Get Verified & Start Selling

Are Instagram also for business and how to use Instagram for business? Can you sell products and services on Instagram or is it just for ordinary people and Influencers?
I think most people think Instagram is just for ordinary people and Influencers but businesses and brands can also use Instagram and promote their products and services. So, yes, Instagram for business is true.

If you are posting regularly to Instagram with beautiful images and you still aren’t seeing growth, you might understandably find yourself feeling very frustrated.
Perhaps Instagram just is not for your business, you may think. Perhaps you are doing something wrong, or not?

We all know that Instagram is all about the picture, so you take a good photo and want it to be a smash hit on Instagram. But it is not.
Instagram is a visual medium, and the nature of these images is photographic. If you don’t know how to take great photos, then you are not going to be able to run a successful Instagram account.

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that organic growth on Instagram takes time. With that said though, here are five tips that can make a big difference and ensure you grow that bit more quickly.

5 Ways To Grow Your Instagram Followers

It takes time to grow your followers on Instagram and you have to be aware of a few things to get the followers you want.

1. Use Portrait Orientation – Taking photos with a portrait orientation is generally considered the best practice in Instagram marketing. If not, then you should at least choose square images. This way, your image will stay on the page longer while the users are vertically scrolling, meaning more engagement and hopefully more likes.
2. Post At The Right Time – Posting at the right time of day has been shown to be hugely important when it comes to your Instagram success. This way, you maximize the number of people who are awake and who are using the app. Research suggests that posting sometime between 10 am and 3 pm on a weekday will net you the best results. But this doesn’t account for the global time difference. If you are aiming for a global audience, then posting at 6 pm GMT might just be the smartest strategy.
3. Post Frequently – How frequently? Ideally, you should be posting 2-3 times per day. This will ensure that there is a steady flow of content on your site and that it doesn’t seem as though the page has been abandoned. What is more though, is that posting this regularly will mean almost all of your viewers will see at least one post from you per day.
4. Use Hashtags – Hashtags make a big difference on Instagram, so make sure you use them often and use them well. One of the most important tips is to use as many as possible (30) in order to maximize your chances of a big hit. Find the sweet spot in terms of population too – 30,000 is a good number of posts to see.
5. Choose A Look – Many accounts are all over the place, with every image they post looking completely different and the end result being a page that has no consistency. Making sure the majority of your images have a consistent look – even picking the same filter for every photo – can prevent this issue and help people to better understand what you are about and whether they should follow you or not.

These are just five small and easy tips you should consider to follow in order to get more followers and engagement rates on your Instagram account.

4 Top Tips For Better Instagram Tagging

No one thing makes a successful Instagram account. Success on Instagram is the result of a smart strategy that incorporates a wide range of different factors.

But with that said, one of the most important aspects is to consider the role of your hashtags. Hashtags are some of the most crucial elements when it comes to gaining new views, gaining more likes, and generally helping your page to grow exponentially.

Here are four tips that will help you use them better.

1. Use Thirty – You have the option to use up to thirty hashtags, and the most important tip to take away from this? Use ALL thirty. It is like being able to play the lottery for free. Why would you play once, when you could enter 30 times and improve your chances of success by x30?
2. Find The Sweet Spot – When you start typing out your hashtags, you will find that you see a little preview with suggestions that have numbers by them. Those numbers tell you how many other people have used that hashtag, and this in turn can be a brilliant clue as to which are the best to use. The mistake is assuming that the most popular hashtag is automatically going to be the smartest option.
   This is a mistake because you will find a hashtag that is too popular gets drowned out by other identical posts and therefore does not stay visible too long. Likewise, you don’t want a hashtag that no one is interested in…, so find that sweet spot with around 30,000 posts.
3. Use A Range – That said, there is always the smallest chance that if you go for the biggest niche, your image will get picked up by someone influential and go gangbusters. Likewise, if you use an obscure hashtag, it can mean that your image hangs around in search for months and months on end. So use a variety and cover the full range.
4. Go Topical – News Jacking means that you are going to use hashtags that are currently prominent or in the news. This is a great way to get attention and to find people searching for your images. Better yet, is to choose topics that are trending right now in your niche, or that are just becoming big topics but have yet to be inundated with competition.

Follow these four tips, post regularly, and use relevant hashtags, and you will be on your way to success!

5 Tips For Better Photos

Succeeding on Instagram usually means posting lots of beautiful images that you took on a smartphone. It does not have to mean that of course. Some people will have successful Instagram accounts not made up of images at all. Others will use images that they have acquired or will use a high-quality professional camera.

But in MOST cases, it means taking better smartphone photos.

Here are some tips to help you take better photos with your smartphone.

1. Think About Composition – The composition of your shot means thinking about where the subject is in relation to the other elements. It means thinking about how you are going to line up the shot, and how you will convey a sense of scale and depth. Don’t just shoot things head-on.
2. Add Depth – Speaking of depth, how do you create this? One option is to ensure that you feature something in the foreground, middle ground, and background. These three elements will create that sense of layers. Another tip is to try and ‘lead’ the viewer’s eye from the foreground to the background, which you can achieve by looking for something like a path or a road.
3. Tell A Story – Telling a story means not necessarily just taking a photo of the thing you want to ‘say’. Leave something for the viewers to figure out. An empty glass speaks to the presence of a person at some point in town. A party, or maybe a sad lonely drink? Think of the Mona Lisa – which has captivated people for generations by being a mystery!
4. Good Lightning – The phone you choose will have a big impact on the quality of the photos that come out, but so too will the lightning. In fact, it is arguably better to take a well-lit shot on a cheap camera phone, than it is to take a poorly lit shot on a great phone!
   Think about the position of the window and where it is in relation to the subject. Think about the time of day. And if possible: invest in lighting equipment.
5. The Right Phone – Finally, do take the time to choose a good camera phone. Know what you are looking for while high megapixel counts sound good on paper, they are far less important these days than other features, such as the quality of the lens being used to capture those pixels, the size of the aperture, and image processing.

For example, I like phones with a Sony camera. Although there are phones with a camera of 100 px, I prefer a phone with a 48 px Sony camera. This is because I think Sony is outstanding when it comes to mobile phone cameras.

Get Verified And Start Selling

If you want to start marketing on Instagram and use Instagram for business, then all you really need is an account. With an account, you will be able to start posting images and linking back to your page and your service.

But while this is true, it is also true that it is worth going the extra mile in order to set up the best kind of account possible. If you want to maximize your sales potential and your success, you have to get a verified account.

Here is why and what a verified Instagram account means.

• What Is A Verified Account – On Instagram, you can choose any name and profile image you like for your account. That means that you could very easily create a profile pretending to be a famous celebrity or to represent a big brand. Of course, this can then create a number of issues as users struggle to know who is the real deal. By getting your account verified, you essentially tell Instagram that you are the one true YOU, and that way you get a small badge to denote that fact by your name in the search results. This reassures users that yours is the official account for that brand name.
• Why Get Verified – So that is what a verified account is. The next question is why you need to go about getting it verified.
  On the one hand, a verified account gives you the authority that comes from being a genuine article. this means that anyone looking for your brand will know to click on your account, and it of course helps you to avoid copycats and fakers!
  At the same time though, verification also acts as a stamp of authority for those that don’t know your brand. This suggests a certain level of notoriety, and therefore that you must be a serious player in your niche.
  Then there is the fact that being verified will give you access to additional features. One of the most important of these is the ability to link to external sites from a story. Users just have to swipe up in your story, and they will be taken to the page you have chosen. This makes it possible to sell directly from a story, which is huge.
  Another big advantage of this is that having a verified account allows you to create IFTV videos running for several hours.

Instagram is an incredibly popular and potentially hugely powerful marketing tool. Did you know that Instagram has 1 billion active users? That is 1/7ᵗʰ of the population!

Moreover, Instagram is extremely effective when it comes to promoting products and brands that have any kind of visual appeal. More and more brands are also starting to use Instagram for business. This allows you to create an account filled with pictures of people using your products or services, or living the lifestyle that you are promoting. That can be highly motivating and encouraging for your followers, and thereby ultimately encourage them to make a purchase.

But how do you go about turning those views into sales?

This is where things can get a little trickier, and the problem here primarily lies with the fact that Instagram does not let you place links in your descriptions. You can include the URL sure, but your users won’t be able to simply click that link in order to be taken to the sore page. And what this means, is that they likely won’t make the effort to go there – and you can’t elegantly convert those views into sales.

So, what can you do? What some marketers will do, is to add the buy link in their bios. The text that is used as the image description can then point to that link (link in bio= and this way, interested viewers can follow it.

This still isn’t perfect, however, and what many creators will end up doing, is changing that link practically every day as they update their page with new offers. A better option then would be to link to a storefront, and then simply move the hottest items to a more prominent position in the store as they are promoted on Instagram.

Better yet though, would be to link directly to the product. Thankfully there are a few ways to do this now. One is by using an Instagram story, which is an image that appears for a short duration of time. If you have 10,000 followers or a verified account, then you can use this in order to link directly to any items you like – the user just has to swipe upward.

Otherwise, you might be able to use ‘Shopping on Instagram’. This relatively new tool allows images to directly link to buy pages through tags. It is not available for everyone, and you will need your business to be approved first. But if you can manage it, this has huge potential for sales.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and get verified – it takes five minutes – and start selling on Instagram!

Instagram For Business – Conclusion

These were just a few tips on how to go about it with Instagram.

Most people think that Instagram is only for ordinary people as well as Influencers, but even a business can benefit from Instagram. As a business, marketing your products or services is a little different compared to, for example, Facebook and X.

However, if you follow these tips, especially verifying your business, you will discover all the benefits Instagram also has for businesses.

Featured Image Attribute: Designed by Freepik