Learn how you can use Instagram for your small business.

1. Instagram for Small
Business
Jonathan F. Williams

2. Instagram for Small Business
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Introduction
Whereas Facebook is the elephant in the room, and everyone has it, Instagram is their little brother, that is quickly
gaining more and more traction. Back in 2012, Facebook bought Instagram and has kept it reasonably separate from
Facebook. They have done some great behind-the-scenes things to connect the two. Most notably, allowing
businesses to run ads on Facebook and Instagram simultaneously without having to go through two different
platforms to manage those ads.
But when you're building an Instagram presence, know that your audience is going to be different on Instagram than
on Facebook. Facebook has trended older, and while Instagram is slowly going that way, it's still used by a much
younger millennial-type crowd.
Now, for your small business, there are ways to use Instagram. Instagram in recent years has gone from being purely
photos with almost no way to drive traf c to a website, to allowing people with business Instagram accounts to use
it to drive traf c and business to their website.
So, in this document, we will go over 11 things you can do to maximize your Instagram account for your small
business.
1) Set up your Instagram account fully.
You should follow the instructions in our white paper to set up an Instagram business account. This is going to be
slightly different from a personal Instagram account. They have a lot of the same features, but offer a little better
and more intuitive interface for businesses.
2) Be prepared to spend advertising
dollars.
If you're a business that relies a lot on imagery based sales, Instagram will be great for you. But with declining reach,
you should be prepared to promote your content on Instagram with some advertising dollars.
The great news is if you're promoting stuff on Facebook already, you can cross-promote it on Instagram to the same
audience you are reaching on Facebook. But again, know that you might have to spend some advertising dollars to
reach the audience you want, especially if you haven't already grown an organic audience to like and follow your
page.

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3) Use Instagram stories.
While Facebook has a story feature, Instagram took off with its Instagram stories, which is a take on Snapchat’s
original platform (with some key differences.) Whereas in Snapchat, you can watch a “Snap” once, and it'll disappear,
Instagram stories allow you to view the story multiple times. Yet at the same type of content, where it is quick, short
little pieces of content, either image or video-based, that in Instagram’s standpoint. After 24 hours, your piece of
content will disappear from the public. As a creator, your stories are always accessible and available in an archive,
but it will not be viewable to the public after 24 hours.
This type of content is great because of the way Instagram is set up once someone starts watching stories; they keep
automatically going through their entire list of people that have stories. And if you are somebody that someone has
interacted with a lot, you will almost always be one of those rst stories they listen to or watch.
As a content creator and a business, you need to understand what would qualify as a story versus what would
qualify as a post. A lot of companies often post images that would have been better as stories. Instagram is a very
visual platform. And nowadays, what you want to post on Instagram is either high-quality pictures, memes, or cute
videos or stories. Instagram stories can be fun, quick, less produced content that gets more of a behind-the-scenes
look at your business or company.
So, look at your content calendar, gure out which content would be an Instagram story versus which would be a
post. Posts are going to be more evergreen-type content that you plan out ahead of time and give more of that
personalized content for your business, such as photos from an event.. Whereas stories are more in-the-moment
content which gives a behind-the-scenes look on how your business is run. Stories allow a takeover of your
Instagram account by one of your staffers for quick updates. This enables your “post to” section to have all those
high-quality photos and content that might last for a long time, and not be littered with very detailed in-the-moment
posts that can go into stories.
The great news is that if you have a lot of great story content that you would want to allow your audience on
Instagram to keep seeing after the 24-hour window, the platform does allow you to keep that content within various
boards on your Instagram account.
4) Share other accounts' content in your
story.
Unlike other social media platforms, Instagram doesn't let you share other accounts’ posts onto your posts.

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However, what Instagram does allow you to do is to share somebody's post into your story. This is great because you
can take a piece of content from someone else, share it on your story, put some commentary on it, which makes it
very visual, and a great way of spreading the message. Because when you share somebody’s posts in your story,
people can still click on it and link to the original post and page to get more information. While you can “regram” a
post, I would recommend sharing that post in a story, versus trying to regram it as an actual post.
5) Make sure you're a business account.
So when you rst set up a new Instagram account, you will automatically be set up as a personal account. This is
when you need to go back to the whitepaper we have on setting up your Instagram account and make sure you go
through the extra steps listed there in Step 1 to convert your personal account to a business account. This is a
straightforward process and worst-case scenario if you need to convert it back, you should be able to. This way your
business account will have access to additional tools like analytics and other features that you don't have when you
have a regular personal account.
6) Match your Instagram handle to
Facebook, Twitter, your website URL, etc.
One thing you need to do or try to do when setting up your accounts is to make sure all your handles/usernames/etc.
for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are all the same. Now the easiest and best thing to do is to make sure that the
handles match whatever your website URL is. But if you can't get Instagram and Facebook or Twitter with your URL
or your URL is just too long, shorten your usernames and get what makes sense making sure they can all match. And
then worst-case scenario, purchase the URL that matches your shortened username separately so you can have that
URL and just forward it to your main website.
7) Think “image rst.”
As we mentioned before, Instagram is all about beautiful images, and you want to make sure that your account has
those nicer images. This is where your business may want to hire a professional photographer to take photos to
create a photo library you can use on an ongoing basis and invest in hiring a graphic designer to help create graphics
with these photos.
Instagram has evolved a little bit to where there are very successful meme or more satirical accounts, sharing more
funny, non-professional images. But for your business, you'll likely want to have beautiful photos that truly highlight
your brand.

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This is something that many businesses don't realize, or just choose to ignore, but Instagram doesn't allow you to
place a clickable link in your social copy unless it’s an ad. You’ve probably seen people and organizations do this, and
they'll end up having a long link in their image description, and it's not clickable.
8) Don't include links in your post copy.
And let me share the hard truth with you. You'll seldom write a compelling enough description to make somebody
manually type out or try to copy and paste that link URL from your social text to an actual web browser.
In all likelihood, they will just scroll past and not even deal with it.
9) Use a link aggregator tool or something
similar.
Going off the previous section about people not being able to click on links in your social media posts, you still want
to be able to drive traf c to your site in non-advertising ways. One way to do this is by using a tool or a service to
create a landing page with a collection of links. You could do this on your own by creating a website landing page
with links that you can use to add current items. However, there are special services that do this, such as the
following:
https://linktr.ee/
https://lnk.bio/
https://www.contactinbio.com/
We're not going to go into all the bene ts here, but while some just offer a list of links, others replicate your image
posts, so that when someone clicks on the replicated image, they are directed to the corresponding URL of your
choice.

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There are many ways you can do this. For example, you can either work it into the actual description itself or place
the hashtags at the end of your description as a long list of hashtags that you want this image to be identi ed with.
Or you can have your image post and then immediately after that have the rst comment, be a bunch of different
hashtags. All this can help ensure that your content will appear with the right hashtag and the right topics within
Instagram.
11) Tag other accounts as applicable.
Whenever you have either another product or want to recognize somebody else in your post, make sure that you are
tagging them within the image or within the description by including the appropriate username, making sure that it
is going to their correct account.
You can notify them that you've tagged them separately so they can add your content in their story, or just
acknowledge that it is there.
On Instagram, hashtags allow you to nd content from users you aren’t already following. Hashtags are especially
important because you can't just search for a phrase - it has to be a hashtag. To nd content, or to be found by people
looking for similar content, you need to include relevant hashtags in your comments or your description. In recent
years, Instagram even launched the ability for people to follow hashtags, not just individual accounts.
10) Use hashtags.