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Hi there I'm Polly McGee and you are watching the social media fundamental series by
the digital ready program part of the Tasmanian's state government's initiative
to help your business engage more fully with the digital economy. Today we are
going for a deep dive into the wonderful world of Instagram. Now if you're just
starting out with social media and instead of getting your head around the
different channels, you might want to pop back to the digital ready page and
there's a ton of information there on everything you're going to need to know
about the digital world and social media and you might want to check out our
other videos. And get some strategy and some fundamentals under your belt. If
you're ready for Instagram right now then I am ready to dive in with you. So for
those of you who haven't looked at Instagram before, Instagram really
started off as a photo sharing social media channel. It allowed you to post up
photos, to share them with people, to connect them to your business and to use
hashtags as a way of searching. It was wildly popular and it was one of the
fastest growing social media channels of of it's time. It It out stripped the growth of
Facebook enormously and so of course then Facebook bought it. So it's now part
of the Facebook family which is actually quite a good thing because it means that
a lot of the functionality of Facebook is also being built into Instagram.
Instagram does differ to Facebook though so if it's the right channel for you, you
can really effectively use it. It tends to work well if your business is really
visual. So if in the Tasmanian context for food businesses, for tourism businesses
capturing all of our beautiful natural assets it works really well, for fashion
businesses, for people who do anything that's art based or design based, for
architects, for garden designers, there are a lot of businesses that can really
use Instagram and as I said it's a visual medium so much as Facebook you
can use a lot of photographs and videos they tend to be sort of confused with
all the texts and stuff around them. With Instagram the focus is fairly and
squarely on the image you're using. So if you haven't thought about your social
media strategy you might want to pop back and have a look at the social media
strategy video we made because whether or not Instagram is right for you is really
going to come down to who your main customer is. Let's talk about some of the
demographics of Instagram and that might give you some breadcrumbs to follow to
see if it's right for you. So there's five million Australian users. In
comparison to Facebook that has 15 million, it's a little less but they are
very dedicated and very focused users. It's still the fastest growing and you
know what 90% of those users are under 35 so again some clues to the type of
categories that you would be looking for in your business if that's your main
demographic. The other thing you need to know is that the users tend to be youthful,
urban females that are relatively well-off so it's a middle-class kind of
channel. That's good for your business coz you're looking for people who
ultimately want to engage with your product or service and purchase it. So if
your product or service is visual, if women under 35 who are active, urban
users are part of your demographic, Instagram may just be the channel for
you. Now Instagram is used on a mobile device. It is probably the other big
difference to Facebook. And even though most of us are using social media on
mobile devices now, Instagram is only for mobile devices and it doesn't even
really work particularly well on tablets it's really just for your phone. So this
is what makes it so great in terms of being able to use it when you're out and
about capturing images and moments in your life as you see them and Instagram
is all about sharing visual moments and connecting people to them. So when we're
talking about Instagram for business, there's a few things that you need to do
when setting up your profile. You need to set it up under your business name and
you need to make sure that you have all of your business and brand assets there to
do so. So you want to make sure people can see a logo, you want to have a really
high quality image to sort of set your profile up with. Instagram, is as I said,
an image sharing channel so throwing up a blurry photo that's not really
representative anything doesn't fly. You are competing with some of the greatest
amateur and professional photographers around when using Instagram. And while
they build in plenty of amazing filters and stuff to help you get the best out
of your shots, you want to take the time to make sure
that every picture that you post really speaks to your business and your brand.
It's a bit different to if you use it for your personal life or you might be
really just posting up photos of your life and giving people a journal of who
you are. In this case, for business, you're giving people a journal of who your
business is and those photos need to really speak to that brand and they need
to be on message. So yet again I'll hack you back to social media strategy
coz you need to have thought about what those that brand story is and what
kind of images you're going to use. If you've decided that Instagram is the
channel for you, you need to really clearly have thought out the types of
images you've you're posting. The research that's been done on Instagram
has shown that generally businesses need to stick to a particular type of
photo in quite narrow way and also stick to a particular type of filter that
gives you a brand voice. Now if you don't know Instagram much you might be
wondering what I'm talking about when I say filters. When you post a photo up on
Instagram, you'll be given a range of filters you can use and filters are
literally a digital overlay that changes either the color or the light or the tone
of your photo and so as I said for your business you probably need to choose a
single one of those filters and use it really consistently. So if you're a food
business for instance, what's been shown to work really effectively on Instagram
is shooting your food in a particular type of way so you might choose to do a
plate close up, an ingredient close up, and you consistently repeat that layout
of photo. Not so it gets boring but just so when people see that they can
instantly say oh I know that's from that restaurant, or from that cafe or from that
producer or from that providore. That way as I said you start to get the
consistent brand story and while the types of images you want to be posting
up need to have variety, people need to be following your story, they need to be
telling a story in a really linear kind of way. At the bottom of your images you
can put in a text-based description and it can be quite long so you can say if
we go with the food example you can list a whole recipe down there or a whole
story you can almost make it into a microblog.
But of course that text has to be compelling enough to make people want to
scroll down and read it. The other thing you're going to see used all the time on
Instagram and it's an integral part of the channel are hashtags. Now hashtag if
you haven't seen them before they're that little symbol which is called a
hash when it's put next to a word it makes that term live which means that
it's searchable. So if you have a restaurant you might have a hashtag that
says hashtag tazzy, hashtag fresh, hashtag vegan,
hashtag whatever it is, that is particular to what you do and who you
are. Now you might see some people on Instagram going crazy with the hashtags
you can use as many as you like but the general rule of thumb is seven
or eight are about enough to keep people involved and you want to make sure that
their the hashtags that are really associated with your business so if
people are searching on that hashtag your image is going to come up. You can
also geotag your photos which means that you can put a location on them and so
again if you're looking for people to be finding where you are by looking at your
photograph they can do that too. So when you put your image in there make sure
you say where it is, where it's been taken, what it's of, and
have a series of hashtags at the bottom of it so anyone who's searching randomly
are going to be able to find it. What sort of content should you use? As I said
things like behind-the-scenes insights, you want to be able to get people to
really know what your brand is, what you're doing and who you're talking to.
And because it's in the Facebook family you better know that there are some
great analytics sitting behind those images so you can really dig deep and
find out what one's worked and what hasn't and make sure you do more of
those. As with everything social, measurement is the key when you're doing
it for business to make sure that you're getting it right. So time to get out
there with your smartphone and get snapping for your business, sign up for
your Instagram account. It's a matter of doing you'll pretty soon see what photos
are working and what gets the most response and of course look at your
competitors see what they're doing and then over all of them
just do what they do with your own flavor. That's all for social media
fundamentals on Instagram. I hope you're out there right now putting a
beautiful filter over your key brand image. That's all for now I'll see you
next time. This is Polly McGee signing off for the digital ready program.
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