4 Ways to Spruce Up Instagram for the Holidays
#Instaholidays need these 4 insta improvements to your Instagram feed.
Instagram continues to gain in popularity, making it a tool of choice for retailers planning their holiday campaigns. Here are 4 tips to help bookstores and publishers rock the holidays.
1. Convert your Instagram profile to an Instagram Business profile so that you have access to Instagram Insights (metrics for the last 7 days), can run ads or sponsored posts, and can add info about your company like business hours, location, and phone number.
See how to convert your instagram profile to an business account:
https://www.boxcarmarketing.com/how-to-create-an-instagram-business-account
2. Ensure your Instagram profile is up to date.
• Instagram bios are only 150 characters. Do you have a pithy bio? Is it the best representation of your business? Do you include a branded hashtag? Can you add some holiday emojis to make it look like you actively manage the account?
• Call to Actions are key to converting followers to dollars. Confirm your retail location, phone, and emai appear. These are available on business accounts. See the link above if you still have a personal account.
• Business category is correct? If your business category is not correct or you want to update it, these settings are in your Facebook Page settings.
• Business hours are also set in Facebook Page Settings. Update your holiday hours. Customers will look for up-to-date business hours in your social media profile, not just on your website.
• Profile URL is the only spot where you can add a link, unless you have 10K followers or more because then you can add a swipe link in Instagram Stories. Make sure your URL pointing to the correct version of your website. In particular, double check the https or http matches your actual site. A discrepancy here that leads to redirects can affect how data tracks in Google Analytics. Here's a 1-Min Marketing Tip on why businesses are switching to https: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6FyzyaChZk
3. Optimize That Profile URL. If you are running holiday promotions, 12 Days of Christmas, or sponsored posts, consider how you can optimize the profile URL. Instead of linking to your website homepage, send Instagram traffic to a dedicated landing page with the current promotion. If you have multiple offers, use a tool like Wakelet to display a curated collection of links.
Here's how @ReadLocalBC uses Wakelet to display multiple links related to their Instagram posts:
https://wakelet.com/wake/5813b934-4e10-404c-a997-81b168bbd235
One frustration for Instagram users is that they see a post, remember the company, but can't find the link again because it's no longer in the profile link. The same thing happens to users who see an ad, remember the company, but have no way of seeing the ad to find the link.
4. Increase your reach by using 7+ hashtags in your posts.
Every hashtag has its own gallery with a “top” section and a “recent” section. The more hashtags you use, the more galleries your posts appear in, which increases your reach. The posts in “Top” are based on recency and engagement (number of likes and comments).
The max number of hashtags is 30, and top-performing Instagram accounts like @NatGeo and @RedBull typically use 5-15. National Geographic, in particular, totally dominates on social media. This SocialBakers case study is from 2014 but the same best practices still apply.
If you are adverse to hashtags and don't care about discovery, you prefer a clean look, you can put hashtags in the comments. A better plan would be adding five dots, each on their own line, which forces Instagram to create paragraph breaks and push the hashtags down, sometimes out of view.
Publishers and booksellers are well versed in metadata so think about hashtags the same way. Aim for a mix of popular hashtags (high-level of browsing), branded tags (tags specific to you), and less popular tags that help tell the story (think about this like subject codes on Amazon, you want to aim for less popular tags where you could rank in “top” spot).
Bonus tip: These hashtag identification and generation tools are helpful
Extra reading:
BNC Research about the book-buying Instagram user offers insights into the demographics, buying habits, and preferences of book buyers who also use Instagram. https://www.booknetcanada.ca/amreading-book-buyers-on-instagram
Fanpagekarma.com has some new research showing the value of Instagram in terms of reach, and from my project work the engagement is way higher on Instagram too. From their research, accounts with 5-10K followers are seeing 26% reach per follower. In comparison, a single post on Facebook or Twitter will reach, maybe, 1-16% of followers. https://blog.fanpagekarma.com/2018/11/14/reach-on-instagram/
