Are you already active on Instagram and want to explore the business opportunities? In this Instagram plus guide, we'll tell you more about instagram's latest updates and how to use them for your company profile. You're just getting started, read the Instagram starter guide first.
1. Ensure engagement
Post relevant content, interact with users who respond to your posts, and respond and like photos and videos on other people's profiles. You can also get more interaction by asking your followers a question or giving them the opportunity to share their opinion seen about a product or service in a comment.
Another way to engagement is to post content from your followers. User generated content contributes to the credibility of information, and credibility plays a role in brand attitudes and purchasing intent.
For example, if one of your followers posts a photo with your product or service, you can then repost it with the repost for Instagram app. However, it is important that you first ask for permission.
2. Use Instagram video
While photos often yield more likes than videos, the latter do provide more comments. Comments mean that a user is interacting with your brand for a longer period of time, allowing you to tie that user to you more quickly as a potential customer.
Stories
Instagram previously took over the Stories feature from Snapchat. That turned out to be a hit: now there are more Instagram Stories users than people who are Snapchat users. Instagram Stories is now used by more than 200 million daily worldwide. These filters also work with boomerang, the rewind function and other formats.
Create a creative story:
- Face filters
You have a choice of 8 filters, including a rabbit snout, bear ears, glasses and two crowns. You'll find them by going to the selfie screen. With the button to switch cameras you will now see a face, with which you activate the face filters.
- Stickers and pinning
Stickers are pictures that you can paste over your photo or video. Like your location, temperature or currently summery things like a flower or sun. You can insert them yourself into the place you want and make them bigger or smaller. And you can add as many as you want.
Live
Live broadcasting gives you even more opportunity to interact with your followers. We show you how to start a livestream:
By pressing the "Start Live Video" button and swiping to the right across the screen, you can start a livestream instantly. These can take up to an hour. Afterwards you can choose to share this in your stories. During the broadcast, you can see viewer reactions on your screen, which you can manually pin. Someone who started an Instagram Stories livestream can be recognized by the term "live" under his or her avatar at the top of the image.
3. Instagram update 2017
Instagram is constantly changing to optimize the social media experience. Yesterday, Instagram launched a new algorithm that will provide more transparency.
- Sponsored collaborations
First, Instagram wants more transparency on their channel by making it clear to all users which posts are paying. It's no longer a secret that influencers are using Instagram for sponsored collaborations. Apart from the ad or spon hashtags, it is often not clear whether it is advertising or not. Instagram now wants to change that with the Paid partnership tag. This makes it easy to indicate if a post has been paid for:
- Grid function
There is also news for the standard user! From now on, you can archive your posts to see if photos look nice in your grid:
Thanks to this update, you can now relive memories without having to share them with all your followers.
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