Written by Pak Lam
Instagram is a social media platform where photos are shared from mobile devices. Users can also interact with other users on Instagram by following, messaging, commenting or ‘liking’ photos. Instagram profiles can become brands representing lifestyle and personality. It can also be an approach to network with others. Thus, the presence of Instagram brings about a series of commercial opportunities to people eager to build brands relating to genres such as gourmet, fitness, art or business. Do you want to build up an account portraying your brand? If yes, here are four tips for beginners.
1.Understand Your Goals and Target Audience
To set up a personal branding effort initially, it is necessary to figure out what your goals are. What is your purpose of establishing the brand on Instagram? Is it demonstrate your expertise? Building a network? Which domain such as food, makeup, life or photography would you like to focus on? Secondly, the target audience is important to guide and manage the brand. You should consider audiences’ age, gender, lifestyle as well as demands when you identify the target audience. Customer enthusiasm toward your brand displays effective branding strategies.
2.Hashtag
On Instagram, the hashtag is a word or group of words to directly link followers to the searchable topic and related IG account. Using hashtag allows users to organize content and track the topics they are eager to interact with based on those keywords. Thus, when uploading the content to Instagram, it is necessary to hashtag keywords alongside every upload. Your content and Instagram brand could be easily discovered once people find it from following hashtags. Here are the top 10 favourite hashtags from 2019. Try to use it throughout your account and make your brand awesome!
3.Interaction and Collaboration
Once you start up the Instagram, you should know that interaction and a collaborationis important to optimise the brand. If you spend more time engaging with followers, the participation and awareness of followers to your Instagram will increase. Instagram introduced the new function of question stickers for stories, giving businesses a fun new way to connect with their audience. You can do the Instagram story Q&A by utilising question stickers. Firstly, select a question you’d like to ask, then discuss specific topics, related to your business, with followers. Moreover, the collaboration between another Instagram brand user is an advantageous method to enhance efficacy of promotions. The collaboration can be made public by including a hashtag of each other’s brand in the content or adding their account name in the story.
4.Social Media Content Calendar
Why do we need a social media content calendar? The social media content calendar could remind you of important dates. Depending on the nature of your business and industry, key dates can bring an opportunity or inspiration for content creation. For instance: Christmas Day, Mother’s Day or Labour Day etc. In addition, a calendar could help you plan and schedule all your social media content in advance thereby increase the stability of content creation. A social media calendar could be the best tool to manage your amount of content because you eliminate an excuse for procrastination.