Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
Let’s Talk About Instagram
Show Notes
Instagram is primarily a mobile app.
Instagram on desktop you can watch your feed, stories etc but you can’t post from the computer. Instagram is designed to be used on a mobile phone.
To see insights, tap on your profile bottom right hand corner and then tap on insights on the left under your BIO.
Insights are great to see what content your followers are looking at and liking. How many people you have reached. The type of content you are sharing and keep scrolling down and you can see the days and time you have reached the most profiles. Tap on days and it will show you the number of profiles you have reached with your Instagram feed. Then profile visits, clicked on your websites then down to the most reached stories and IG TV posts.
Then you can do see all and you can see all posts you have made on Instagram for all time categories by most reach. Then you can filter by likes, impressions, views, comments etc. Each tab in the insights you can tap on them and get more details on each section. See all your followers and see age, gender, when followers are most active.
How Many People Should You Follow?
To build you need to start following other people however, be careful of the ratios. Ideally, you want to have more followers than you are following, this is particularly important when your account builds to over 1000 followers.
Yes it is nice to follow lots of people but it looks spammy if you are following lots of people however, they are not following you back.
The other reason to be careful of having too many people you are following is so that you can see their content and engage with it.
Who to Follow
People you want to follow are people
- You want to network with
- Who inspires you
- Motivates you
- Make you laugh
- People you want to see their content
You don’t have to follow everyone who follows you.
Please don’t used the follow unfollow method which is very unsavoury and not a good practice. This is where you follow a number of people hoping to get a follow back and then the following week, unfollow them. It is just spammy.
Should You Follow Your Friends?
Yes, if you want to share things with friends and families but do it on a close friend list. Close friends and family list are given only selected content if you tap close friends when you are posting a story or post then people on your close friends list will see that content not your main feed. Close friend works like a private account and is denoted by a green ring on your stories.
Hash Tags
Hash tags are used to categories. Content that can then be searched. Think of hash tags like folders that you are putting your content into with lots of other people. Then think of all these folders starting as a big folder and then being broken into lots of smaller folders. Like start with .
- Beauty
- ladies beauty
- hair
- nails
- makeup
- skin care
Lots of sub folders with the main beauty folder. Then within each folder they are divided again. So the hash tags become more specific.
Hash tags are free advertising. Hash tags get you
- Reach
- More exposure
- Show up on other people’s feeds
Hash tags will get you exposure but if your content is not engaging people won’t interact with you and your Instagram followers won’t grow.
Where Should You Put Hashtags?
Should you put hash tags in the caption or comments? From my experience, testing and researching – ot doesn’t matter. Personally, I put them in the first comment because it looks better, it’s cleaner and you then have 1 comment on every post.
If you are sharing the same content into Facebook, definitely put in the hash tags into the comments because Facebook and Facebook users don’t like more than about 3 hash tags in their posts.
If you are using a scheduling tool, which give you the opportunity to get your content out there but may or may not help your reach a lot (see below for more on that) then you will need to put the hash tags in the captions.
Should I Use a Scheduling Tool for IG?
Like all social media platforms, you should be being social. Instagram likes you to stay on their platform and engage with other pages and your followers. When you use a scheduling tool, you are not doing this.
Scheduling tools are great time savers and can help you increase your posting volume. My advice would to use a combination. Set up some of your posts in scheduling tool so that you can keep your consistency up. However, do some post organically after you have been liking, comments and sharing other pages content to your stories.
How Many Hash tags Should I Use?
You can use up to 30 hashtags although best practice says to use 28.
Brock Johnson, an Instagram influencer suggests
15 niche hashtags
10 post specific hash tags
3 industry hash tags
28 total
That means pick 5 topics in your niche and use 3 hashtags for each. These hashtags should have a post volume of 20k – 500k.
For example, if your niche is Fitness for new Mums. You need 5 topics x 3 hashtags each.
Your topics could be
Workouts for new Mums
- New Mums workout
- New Mums exercise
- New Mums fitness
Then you could do the same for Nutrition, Mindset, Tips and maybe memes.
Then you do the specific.
If you post is on pelvic floor exercise then you do 10 hash tags on Pelvic floor
Eg.
- Pelvic Floor Health
- Pelvic floor exercises
- Pelvic floor PT Etc.
Then finish with 3 industry hashtags
- Female fitness
- Workout tips
- Workout tips for new Mums
Now you have your 28 hashtags. Save lists of hashtags in notes on your phone so that you can copy and paste them into your comments when you are posting.
How Often Should I Change my Hash Tags?
If you are using the formula we just talked about your hash tags will be different each time because your content specific tags will be different.
Don’t be lazy an use the same tags for every post as that is not being post specific and although you may get some reach, you won’t get as much as you could.
Save lists of hash tags into your phone so that you can use different multiples for your different types of content.
As you can see, Instagram is a huge topic and we have only just started so I will make this a multiple series.
All About Instagram
As mentioned Brock Johnson is a great resource for everything IG and along with his Mum Chalene Johnson, Brock has just launched a new Instagram Training Program called Insta Club Hub. If you are interested, check out my affiliate link, instaclubhub.prupel.com/?ref=1068
This is a great course for only $27 US a month and for every referral you get using your own referral code, you get a month free. Insta Club Hub really is a great resource and with Instagram changing so often it I important to keep up.
Next week, we are talking business systems in a really fun way.
