.
This is just one of many reasons brands should use social media technology like Instagram to buff up their visibility. But, again, there must be a strategic approach brought to the table as such social media solutions are employed. Posts must be made at regular intervals, and they must reflect the mindset of potential and existing clients.
One thing you can’t forget is that once you’ve obtained a new subscriber, follower, or “friend” through social media, you can’t just neglect that individual. You need to treat them as a “lead” and check in with them periodically. This can be very difficult to do, but you can design surveys and the like to help expedite the process. You can also design promotions.
Certainly there comes a limit. Eventually you’ll have to just make public posts referencing upgrades, changes, and promotions, as you’ll have just too many followers to manage individually. That said, you may manage certain groups in “batches”.
Getting Followers
If, for example, you ran a car dealership who additionally provided repair services, you might group followers as those who need service, and those looking for new vehicles. But all that is a sort of “future tense” scenario until you’ve obtained such followers. This is going to be the hard part, but it’s also going to be the profitable angle.
If you’re trying to figure out how to gain followers on Instagram, SocialMediaDaily.com points out that: “Photos and images speak volumes—if you like them. Instagram gives you the opportunity to let your images speak for themselves. If you can harness this technique and remain consistent…you will gain relevant fans on Instagram to whom you can market your product or service.”
Sourcing and expanding your followership is key to effective Instagram utility. The linked article in the precedent paragraph gives a number of excellent tips to this end. They include: properly balancing images and text, understanding the psychology of images, advancing unique images, playing on people’s emotions, knowing what to share, and calls to action.
Some additional tips include properly putting text in images (and keeping it from them as necessary), ensuring a description helps explain a given picture, proper employment of hashtags, telling a story with pictures, combining your blog with Instagram, outright purchasing followers, and ensuring you employ multiple social media outlets as well.
Strategic Considerations
If that sounds like a bit of a tall order, don’t worry: it can be. You’ll need dedicated personnel for the best results. That said, the internet today allows unparalleled advantages. You will be able to reach more people more effectively and more expediently via social media.
The best way to be effective with your social media utility is to have some level of organic authenticity suffusing operations. That is to say: not every post has to be about something which brings in sales. Humanize your social media accounts, including your Instagram, Twitter, your Facebook, your Snapchat—you name it, it needs to feel natural.
You’ve got to understand the psychology of your viewers, your “crowd”, your “followers”. One thing that’s nearly unanimous across the board is a general distaste for manipulation. What you don’t want to be is inauthentic. But you also want to give your followers something they can latch onto, something substantive.
They should want to check out your Instagram. There should always be interesting, engaging, relevant content. For a good example, look back at the car dealership referenced earlier. They’ve compartmentalized contacts into those needing service, and those needing to buy a new car.
Now, to affect people on an inspirational/motivational level, they continuously post GoPro videos of vehicles driving off and on the road in desirable locales. They’ve got a ten second clip of a vehicle off-roading near the Grand Canyon and a minute-long clip accompanied by catchy music of a classy car in a classy part of town.
Real Social Media Profiles For Real People
People like to be stimulated. There’s a reason kitschy pop music continuously tops the charts, and it’s not because that music has some objectively qualitative aesthetic quality. It’s because there’s a simple beat, a simple melody, and simple subject matter that’s widely relevant—like relationships, and self-aggrandization.
With your Instagram, you want the same sort of reach, relevance, and impact. But lastly, you want to ensure that whatever you do, it is squarely aimed at your target market. Different markets will be amenable to different means of mobile engagement. Identify what moves your constituency, and work to meet those needs.
Techniques like these will expand your followers and increase your effect in the marketplace. So get out there and see what best works for your Instagram profile. You may be surprised at how effective social media outlets like Instagram can be.
Image from http://commsbusiness.co.uk/news/increased-cloud-adoption-driving-devops-and-containers/