Instagram for Small Businesses in 2021

Whether you’re looking to establish a new business online, interact with your existing customer base, or reach out to an audience further afield, Instagram is the way to go. With over 32 million users in the UK alone (Statista, April 2021), the social media platform is one of the best ways to grow your business online in 2021. If you’re looking to get yourself and your business set up, check out our top tips below.

Setting It Up

Creating an Instagram Business page takes less than 5 minutes and only requires a bit of basic contact information to register. After entering your desired username, you’ll need to add a contact number and email address to complete registration of the account. You can also use a Facebook account to sign up, if you wish to connect the two platforms. Once you’re into the account, you can start to add your profile picture, bio and business information to give your profile a bit of personality. Remember, Instagram profile pictures always appear as a circle, so make sure your image is properly cropped so you don’t end up with a crooked profile image! Ensure your website is properly linked, alongside all relevant contact information, so any potential customers always know where to find you. Once the basics are all set up, you’ll be ready to start sharing your first few posts.

Creating Content

Whilst it may be quite daunting to start creating and sharing your first posts, it doesn’t have to be so intimidating. Repurposing or resizing images from other platforms you already operate on is a great way to get started. If you’re already familiar with Facebook, or share product images via your website, why not try to get these on your Instagram to introduce your business. It’s also always a good idea to let people know who you are via ‘Meet the Team’ posts. Take a few snaps of your team in action and give each member a brief bio so your followers get the chance to get familiar with the people behind the business. You could also share details of your businesses’ journey so far, giving a bit of background on your company for your new followers. As you begin to get more comfortable on the app, and get accustomed to the type of content your followers want to see, you’ll begin to fall into a good routine with both your content creation and your schedule. We’d recommend trying a scheduling platform such as Hootsuite to load and plan your content so that you can almost ‘set and forget it’ once created.

#Hashtags

Having your followers see and engage with your content is one thing, but drawing in a set of new eyes is a whole different feat. One of the best ways to do this on Instagram is of course through hashtags. Captions allow you to enter 30 separate hashtags so that your content is visible under those tags, which will bring in the attention of those outside your follower base. There are some great tools out there to help with hashtag generation so you can be sure that they’re always optimised for maximum engagement. Display purposes is a great example as it allows you to enter in a few key hashtags you wish to include, and will produce a set of 30 popular hashtags related to your content, ensuring that any banned or spam hashtags are filtered out. If you get into the habit of using a tool like this for your posts, you should start to see your engagement rates rise by bringing in a new set of followers and likes. It’s also a good idea to start following some popular hashtags in your industry so that you’re always kept up to date with any trends or styles of content that you can try out.

Stories

Whilst posting regularly on your feed is a vital part of any Instagram marketing strategy, don’t forget about the benefits of Instagram stories for your business. With many interactive elements, Instagram Stories are a great way to regularly interact with your followers to maintain a strong relationship with your social following. Polls, Q+As and Quizzes are great little tools to keep an open channel of communication between your business and customers and a fun way to keep your profile interesting. As Instagram doesn’t allow for clickable links within post captions, stories are also great for directing your followers to other platforms such as your website, blog or other social media platforms. Just remember, you will need to be using an Instagram Business Profile and have at least 10,000 followers to enable link sharing on the stories. Whilst you're building up your following, you can always use the ‘website’ section of your bio to share web links -  we'd recommend trying out Linktree for this.

Promoting Posts

Don’t forget that Instagram is also a great platform to begin promoting your services or products on a wider scale. Linking your account to a Facebook Ads account will allow you to create and run paid video and image adverts to either grow your social profile, or increase your website traffic. You can check out our blog post on Facebook Advertising if you want to read up a little more on this. You also have the option to ‘Promote’ posts so that they can be seen by a larger audience than your follower base. Instagram will automatically suggest promoting the posts which are performing well on your profile to help you determine which images have the best chance of drawing in new followers. Trialling a few promotions will help you determine whether it’s a useful solution for your Instagram strategy - and is usually a great way to get started before delving deeper in to the world of Instagram Adverts. Do remember, that if you wish to promote Payl8r finance options online, you'll need to be mindful of the compliance rules related to financial promotions, and should get in touch with our team to approve all financial adverts.