When it comes to growing your business and the presence of your brand, Instagram is one of the most important tools available. Whether you’re growing a small local business or scaling to international reach, the perception of your brand is critical. Human nature is drawn to what is familiar along the path of least resistance. In order to get the attention of new customers, you must make your branding feel familiar and inviting. Instagram business pages are the perfect platform to project your brand image to a large and highly targeted audience. The growth hacks below will help your posts enter the feeds of prospective customers and establish familiarity with your brand. 

1. Consistency 

The content of your Instagram posts matters to build a consistent brand image, but that isn’t the only consistency to pay attention to; the frequency of your posts is a huge factor in growing your brand! By consistently posting at least once a day with meaningful content, you are showing the Instagram algorithm that you are an active account and it will help rank your posts. This strategy also gives your followers something to look forward to each day; increasing their familiarity with your brand and reducing the friction of page discovery. Make the commitment to posting at least once a day!

2. Timing 

Not only should you focus on the amount of posts, when you post is just as important. The first 30 minutes after a post goes live is very critical. Instagram rewards posts that receive large amounts of engagement in this time window by adding it to the explore page and ranking it higher for the hashtags used. Because of this, you need to understand who your target audience is and find out when they are the most likely to be using the app. You want to make sure it has it receives the maximum number of eyes and potential for likes, comments, and shares. 

Our strategy to target business professionals revolves around the usual 9 to 5 work schedule. We focus our three daily posts on 8:30, 12:07, and 5:30-7. The first post of the day is saw by people killing time before they start their daily activities, our second post targets people after they have warmed up their lunch, and the range of 5:30 to 7 is meant to capture people after the get home from work. We vary this posting time to try to reach people before and after eating dinner. Plan from the perspective of your audience!

3. Tagging 

As annoying as the word “hashtag” has become, there is a reason its popularity has stuck. Using up to 30 relevant hashtags increases your algorithm penetration significantly. With the explore page and opportunity for users to follow specific hashtags, your posts can be shown to a captive audience outside of your own, increasing your organic reach. 

Not all hashtags are created equally. Depending on the size of your following audience and the amount of engagement they provide, having your post show up in a feed for #blessed (which is tagged by 112,000,000) is very difficult to do unless you have a major following. Focus on the smaller hashtags that are easier to rank under and sprinkle in some of the major ones. 

For a local business, location tags are also very important. Locations have the same search and discoverability as hashtags do. Best practice is to use both types of tagging to increase your chances of local people discovering your business and content.

4. Alt Text 

Another new and important type of tagging is alt text (alternate text). Instagram uses this type of tagging to describe an image to the vision impaired, but has other benefits. By telling Instagram exactly what is in your image, it helps the algorithm decide what your content is about and who to distribute it to according to their interests. We personally have witnessed a night and day difference in the attention of a post using effective alt text versus neglecting to utilize it. Use these free additional tags to your advantage! 

If you incorporate these 4 Instagram hacks to your posting strategy, your business will increase its organic reach to a targeted audience and familiarize them with your brand. Your brand image and authority will shine through and help convert casual observers to paying customers.