Want to increase your exposure on Instagram?

If you are using Instagram to promote your business and want to increase your exposure and engagement , don't miss this article!

#1: Embrace the Hashtag

Descriptive hashtags on Instagram will help expose your content to more people. This will lead to more engagement and ultimately grow your followers.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, hashtags are short, descriptive keywords, preceded by the hash sign (#), which enable users to find content they’re looking for with a simple click. Relevant hashtags in posts help create a dialogue between your business and other users.

Hashtags are an excellent way to improve engagement on Instagram posts, since they help interested people find your content.

There are a number of things you can do with hashtags to get the ball rolling on Instagram.

First of all, add hashtags relevant to your industry or niche to every post your business makes on Instagram. Remember, you can use as many hashtags as you want, which will help you attract a wider audience. Note: Research has found even small accounts that use 11 or more hashtags receive an average of 77.6 interactions.

So if you’re an online retailer specializing in women’s clothes, include the hashtag #womensfashion, among others, in your photo description. This will help users find inspiration, as well as help you land more followers, improve brand awareness and increase sales.

When you add relevant hashtags to your posts, you make it easy for users interested in your niche to find them.

Plus, spend some time commenting on relevant photos from other Instagram users with a hashtag you’re targeting. Your brand will be exposed to users who are already interested in that specific hashtag, which will also help increase followers and engagement. There are a few more things you can do to get the most out of hashtags.

First, be as specific as possible when choosing your hashtags. This will help your brand connect with other like-minded users on Instagram. You’ll have a much better chance of converting them, since they’re highly targeted prospects.

Also, be relevant. Make sure you use applicable hashtags on your posts, so people who are interested in what you do are able to find you.

Finally, keep your eyes open. Pay attention to which hashtags other users are including on their photos. You may find a new, popular hashtag that will help you reach more people.

#2: Engage With Your Community

To make the most of your efforts on Instagram, it’s vital to spend time engaging with your community and other users on the platform.

See what photos and hashtags attract the most comments and likes, and jump on the bandwagon. You can also re-post exceptional images from your followers.

Posting your own content isn’t enough. To be successful on Instagram, your business must engage with other users and their content.

Also, determine where people from your target demographic hang out. Find out which accounts they follow and then engage with them. Comment on their photos and like their posts. Remember to add value with your comments and don’t be spammy.

If you’ve done your research and interact with the right people, these users are likely to engage with your brand and follow your account. Your brand will also start to show up on their followers’ radar.

#3: Launch a Contest

The prospect of getting something for nothing has always been alluring in the world of marketing. Use the reach and popularity of your Instagram account to host competitions and attract more followers. An Instagram contest is a great way to drum up excitement and get people talking about your brand.

You can use Instagram contests to engage your current followers and attract new ones. Image: Place it.

Whether you go with a tag, hashtag, like to win, share or other type of promotion, your Instagram contest will certainly be a hit.

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Hootsuite & Instagram: Better Together

Community managers, rejoice! Starting today August 5, all Hootsuite users can post and schedule Instagram through the social-media management tool.

In a major addition for the social media management platform, Hootsuite has announced that Instagram will now be supported by the Hoostuite dashboard. While users have been able to monitor and track Instagram content for some time via third-party apps, Instagram will now be fully integrated into the Hootsuite experience, enabling users to schedule and publish Instagram content, monitor and engage with Instagram audiences and create team workflows – including shared access with team members - all from the one platform.

The ability to schedule Instagram content will be a major boost for Hootsuite users. Users of Sprout Social, a rival social media management tool, have been able to monitor and comment on Instagram content for the last month or so, though Sprout doesn’t allow users to publish content via the platform. Instagram’s integration with Hootsuite will enable posting functionality – users will be able to edit and schedule content alongside their regular networks within the dashboard, providing content oversight and ease of use. In the official release, Hootsuite notes that Instagram integration has been one of their most requested features for some time.

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Fuel Your Instagram Addiction

If you are an Instagram addict, here you have 5 free apps to tell creative stories.

Instagram is more than just an app for photo filters, it’s a community to share stories. And sometimes, the app’s built-in features aren’t good enough to tell the story you want to. But there are some innovative third-party apps that let you get creative with Instagram.

Third-party apps for Instagram are nothing new. In fact, some Instagram clients are better than the official app. Of course, you will still have to use the official app to upload your images, but these third-party apps let you do some cool edits to them before uploading. From adding captions to a Flipbook-like collection of photos, this is how you can tell a better story on the world’s most popular social photo community.

Yes, Instagram has captions. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But haven’t you sometimes felt like just adding text right on your image? It’s one of the best ways to tell a story without taking the eye away from the photo itself. Quick is the easiest way to do that.

Available for free on Android and iOS, all you need to do is select an image from your gallery or take a new photo with your camera. Quick will show you a text field that you can tap to edit. There’s a wide variety of typography to choose from, and you can customize the color too. Once you’re done, save it and share it.

It’s not the most powerful photo editor around, but the focus here is simplicity. And it couldn’t be simpler.

Instagram lets you upload video clips of up to 15 seconds, but sometimes, that isn’t enough to convey the full story. Which is why Instagram Hyperlapse fits more into 15 seconds by speeding up your footage.

Basically, the Hyperlapse app takes a video, which is artificially stabilized and sped up, from 1x to 12x. At any point, you can see the actual footage time as well as how much it would be in sped-up time.

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Vacation Time...Turn Off Your Social Media And Cell Phone Addiction

Technology is a filter that removes you from present experiences. We see it all the time at dinner, when friends have to remember to put their phones down and actually talk to each other. We see it on trains and buses, when people miss their stops because they’re absorbed in their devices, or fail to connect to their surroundings because they’ve got their earbuds in. They may as well be somewhere else.

I’m be the first to admit a social media and cell phone addiction. In part, I blame my job. As a blogger and a writer, I tweet articles and blog posts. I Instagram almost daily, making sure my photos have a certain aesthetic and that they’re on brand. It’s all stupid of course, but it’s unfortunately necessary. And I’m grateful for this five-inch rectangle of magic, because it gave me a career. Simple as that.

But when I go on vacation, I hate the stupid thing. I recently came back from a trip to San Francisco with my cousin. In a new city for the first time, our devices were absolutely essential. We needed bus schedules and stop information, we needed a way to contact friends, get Ubers, split the check after dinner, call our families back home. Cell phones make everything effortless. I love them for that.

We created a hashtag before we left so we could post our pictures and show the world what we were doing, and then have a little cyberpage where our photos would be organized. Whenever we saw something beautiful, breathtaking, or new, we took photos of each other posed in front of the thing, and then sent them to each other. I Instagrammed mine, she hers. I spent time choosing filters. She asked me, “What should the caption be?” We let our food grow cold while we got the perfect angle for the #innout hashtag.

And then for the tacos. And the Golden Gate Bridge. Don’t get me wrong: photos are the absolute best way to remember a vacation and I carry along a DSLR wherever I travel. But social media is different.

There’s a feeling that we’re enjoying ourselves for others: that we need the appreciation, acceptance and even jealousy of other people to fully round out our vacation experience. The phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” seems to apply here! So we take photos of stuff—everything we see—and then spend more minutes editing and filtering and ‘gramming the photo than looking at the actual thing in real life.

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