Expanding Your Business Beyond Instagram – It Just Makes Sense
Most entrepreneurs are aware that Instagram is one of the prime channels to start building a fabulous and profitable business because it brings 25% more consumer interaction above what some of the other social media stages offer. Saturating the market with your branding is important to gain loyal customers, grow your customer base and building the reputation needed for your business branding. Instagram is awesome and it’s a great beginning however it may be time for you to use it to expand your branding beyond Instagram.
Or maybe you haven’t considered yourself an entrepreneur or are just toying with the idea of going ‘public’ with a product or service idea. Now more than ever, a lot of people are giving up the idea of looking for work and creating their own companies/jobs. Social media has seen an explosion of new and innovative business start-ups.
Starting a business is exciting and it is also hard work. Building your brand, gaining customers, and getting the highest possible amount of exposure possible is key in building a truly profitable and successful business. So although Instagram is a phenomenal way to start, it should be considered a just that- a starting point used to expand to a greater audience (and a potentially huge gain in loyal customers) worldwide.
Posting interesting, engaging and new photographs does of course satisfy one of the first requirements to beginning to grow your business, but creating a business website as well as a social media profile on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are needed if you really want to expand, and of course you want to expand if your goal is to make a profit and gain a great return on your investment. Marketing experts around the world know the importance of being visible in every market possible, and in today’s world that means being seen on all the top Social Media platforms.
Once you establish a business website, and Social Media profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and others, you can start using your Instagram profile to direct followers to those pages. How do you accomplish this? First of all, don’t stop and just sharing amazing and interesting pictures on Instagram, add some great hashtags and links to your other social media profile/pages. This is a excellent way to get new visitors, especially to your actual business website. Also good to note, when you attach links to your Instagram photos those links lead back to the page featuring the image, the number of comments and the number of likes.
Even well-established brick and mortar businesses have an online presence in one form or another, and as mentioned before, in today’s world of technology and considering the number of people who now shop online for just about everything it would be foolish not to have a business website. They are not as complicated or difficult to create as you might think. There are lots of options available.
If you’re not ready to start an actual ‘business’ website, start with a Facebook profile. Facebook is currently the top social network on the internet today with over billions of users worldwide. Starting a Facebook page is relatively easy and they offer a ‘business’ profile set-up. It’s important post interesting and fun information related to your products or services, and don’t be afraid to share things that are trending on the internet. This helps to gain attention from those who may not visit your profile if you are only sharing merchandise related updates. When you use pictures from your Instagram profile to engage people, be sure to put in a link to your Facebook page with the picture, this will help ensure your Instagram followers become aware of you Facebook profile.
Of course you have to have a Twitter account since it is one of THE top sources when it comes to real-time news, trending topics, and information. Like Facebook, Twitter has millions if not billions of members worldwide. You can put your Twitter settings so that when you tweet it will automatically also post to your Facebook page and what this means is you can get your ‘message’ out on both social media outlets at the same time. This saves some time and hassle of having to share pictures, information or status updates by going to each profile individually.
A good thing to remember also is when you add a link to your Instagram profile it increases visibility for your website and it provides some great “Search Engine Optimization” by sending signals to all the search engines.
Google+ is currently be touted as the fastest growing social network in the social media industry and the cool part about the Google+ is it works will all of Google’s popular applications. So that’s a win-win.
Now back to those hashtags because even though they are not used on Facebook, they can be used in combination with Twitter to gain curiosity from a new audience that may be looking for the type of product or services you are selling. A great way to find relevant hashtags is to by doing a search for key words that are closely related to your brand.
Instagram lets you use a max of 30 hashtags for each post, and Twitter allows whatever doesn’t go over their 145 character limit for each tweet. If you combine a Instagram link in a Twitter share, that’s a lot of popular words to get some pretty high visibility and new followers. If you are selling several different products or services, do a keyword search to find which the most popular Twitter and Instagram hashtags are.
Expanding your business beyond Instagram is not only relatively simple to do, it is also something you must do if you want to grow your business to a point that takes it to its highest potential and maybe even beyond.