Hey guys!
Andrew from Thinkific here.
Today, we’re gonna be talking about how to use Instagram to promote your online course.
Check it out!
Alright, so we get questions every single day about how do you best promote your course
and there are tons of freeways that you’re gonna be able to promote your course to make
sure that you engage your users and attract more and more and more users every single
day.
So today, we’re going to talk about Instagram.
We talked a lot about Facebook but Instagram especially if you have a course that have
very visual content.
So, maybe you’re teaching about cooking or about exercise or about you know flying
drones.
All of this contents has the potential to be really good in a visual social media platforms,
like Instagram.
So today, we’re going to talk about tips and tricks for you to be able to grow your
audience on Instagram and make sure that that audience is being driven back to your online
course that you could be making some money as well.
And then we’re gonna be jumping in and showing you two examples of users on thinkific, with
really really good Instagram account.
So you can learn from what they’re doing it and apply it to your courses also.
So the first thing that you need to do is
create great content.
Instagram is all about wonderful content.
You always say, content is king on Instagram and especially for Instagram, its visual content
that’s really going to make you stand out.
So, you might say, I don’t know, maybe I don’t really have a visual course.
I am teaching something about workouts and and maybe to me that’s not really visual
course.
The tip I want to give you is to be able to look at your course, but not what you’re
selling, but what you can be producing.
And GoPro does a terrific job at that.
If you end up going to GoPros Instagram account, you’ll be able to see they don’t really
take images of.
Hey! here’s the actual product I’m selling and here’s the camera where you can buy
at which could be equivalent to your course.
But at the end they say, you know what you can do with a GoPro.
They show amazing footage that you can get and the result of using their product and
that’s exactly what you can do as well.
You can take your course content and start flipping into different visuals.
So, again if you’re in an exercise field for example, maybe you show different shots
of hikes that you’re able to do once you achieve your kind of workout goals or think
about being able to actually take a small little video teaser of an actual exercise
that your training.
You know we have course creators doing hula-hoop exercising on thinkific.
Being able to do a really short video on Instagram.
Instagram takes videos that you be able to do a video and show a move that you’re going
to be teaching in a later course.
So, great opportunity for you to do there, but just dive in and think about content that’s
exciting.
And you don’t always have to make that content by yourself.
Absolutely not once you build a following you’d be able to jump out and start creating
that content back from your users.
So, you can create contest, you can create hashtags and say…
You know what, hashtag my workout and made your carrying comments back from all your
other users about what kind of workout their doing or what kind of heights they were able
to achieve on the weekend.
So start carrying information back from your users as well.
It will really help you make sure that you’re feeling that content.
Also, when in doubt motivational quotes work wonderfully on Instagram.
So, if you’re kind of feeling like you don’t really know what to do, you’ve done a lot
videos and images of other content.
Throw in some motivational quotes you know we’ve done one specifically.
Your knowledge and experience is worth more than you realize and it worked out so well
on our Instagram feed.
You can always check out our own Instagram account as well so just Instagram and then
thinkific is our handle.
Actually will be able to check that out but those kind of quotes is really with the foundation
of where Instagram came about.
People love sharing those and I’ll show you a little bit later on and how you can
use post like that to engage other users as well.
But make sure you’re just creating really cool and fun content and if you have any questions,
but what you want to create, messages us or leave a comment on this video.
We can talk through some of the ideas to create really good engaging content for yourself.
So now that you’ve created all this
really cool content.
You want to make sure that you’re releasing it out to your users and kind of a regular
basis.
You want that expectation to be laid down.
You don’t bombard them with 10 different images and then disappear for two weeks.
There are tools that can help you know later gram which is now re-branded to later can
absolutely help you searched them and they are just a scheduling program that can allow
you to scheduled out when your Instagram post would be put out.
We use it, so I hope that you use it as well and you’ll be able to save tons of time
and not sitting behind your computer all day long making sure your Instagram account is
up and ready and getting tons of followers.
So the point of Instagram is not just engaging users you have.
But as a smart business person, you want to be able to start getting more and more users
into your account which is they’re gonna be following into your course.
That’s the goal here, is getting people new users into your course.
So how do you attract new users?
One great tip is to be able to use hashtags.
I’m sure you’ve heard of hashtags before if you haven’t, it’s a way to be able
to categorize the content that you’re using and people are able to find it.
It’s not just a Twitter thing, so make sure that if you, you have experience using hashtags
on Twitter, make sure you bring that into… into Insragram.
Now what we suggest is in an Instagram post, put the picture up and create kind of caption
for your image.
But don’t put all your hashtags right there, because they’re going to really take up
a branch of that information that room is going to as you look quite cluttered.
So what you should do is create your image and then add a comment to your own post.
So, I put up an image of a motivational quote for example and then right after it, I can
put comment on it that says… all different hashtags.
I can put five or ten different hashtags of...of… categories that back post would fit under.
So, users in your industry who are searching all these other uhm, categories can find you
and stumble across you will attract more users.
And make sure using hashtags that are popular in your industry.
You can do searches all over about different ways of finding out which hashtags work well.
You can test hashtags yourself and you can do a search of which ones are the most popular
so that you’re in the feeds of users that are already searching for your content.
So make sure you use those hashtags and make sure you categorize your post so that they
get found.
Now, another great thing to do is we have
to follow other users on Instagram.
It really is at the end of the day a social network.
You are able to go on and follow other users and make comments on those users post.
So, when you’re making comments, all those other users who are following the influences
that you’re following, will see your comments and they might say
Oh, that was really insightful comment.
I’ll click what you know, see what’s going on with you and then you can start attracting
more followers as well.
So go out there, follow different influencers in your industry and make sure doing a lot
of commenting on their post as well to attract more users to yourself.
You don’t want to just have an Instagram account just for the sake of having Instagram
account.
You want to have an Instagram account to drive traffic as you’re talking about back to
your online course.
But how do you do that in kind of this really tight social network?
Your aren’t allowed to actually create links on your actual post.
So, when you’re creating a new video or a new image, you can’t put a link right
there.
So what you can do really strategically, is put a really strong call to action in your
bio.
So typically in our bio, write a little bit like a half sentence about what we are, what
we do, but make sure you put a CTA in there about where people can go to find more information.
If you’re doing a promotion, you can change that bio frequently to be able to drive people
to new places which is one option.
But, make sure at least the minimum you drive them to a blog or hopefully your online course
to be able to grab some more content from you.
Ok, so if you now have a really strong call to action in your bio, you can still put calls
to actions on your actual post to make sure that action is still being taken, that they
don’t have to be clickable, but they can still drive action within Instagram for example.
So, one thing you could do is, let’s say the quote I had which is
“Your knowledge is more appreciated than you really think” You could maybe add that
you know tag three friends that you think are doing incredible things this week or tag
four friends that you think are blowing you out of the water in their industry.
And you can start creating, some action around the images and by tagging friends you’re
going to make sure that, that image is being shared amongst other user and are really growing
you’re following.
So make sure that you have really big call to action in your bio, but also on every photo
you’re trying to drive some action so it’s not just sitting in stagnant and taking action
to drive money to your online course.
You might be wanting to see how this actually plays out in practice.
So the next video, I’m actually showing you two examples of thinkific that course
creators who are using Instagram to drive traffic to their online course.