Jason McDonald, a Top-rated San Francisco SEO Consultant and Director, JM Internet Group, Shared These Tips for Instagram Marketing

The JM Internet Group, a leader in books on SEO, Social Media Marketing, and AdWords for small business marketers, is proud to announce that a new post on Instagram marketing.

Instagram is a key component of social media marketing, as the social network (owned by Facebook) is one of the largest social media networks in the world. It is also notable for its reach to younger people and its focus on photos first. With the addition of video, Instagram is on course to challenge YouTube as a singular place on the Internet to view videos. The post explains many secret technical tips and secrets that the average small business owner or marketer may not understand.

“Instagram is a key component of social media marketing,” explained Jason McDonald, Director of the JM Internet Group. “As part of the preparation for the new 2019 Social Media Marketing Workbook, this post identifies tips and secrets for better marketing on Instagram for small businesses.”

Also Read: Insights on Social Media Marketing: Scoop the Best for B2B Marketing

Instafamous: Tips and Tricks for Marketing on Instagram

There’s that old quip about it taking something like “ten years” to be an “overnight sensation,” and anyone who has ever either had fame or pondered fame quickly realizes it’s very true. It takes knowledge, skill, perseverance and of course timing and “luck” to be an “overnight sensation” on anything, including Instagram. Here are some tips, tricks, and ideas about using Instagram to be “Instafamous.”

• While you can’t share a URL on Instagram, you can embed or share an Instagram post to another network. In this way, you can find a URL and share it to Facebook, Twitter, or even your blog. To find the URL of a post on the desktop, go to your account, find a post, and click the three dots. This then gets you to the “embed” code. You can look at that code and find the URL in this format – https://www.instagram.com/p/BjFnRMaF5Go/. On the app, it’s simpler – just find a post to your account and then click the three dots, and then share.
• You can follow anyone you like on Instagram (including folks more famous than you) and then start commenting on their posts to “attract their attention”
  1. Search Instagram for people/brands to follow. (Research what they like, interact with, comment on, hashtags they use, etc.).
  2. Comment on what they’re posting to “attract their attention” (please have something useful to say!) – use their hashtags, for example. When you comment you can use Emojis to draw attention to your comments (or not, if you – like me – think Emojis are kind of silly).
  3. Hopefully, they will a) follow you back, and/or b) engage in an Insta-conversation.
• Mentions. Like on Twitter, you can “mention” someone in a post by typing the @sign before their name (just type the @ and the first few letters of their handle). This “mention” should generate an alert. You can also use the @someonefamous strategy here – start mentioning persons/brands “more famous than you are” to start a conversation or relationship.
• Follow for follow. Okay, this has gone INSANE on Instagram, especially due to “bot abuse.” But in general people still “follow back” on Instagram – so find a competitor and then follow the people that follow them. For example, if you want to know who follows Kim Kardashian just visit her Instagram account and click “followers” or go to https://www.instagram.com/kimkardashian/followers/. Like Twitter, it’s very open who follows whom on Instagram. (The dark side of all this mentions, follow for follow, comments, etc., is what is called an Instagram Pod. Only for the brave at heart. Or desperate. Or both.)
• Tagging People. You can “tag” people you know in a photo, and this alerts them that they’ve been tagged. To do it, either do it during the upload process or click the “three dots” in a photo, edit and then tag. Help file is here.
• Hashtags are big on Instagram, possibly bigger than on Twitter. You can just start typing on Instagram AND you can also search for them on Google. Either use site:instagram.com keyword as in site:instagram.com “organic food” or @instagram.com “organic food”. Or you can search by hashtag on Google (once you know it) as in #organicfood. You can also use Hashtagify.me, but note that Twitter search is free and Instagram search for hashtags is paid. Go figure.
  1. Don’t confuse hashtags with geotags. Both exist on Instagram, while hashtags only are on Twitter. Geotags are helpful for local discovery; Tulsa geotag vs. Tulsa hashtag. If you are a “geo” business, you should probably use both as a promotion strategy.
  2. Branded hashtags. You can create a special hashtag for your business, such as #optoutside created by REI or #southwestheart by SouthWest airlines. (Notice how those are featured in their bios!).
• Contests. You can have an Instagram contest – here are the rules, as a technique to promote your account. To brainstorm good ideas, search for contests on Instagram as a hashtag or search.
• Advertise. You can advertise directly on Instagram, though for all intents and purposes it is controlled via the Facebook Ads Manager platform. As on Facebook, you have many options for demographic targeting. Tip – you can link the ad as a URL to your Instagram account to grow followers and use Facebook Audience Insights to create a custom audience.

The JM Internet Group provides SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Google AdWords training and courses for busy marketers and businesspeople. Online search engine optimization training helps explain keywords, page tags, link building strategies and other techniques needed to climb to the top of search engine rankings for Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Recommended Read: Instagram Measurement Now Available In Nielsen’s Social Content Ratings