Top Reasons for Including Instagram in Your Social Media Strategy

While businesses cannot deny the certain advantages that social media brings to brand building and enhancing customer loyalty, the rapidly changing social media environment tends to leave traditional marketers somewhat confused as to how to properly direct their marketing efforts in this new age. Despite the very much in-the-face presence of Facebook and Twitter, there is simply no way brands can ignore Instagram’s 400 million monthly users and over 75 million daily users that account for more than 20% of the population logging into the Internet. So even if you are somewhat reluctant to increase your social marketing effort, it would be kind of suicidal to ignore the potential of Instagram.

Improve Your Facebook Marketing Impetus

All marketers and brand managers would be very worried about the continual drop in the organic reach of Facebook. You can lend extra strength to your marketing on Facebook with Instagram as it allows the posted photos and videos to be syndicated. This basically ensures that the image is posted on the brand’s Facebook page automatically without any physical intervention such as sharing. You can also switch the options from sharing to a personal profile on Facebook or a Facebook Page from time to time at will.

Not only you can keep the Facebook page updated but also virtually all other social media platforms that you care to mention such as Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Weibo, Mixi, Foursquare. You also get a really wide variety of apps to make this sharing possible in a cool way.

Content Can Be Repurposed

The ability to repurpose content can be used to great advantage by social media marketers. An easy way do it is to save the links of important brand images as well as posts that had received a lot of Instagram likes and re-share them on other social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and many more as you like. This exercise keeps the brand awareness high and the content streams rich with images that are liked by the brand’s followers.

It is also possible to embed Instagram images and videos in web pages and blog posts. Repurposing content allows brands to keep the interest of the followers high and maintain an enduring freshness of the brand image.

Connect Better With Hashtags

Apart from being image-oriented, where Instagram really scores over its many other competitors in social media is that it does not have any limit on the amount of text that can be posted. Also, brands can direct the attention of specifically targeted followers with the hashtags. When followers seek out content with a specific hashtag, they get to see the brand’s content if the post has been uploaded with the particular hashtag.

Apart from specifically targeting followers, hashtags can also be used to attract new followers, and track promotions and contests. Since hashtags have been one of the pillars of Instagram right from its inception, its use and utility are clear to all followers who make extensive use of them.

Unchain Your Brand

The main issue with most social media platforms is that they have all been designed to work very well on computers and tablets and do only a middling job with the apps developed for smartphones. Instagram has the advantage of coming into existence at a time when the boom in the smartphone market was just taking place and consequently it was designed right from the very start as a smartphone app. This means that using it on mobile devices is simple and intuitive. Instagram has been able to unchain brands from desktop devices and travel out with followers on the mobile phones. No wonder Instagram users have made photo-sharing an integral part of their lives. Brands can now stay connected with their fans 24×7 wherever they are.

Author bio: Charles Mosley is the chief brand architect of a very popular line of ladies’ wear. He is continually on the hunt for strategies to get more and more Instagram likes to increase his brand value.