Digital Chai Pe Charcha – How To Use Instagram For Business

The fourth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at Karya Space on Saturday, May 28^th 2016. The turnout for this event was fantastic with over 60 entrepreneurs, working professionals and social media influencers participating in the session. The topic for this session was all about Instagram and how it could be used to leverage business.

Instagram is a very powerful platform which when used correctly can help brands and business reach out to a niche and specific audience. The customers that brands acquire through Instagram can display strong loyalty towards the product or service.

Here’s the presentation that was discussed during the session

[embed]http://http://www.slideshare.net/socialbeat_ss/how-to-use-instagram-for-your-business[/embed]

It was a very interactive session with the participants sharing their personal experiences with Instagram and asking plenty of questions. Here are few tweets shared by participants about the event.

Here’s a quick recap for those who attended the session and for those who could not make it yet would like to leverage Instagram for their business

1. Instagram is a young and an emerging platform and great for Indian brands to get in early
2. Instagram pictures showcase not just a good looking product or a service but a lifestyle
3. High quality and organic pictures work very well on this platform and products need to be showcased with a story
4. Text showcased on images in a creative and aesthetic way can work very well to promote content like blogs and articles
5. Instagram does not allow clickable links on the content accompanying the image. Therefor the bio and the website link becomes extremely important to direct the potential customers to the website
6. Instagram Ads are a great way to reach the relevant target audience. To run ads on Instagram, one needs to use the Facebook ad manager and link the brands Instagram page to the corresponding Facebook page. More details are mentioned in the presentation shared above.
7. Instagram ads work especially well for mobile apps and websites that are mobile optimized
8. It is important to keep track of your followers and unfollowers through apps like Crowdfire, social rank etc
9. Hashtags are very important to help the right audience and can be broadly divided into three categories – Popular, Industry related and Brand specific
10. There are many influencers on Instagram who specialize in a certain industry, eg. Food, beauty, Fashion, Parenting etc. To help reach the right demographic brands need to leverage and tie with these influencers.
11. Using analytical tools available online, it is imperative to understand the progress of the page and even analyze the best performing hashtags
12. Maintaining a steady flow of interesting posts and content is crucial since a long break may result in losing the traction generated over time

While these pointers can help you, like any other platform, Instagram is constantly changing and brands will have to adapt and implement these changes. In fact over the past couple of days, Instagram has rolled out a massive algorithm change due to which you will see posts based on your interests rather than chronological order. The reach due to hashtags will decrease and your followers will be more important than ever.

What has you experience with Instagram been so far? Do share your feedback in the comments!