Instagram and Basic Social Media Marketing

Instagram is a great platform for sharing graphics and information for your business and growing followers who can potentially turn into customers. As I mentioned Instagram is a very graphic heavy platform, every post on this platform will have either a picture, an animation or a combination of the two. The most important thing is to make sure your graphics are done professionally and that you can create content that engages your followers in a way that will bring them to your product or service. In this subsection we will go over how to make and grow an Instagram account for any business. If you have never used this platform or any of the others we have talked about, do not be discouraged.

The best first step for you will be to simply make an account, search and follow some of the competitors in your industry and get an idea of what type of content people like to engage with. Look at the platform from an outside perspective and get an idea of what works. You can get a good grasp of these platforms just by browsing around for a couple hours and then from there you will learn so much more as you jump in and come back to these resources.

1. Find someone to make graphics for your account. This will be the main thing you need to find when creating an Instagram for your business. All your content should be up to par with your competitors at the very least. Fiverr.com is a great place to find graphic designers for cheap that can bring your graphics to life. Simply search Instagram posts or graphic designer and find someone with reviews and a portfolio that you are happy with. Even if you are not quite sure what you will post yet it is good to have an idea of who you are going to use and you can even reach out to any of the people on Fiverr to find out if they are right for your particular job. Once you find the right person for the job you can also use these graphics on some of your other social platforms as well, ultimately taking care of a lot of your social media content in one go.

2. Spy on Your Competitors. No matter what industry you are in you will almost certainly find an Instagram account when searching for some of the largest companies in your industry. One thing I always do is check on what type of content is working to engage their followers. Maybe they do giveaways that do well, or they have nice graphics on their latest sales or maybe they provide interesting content about the industry that pertains to your customers. Whatever you find you should ask yourself if the content would make YOU stop and look at it or if you would just keep scrolling. If you wouldn't stop to look, then almost certainly your customers are going to do the same. So do some brainstorming on what will engage your target audience.

3. Plan Your Posts around Events and Vice Versa! When You first make your account, you want your first few posts especially to be very exciting for your potential customer base. You should have something special to announce or an offer for the start of your business that you yourself would want to take advantage of. It can be anything, but make sure it catches the attention of your customer. Plan a giveaway, if you follow us like our post, leave a comment you could win something. If you tag 5 friends you could be eligible to win a raffle for something. People love value and when you are starting out even something small can excite someone. Even the idea of a free $100 product or service can get people to do A LOT. Take advantage of this especially early on while trying to gather social proof. If you are opening a location, you can say first 20 people in the door get something come see us at this date and time. Things like this can take you farther than you ever imagined. If you do not have anything planned for promotions think of something and put it out there and make sure it would excite you if you saw it.

4. Follow and Unfollow. This is probably the oldest trick in the book when it comes to growing social media profiles, but it still works to this day. Whenever you have free time and you find yourself sitting around this is what you should do. Go to one of your competitors or a group that shares interest in your field and click on their followers. This right here is a free list of leads for your business! Then what you want  to do is follow people from that list of people so that hopefully they will take a look at your page and see what it's about. I have created certain pages that averaged a follow back for every 9 people that I would follow. This is a great way to start off when building an account. You do have to BE CAREFUL however because Instagram does know what you are doing and if you do it too much they will start restricting your abilities on Instagram and even ultimately end up banning your account. These are the guidelines you will have to follow especially on accounts that are less than a year old. You can only follow or unfollow 20 people per hour and 100 people per day. To be honest I would test the waters a bit more than that because you can typically get away with up to 200 a day and even more sometimes but as time goes on, they will notice and start limiting your interactions. I typically would start with 300 a day until my first restriction and then pull back to 150 or 100 but it is always better to be safe than sorry in most cases. Either way this is something I like to do starting out because it can give you an audience for FREE if you are using already wasted time. Make sure to have some quality posts up before this step as well because you want them to see something that will keep them on your profile and looking at your brand ultimately you want to EARN your follow back.

5. Comment on other profile's posts. This is also a great way to get your account seen. Remember that when you are starting almost no one is going to just accidentally stumble across your account. Most social platforms simply do not work that way. Typically, people are just going to be seeing content from people they are following and ads. Because of this you are going to want to start getting other people to see your profile. A great way to do this is by commenting on groups that relate to your industry so that other people can see your comment and hopefully check out your profile. One thing you also want to keep in mind is that you want to do this tastefully. Everything you do on this profile will represent your brand. Don't be afraid to show personality but also be respectful of course and don't be annoying. The most important thing when leaving a comment is that you want to provide value or humor to whatever community you are interacting with. Most people are not going to click on profiles that just sound like robots. Add insight to posts that interest you. If you have information that someone is looking for, be sure to put it out there! The most important thing is to check these communities or big brands in your industry's profiles from time to time and interact if you can.

6. Partner with Bigger Profiles in Your Industry. This is where you can really see big growth in your account quickly, especially if you have a bit of money to spend on partnerships. giveaways and sales are a great way to partner with larger profiles that can bring exposure to your brand. The most important thing to think about is how well the sponsored post or posts will grab the attention of the profile's audience. Make sure it is simple and enthusiastic if you are paying for a video post. This is usually much more effective but make sure your message is easy to understand in a graphic as well if you are going that route. Just remember to always ask yourself or your friends if they would be engaged by the post. If you like the content your partner makes sometimes it may be ok to give them some creative freedom but always have a plan to capture the attention of your audience. If you can use humor that can certainly bring people to the post as well. Below we are going to walk through what starting a partnership can look like and what the steps would be to do so. Keep in mind this is just an example and no partnership has been started with the mentioned account we are using.

For this example, we are going to be using The Black Sheep Project. For this company our target audience is going to be people that feel forgotten, have gone through hard times and maybe overcame them already. These steps below will go over the process of finding and obtaining the right partnership for your business.

1. Find the right profile to sponsor us. The biggest thing you need to keep in mind when finding someone to partner with is how organic their following is. This is even more important than the amount of followers they have because if most of their followers are fake or inactive then your sponsorship may be virtually worthless. Many accounts may buy followers and likes to appear bigger than they are. It is okay if it is only a small portion of their following but if most of their likes, comments and followers are not real then a partnership will not be worth it. Go on their profiles and see if their comments look real and get a good idea of what a reputable brand’s engagement looks like based on the number of followers they have. You can use this to compare against the profiles you wish to partner with. Also go to their follower list and do some snooping. See if their followers look like real potential customers or fake profiles. Once you establish that their likes are from real profiles with real pictures and the comments sound genuine you can go on a site like Free Instagram Engagement Calculator | HypeAuditor and you can check their engagement rate. This will tell you how active their audience is, and you can base the price you pay for your post on that and the amount of followers they have. If their engagement level is low, then I would avoid a sponsorship altogether because that means people are not paying much attention to their content.

For the Black Sheep Project example I might like for some smaller rappers with audiences around 50-100k where I could get the most bang for my buck. Big influencers and celebrities can obviously help build traction but the price you are paying per follower will typically be more because they are not as desperate. Starting with multiple smaller profiles can be better starting out especially. I would recommend finding a few for your business and reaching out to a couple at a time since no one is guaranteed to work with you. Try not to ruin any future relationships however by wasting someone's time.

2. Create our post or post idea if the creator is making a video. Like we said before you want to plan something special for this post refer to the examples we provided in the intro to this subsection. You should have a giveaway or promotion for following your profiles and sharing your posts. You can also make content that a partner can share on multiple social media platforms to expand your reach for the money you are paying. The energy in the video should be enthusiastic, funny or both typically. Whatever it is, it should evoke emotion from your audience and make them click on your profile. As for the caption of the video, it should summarize the video or event you are highlighting and grab the attention of your customer.

For the Black Sheep Project example I may go with a passionate post about our purpose of helping educate people that never had guidance and put our clothes on display. We may even do some kind of giveaway announcement for a random customer of our clothing with an announcement date for the winner to drive people to our page. I would have the rapper talk about what we are doing while wearing our clothing in front of a nice car with some giveaway money in hand or something of that nature. I believe it would capture the attention of our audience because it should strike some emotions in them about our mission and hopefully they will like the clothing we are presenting as well. This is the way I think about creating content and when I ask myself if I would be excited for the post the answer is yes. Also, the post will have a good call to action by telling them to buy some clothes to help the mission and to have a chance at winning the giveaway. This way you can get the customer in your territory and hopefully explore the things you have to offer. Make sure that there is a clear call to action in your post. If they just hear about an event or promotion but don't know how to take advantage of it they will just continue to scroll. For the caption I would put something about your promotion or giveaway in a creative way. It should highlight what the post is all about and draws attention to the video.

3. Send a Planned out message to the profile you wish to work with. You should write down your message before even beginning sending it to your prospective profile. Sometimes if it is a company you may even need to find their contact info on their site if their inbox is not open, but either way write down your message somewhere else first so you can think it over. You don't have to overthink it too much but it should act as a template for you moving forward when reaching out to other partners as well. 

For our example I would send this message to our prospective partner we have chosen. Hey I have been following your profile for a while on my personal account and I really love your content. We are a clothing brand that uses part of profit to bring free educational resources and community to underprivileged people. We would love to work with you guys on a sponsored post for our project if you guys are willing. Feel free to check out our website as well if you'd like at_____. Look forward to working with you guys!

This message could be used for reaching out to any prospective partner for our project and it tells them what we are as a business and what we are looking for from them. That is really all you want to do when sending your first message to a potential partner. 

4. Negotiate Pricing. Once you get a response from a potential partner you will then need to figure out what you are going to pay for a post. It is good to go into a partnership knowing what a post from their profile is really worth and what you are willing to pay. The good thing is no matter what your budget is you can always reach out to smaller yet still organic followings that will cost much less money. The simple rule of thumb for an engaged organic following is $10 per 1,000 followers they have. Certain industries tend to charge more because they know the return on investment can be much higher but for the most part this is a good guideline to follow. Also keep in mind this is typically if you provide the content so if you want a video or something done by them they may charge a little more. Either way always have an idea of what your goal outcome is from each post and keep track of the actual outcomes to see if it is worth the money you have spent. Also, something I like to do is negotiate posting to other profiles they have as well because it is really no extra work for them and so they may not charge much extra after coming up with a price. You can even talk about how long your post will remain their top post and negotiate that as well or maybe you can add a story post as well into the deal. You always want to get the most bang for your buck when marketing and that can be the difference between success and failure.

There is a rapper’s profile we used for this example they have 615,000 followers so 615,000/1,000 would mean we will want to pay $615 for the post we created. If we get 100 orders or so from this post then it will most likely be worth the return. However, these will ultimately be numbers that we keep track of moving forward.

5. Set a good time for your post! You want to make sure that your post will get seen whenever it drops on your partner’s profile. Make sure to establish a good peak time for your post so that it gets seen the maximum amount of times that it can. On average, the best time to post on Instagram is between 10 AM and 3 PM CDT. However, the level of engagement you get can change dramatically depending on what day of the week you post. The best days to post on Instagram are Wednesday throughout the day, but particularly around 11 AM, and Friday from 10 AM to 11 AM.

6. Keep your new audience engaged. The hard part of this type of marketing is consistency. You should be posting at least 3 times a week in most industries and when bringing in a new audience you should be posting much more than that and be coming consistently with new events, promotions and giveaways to keep them engaged until ultimately, they become customers. Remember that a follower does not always equal a customer and in fact most of the time it does not. Your job is to create content that turns them into a customer of your product or service.

I would follow our post up with a new giveaway of a free hoodie or business advice rom an expert for sharing our post and joining our communities online. This would help bring them to our other platforms and get involved, furthermore securing them as future customers.

7. Buying followers and likes. This is a method that can be useful but only in the beginning when establishing social proof. The reason this can be useful starting out is because typically people will not follow a profile that has virtually no followers. I typically like to buy 1,000 followers online and 100 or so likes on my posts and then have my friends follow and comment on some of my posts as well to make things look organic. This should not be your way of growing your profile in any long term way because these followers you are buying are certainly not going to buy your product and most likely are not even used by anyone so they will not be interacting at all either. You want an organic following on social media that is made up of a community of people who care about your product  or mission. If you would like to start off this way you can simply search, buy Instagram followers and buy Instagram likes on google and you will find plenty of trusted sites. One thing to be careful of now is that on certain platforms it can mess up the algorithm for reels and other short form content since usually it will be shown in part to your followers first to check their engagement and determine the scale it will be shown to the public. If you plan on using short form content which I recommend I would be very careful with this.

8. Instagram Ads. Most of these social media platforms also offer ad services where you can promote your brand to a targeted audience. Instagram has a great ad program that will allow you to target specific audiences pertaining to your industry. Find out who your targeted audience is, their age, gender, location, interests and with that information you can choose settings that will allow you to only pay for advertising to this particular group. Further on in this Marketing section you will find more in-depth information on targeted ads as well, which will pertain to all platforms.

I hope this section has given you some insight into Instagram and social media marketing in general. I have done this process many times to grow brands and it works when you are consistent. Remember to keep going most importantly and even if you are growing slowly moving forward is always better than moving backwards. Progress is progress and with time you will only get better as you try new things.

Daily Tasks for Efficient Growth on Instagram

- 1 post with 2 carousels per week

- 3-5 stories

- 2-3 reels (read our Tik-Tok section for tips on making short form content)

- 1 live a week if growing a personal brand