A Professional’s Tips on Creating Instagram Visual Content That Engages More

Friday, 27 October 2017 / Published in Content Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

A Professional’s Tips on Creating Instagram Visual Content That Engages More

A Professional’s Tips on Creating Instagram Visual Content That Engages More

In less than seven years after its launch, Instagram boasts over 700 million active users every month. Even Instagram Stories has clocked up an astonishing 250 million active users in less than a year of existence. Small wonder that with this sort of activity level, Instagram content marketing is in very high demand by businesses of every type, big and small.

Instagram Content Marketing – How Does It Work

Compared to conventional content marketing, there is one major difference that differentiates Instagram. Instagram content is purely visual, though there is a minimal text support. Posted visual content remains on the network forever, though posts on Stories expire after 24 hours. Instagram content marketing, like any other marketing, works the best when you have a clear objective in mind; it could be anything from getting more followers, increasing traffic, sharing or promoting events sponsored by your brand, etc.

Why Deploy Instagram Content Marketing?

Instagram content marketing tends to outscore other social media content because it is primarily visual-led, which leads to a higher degree of user engagement. Visual images are processed an astonishing 60,000 times faster than text, and studies show that 40% of people respond far better to visuals. A Forrester study reveals that Instagram has an engagement rate of 4.2% in comparison to Facebook’s 0.1.

Getting Instagram Content Marketing Bang On

The visual content that you post should be compelling, both in the subject and in visual appeal. Clarity and crispness are of utmost importance to an audience that is flooded with visual content. Users should immediately be able to relate to the image without needing to puzzle it over. Video post clarity in both image and audio is essential. Standalone images of your products should be avoided and instead images showing the products in action thereby underlining the benefit to users should be used. Don’t make your Instagram account a product catalog.

Chose the Right Hashtags

Content discovery in Instagram works through hashtags, however, you just can’t use whatever you fancy. Instead of going overboard and making virtually every word in the post a hashtag, choose what is most appropriate to the post and insert them at the bottom of the visual. Leaving a few spaces between the caption and the tags can hide them below the fold and reduce the visible clutter on the page. Using the right hashtags translates to free Instagram likes.

Conclusion

With over 95 million images and videos posted on Instagram daily, it can be somewhat of a hit or miss for your post to be seen by your followers unless you get the timing right. By finding out when your followers are the most active, with the help of the Insights feature, you can time the posts in such a way that people have the maximum opportunity of seeing them. You can even find out the geographies of your audience so that you can strengthen your global marketing efforts. It is also very important to constantly engage with your followers by responding to their comments.