If you want your small business to grow, you can do so with social media. And these days, Instagram is becoming a popular platform to promote your business and products. Probably because the platform is free, and it allows you to connect with your audience on a creative level.

That said, here are nine ways you can leverage Instagram to grow your small business:

Post Engaging Instagram Photos

You can do every single technique possible to grow your Instagram presence. But if you don’t post engaging Instagram photos, you’re not going to grow on the platform.

Since the platform is photo-centric, it makes sense that one of the ingredients to Instagram success is to post engaging and high-quality photos.

There’s no need for your small business to get powerful camera equipment. As long as the photo is clear enough, you can get away with doing it yourself first. You can start improving your images once your business has already grown a bit.

Nonetheless, the critical part is that you do post photos on your profile in the first place. You should make sure that they’re visually appealing and that they make sense on your profile.

Optimize Your Profile Bio

When someone goes to your Instagram profile, the first thing they’re going to see is your profile photo and your bio section.

Although the profile bio is a small part of your Instagram, it’s something that you shouldn’t neglect. You should use that space to input information that is most relevant to your audience.

With that said, you can include a short sentence of what you do and link to a website if you have one.

Doing this alone can increase your engagements and even help buildup your website that you’ve linked to in your bio.

Encourage Audience Engagement

Although follower count is an excellent way to indicate an Instagram account’s success, it shouldn’t be your be-all-end-all. There are better metrics to figure out whether or not your Instagram account is thriving.

One important metric to look at would be the engagement you get in every post.

Your engagements help you figure out which of your followers are interacting with you. Since they interact with you, this means that they’re the ones who are most likely to buy from your small business. That’s why you want to encourage audience engagement as much as possible.

With that said, responding to your followers’ comments is a great way to encourage audience engagement. There are also promos or techniques that you can do to increase engagement, like giveaways.

Leverage Video Content

Photos aren’t the only type of content that is on Instagram. Now, there are also videos that you can post on the platform.

In fact, no matter the type of platform, video content is the content that engages with people the most. That’s why many businesses like to incorporate some form of video on their Instagram page.

If you haven’t used it yet, consider posting more videos on your Instagram. You should also go on Instagram Live and provide value to your audience whenever you can.

Use Instagram Stories

Aside from video content, one other thing that you should use on your Instagram is the stories feature.

Instagram stories are excellent because they’re a unique form of content that can be a photo or video, and they disappear in 24 hours. You can use this feature for posts on everyday goings-on in your business.

There are also multiple features on Instagram stories, like polls and Q&As. You can even save some of these stories and put them up on your profile. More so if it’s something that everyone should know about or something you want to highlight.

Run Instagram Ads

As much as possible, you want to try your best and get organic traffic to your business’s Instagram page. However, you’re still a business, so you need to power up your presence on the platform as much as possible.

The best way to do that is by getting as many eyes of your target audience as possible on your offer, and you can only do that through Instagram ads.

It’s not as expensive as you’d think. They will only charge you for the ad if someone clicked through when they found your ad. Plus, you can dictate a budget so that your ads stop running once the marketing budget has run out.

Create a Posting Schedule

You don’t need to have a post up every day on Instagram to get followers and engagement. However, there needs to be some consistency out of you to ensure that you still are in people’s minds. Otherwise, it would be unfair for you to expect to have an audience even when you rarely post anyway.

With that said, all you need is to create a consistent posting schedule and follow through with it. You can post about four days out of seven days a week and have many posts on that day.

There are also Instagram post schedulers that you can use to make it easy on you.

Optimize Your Content

Give your content the best chance of getting viewers and engagements by ensuring that you optimize your content.

Hashtags are the first thing you should be doing. Think of it as an extension of keyword research, except you add a # symbol in front of it. Of course, you shouldn’t overdo it with the hashtags.

Aside from optimizing for search engines, you should also ensure that it is engaging.

The Instagram search tool is powerful, so you should make use of it. You can use it to research your customers, clients, and the market in general.

The information you gather there will help you identify what type of content your target audience likes the most. You can then have better engagements with that.

Track Your Analytics

If you want to improve upon your Instagram strategies, you need to set a goal first. Your analytics would then tell you whether you were able to achieve your goals or not. Thus, it’s essential to track your analytics and choose the correct analytics to track your end goal for your Instagram.

Not every analytic will be necessary to you based on what you’re looking out for in a specific campaign. Therefore, you should plan out your goals and choose analytics before you start posting.

Using Instagram to make your business grow requires creativity and being strategic. And the tips listed above can be an excellent way to help you get started. If you don’t have an Instagram account yet, start now and apply these tips to watch your account and business grow.