Hello, today I’m going to be talking about Instagram for business. 

I don’t know about you but I enjoy Instagram as a social media platform more than any other. It just feels more fun and easy to show up there and I particularly enjoy getting ideas for my sewing projects and art-life as a user.

Using Instagram for your business is going to be a bit different to using Instagram for fun and whether you enjoy Instagram or not I think it is a really valuable tool especially if your audience is potentially hanging out there.

In this blog I’m going to cover:

1. The 2 kinds of Instagram business account
2. Types of post
3. Tools I use to create content
4. An easy Instagram content strategy based on content types

2 Kinds of Instagram account

The way I see Instagram for business is that there are basically two kinds of accounts.

One kind of account is someone who starts creating content and finds that people love their content, they find it entertaining. They earn themselves a large following and at some point they realise “Hey I have an opportunity here. I could monetize this account and this could be a business”.

I see a second kind of account where people are service based businesses or product based and they already have a business. They want to use Instagram for marketing so the Instagram account is not the whole business. The Instagram account is for relationship building and communication.

I see myself in this second category and most of my clients are in this second category as well.

The reason I mentioned these two different types of Instagram accounts is that I think a lot of the advice given in the online marketing business world about Instagram is actually better suited to the first kind of Instagram account and not to service based businesses.

Some of the advice I see being delivered about Instagram is that you have to post everyday, you have to create Reels, you have to point and dance and be entertaining to succeed on Instagram.
This is not my experience and so I’m going to share my advice on Instagram.

LISTEN ON THE PODCAST

Your feed is the main place you see posts as a user; when you click on that little house icon in the bottom corner. The feed contains lots of different post types but the main ones that are featured in your grid on your profile are of this three types:

A single image may or may not have a caption,  

A carousel post that may or may not have a caption or 

A video that may or may not have a caption. 

Videos in your grid need to be 60 seconds or less

IGTV is for longer videos; from 1 minute up to 60 minutes. You can preview a snippet of an IGTV video in your feed so it will appear on your grid, and they show up on your profile in the tab with the little play icon, under your highlights. 

One of the great features of igtv is that you can include a clickable URL in your caption. This is not available in normal feed posts.

Stories posts that last 24 hours and then expire. You can add them to your archive and then use them as Highlights. They are portrait dimensions rather than square or landscape and they are highly recommended by me.

Reels are a recent feature that Instagram copied from Tik Tok. They are short videos that can include photos, music, captions, links and more. They are currently very popular however personally I do not create many Reels as I find, while I do get more reach, it is not to the right audience. This may or may not happen to you so I recommend experimenting to see what happens.

Finally, live videos are available on Instagram. I recommend doing these occasionally as they are a great way to connect with your audience and appear later in your igtv feed. The fun thing about going live on Instagram is that you can have other people join you and do fun Q&A days or chats or interviews. 

One thing I especially love to do is share my Instagram posts to Facebook. Personally I do not love posting on Facebook on my page (and that is partly because I don’t find I get very good reach or engagement over there) but I do want to maintain my presence on Facebook so I always share my Instagram posts over to Facebook, that way people can see I am active in my business.

There are a few tools I use when creating content for my Instagram and I thought I would share a couple of those with you. 

But before I go into those I need to be clear with you: you can start simple and just use your mobile phone camera and the Instagram app itself. You don’t actually NEED any other tools at all. I just like to use these and thought I would share. If you are at the very start, just use what you have got (and maybe Canva haha). 

#1 Canva

 I love to use canva for lots of things and I find I use Canva a lot for my Instagram.  I’ll use it to create posts in my feed,  I use it to create Carousels,  feed videos, IGTV  videos  and more.  There is a great free version of Canva that I recommend before you even think about paying for Canva and you can do heaps with a free version. One thing I particularly love about Canva is that it has the templates for Stories and IGTV so I don’t have to worry about giving the size of those posts right.

Here’s a link to Canva

#2 Creator Studio

Creator Studio is a Facebook tool that lets you create posts for Instagram from your desktop or laptop. It Is also a great way to view your results from posting where you can see how many likes and how many comments on different posts. 

Here’s a link to Creator Studio

#3 Headliner App

Headliner.app is another great tool I love to use to create “wave grams” of my podcast episodes or audio recordings. This  is a great way to make videos if you don’t want to get dressed today.  You can use an audio recording and turn it into a video

Here’s a link to HeadlinerApp

An easy strategy based on content types

People always want me to tell them what they should post on Instagram and while I resist I noticed that I have this method that I use which might work for you too. 

The reason this works for me is: I have plenty of time with clients and so many ideas for content that I don’t have any trouble coming up with content ideas. What I sometimes lack is clarity when I get to the moment in my calendar where I know I have to create a post. I have a little brain fart about what it should be. To overcome this I keep a big list of my content ideas and then when I get to Instagram I just pay attention to what type of content am I going to create today and make a post as quickly as I can.

I create content based on content type so for example:

On Monday I create a 60 second video for my feed. On Tuesday I create a Carousel post. On Wednesday I create an IGTV. On Thursday I create a Headliner post and on Friday I create a Reel. For Saturday I might have scheduled a single image post that is text on a white background and has a caption (a bit like a Blog). I always try to post an offer at least once a week. I will create a post for that depending on how I feel. You could do a Live, it could be a little video in the feed, it just depends.  

I also try  to do Story posts every day or as often as possible because I know a lot of people jump on Instagram and start in Stories and hardly get out of Stories into their feed.  So I think it’s important to always have posts in your stories because they only last 24hrs. 

So, I wonder how you find this information: do you have more questions? Please leave a comment or email me and let me know so I can make another blog for you 🙂 

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