Assuming you have already taken the step to optimize your social media activities for your Facebook business page, why does it make sense to go further and create and manage an Instagram account for your business? The short answer is that it is good for your business and it is easy to do.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
There are several important benefits to taking the initiative to add Instagram to your social media presence:
Enhancing Your Digital Doorstep: As we've discussed before, for most businesses, social media has become the new 'business card,' that is, the entryway that offers customers a first glimpse as to who your business is. If your business card is crumpled, so to speak, or otherwise shows poorly, you have an uphill battle to convince customers that your business is professional, reliable, and worthy of their trust.
Adding an Instagram hashtag to your digital doorstep takes your business credibility up a notch. This is especially true with millennial customers, who live on social media, and therefore view businesses through this frame of reference.
Deepening Customer Relationships: By its nature as a visual medium, Instagram gives customers an additional perspective for getting to know and engaging with your business. They get to see your business in a different light, which helps to broaden the relationship and further enable the opportunity to build trust.
Keeping Up With Growing Relevance: With the number of active users of Instagram continuing to grow, having an account for your business enables you to tap into this wave. But on the other hand, not jumping into the water can leave you disadvantaged vis-a-vis your competitors.
ADVANCED FEATURES
There are a couple of advanced features of Instagram that are worth mentioning.
Filters. A cool feature of Instagram is the built-in tools that enable you to augment photos before you upload them. While this is not required, it does allow making your photos better, whether that is to fix what could be distracting, or to enhance for making them more appealing.
Instagram Stories. This is a feature within the Instagram app that allows you to capture and post related images and video content in a slideshow format, for which the content will remain available for only 24 hours from the time of posting. Unless you have a very large number of followers, you probably won't need to concern yourself with Instagram Stories for your business.
GETTING STARTED
Getting started is very easy and quick to do. Since you only need to Google or search on YouTube to find lots of excellent tutorials for helping you get started, we won't take up space here to do it. But as you get started, it's important to keep in mind that although this will be a new social media channel for your business, you will want to have brand consistency across all your marketing channels. So matching your company logo, colors, style, etc. is highly important as you are setting up your Instagram account for your business.
