For most social media marketers, Instagram has emerged as the social media platform of choice with its immense popularity among the new generation of young and affluent smartphone users. The radical visual orientation of the network that sets it apart from most of the other social media has helped it to amass humongous one-billion-plus monthly active users, of whom, more than 80% follow at least one business profile.
Very much like Google search result optimization for superior ranks, many brands marketers too have commenced applying SEO techniques to elevate the visibility of their brands on Instagram, especially when they have managed to acquire a large number of followers and a reasonable reach. Some of the most popular SEO tactics that you can use for boosting your Instagram profile:
Establish the Brand Message
Creating effective Instagram SEO needs to commence with aligning the efforts with the messaging of your brand, which needs to be consistent and regular. The best way to proceed is to make a list of important keywords and key phrases as well as the relevant hashtags that are important.
While the marketing and brand message may have already been evolved for conventional marketing, it is vital to bear in mind that Instagram is all about visuals and therefore, it may be necessary to modify or even shorten the message and focus on representing your brand visually.
The new brand messaging could then be the shortened tags and you will need to keep using them on a regular basis in all your posts. The Alt text associated with the photos will ensure that Google indexes your Instagram account in a relevant category.
Organize Contests and Award Prizes
As every brand marketer knows, holding contests is an awesome way for building engagement with the brand among existing and potential followers for Instagram. By organizing contests and giving away prizes that have a perceptible value among users, you can increase the number of your followers quite easily in large numbers.
While designing the structure of the contests, you should invariably keep in mind that Instagram is all about images and the followers are invariably photo enthusiasts. It, therefore, is advisable to make the contests also photo-centric.
Influencer Marketing
Instagram brand marketers can give their marketing efforts a very big push by using influencers. Influencers are people who have very a large number of followers on Instagram and who can exercise considerable influence on their behavior due to their status. Typically, influencers are celebrities in areas like sports, films, the arts, or even well-known bloggers and people in constant limelight.
It is important to identify influencers who are suited to your business activity. Some of the micro-influencers may still agree to work for free or in exchange of product samples, however, most of them will only engage with you commercially for endorsing your product on their accounts.
According to https://mention.com, influencer marketing has already outranked email marketing and organic search as the most-effective channel for acquiring followers.
Conclusion
Whether search engines like Google actually use Instagram profiles as a factor in their results and rankings is still not established very clearly. According to experts, Google may already be using the SEO inputs of Instagram profiles. However, regardless of the extent Google picks up SEO signals from the social media content, it can still be very rewarding to focus on these activities for increasing the brand reach and attracting more followers.
Author Bio –
Kristen Smith has been working on the importance of social media in marketing with thousands of followers for Instagram for her postings.