7 Instagram Features That’ll Escalate Your Business

With Instagram's constant growth and addition of features, the platform is able to engage its audience in more meaningful ways. How are you optimizing these features to improve your reach and engagement as a user? Knowing what's new and what's coming is highly essential. An effective marketing approach can lead your company to great success. Increasing interaction with your audience and gaining permanent followers will help you grow your business. To boost your business' marketing strategies, here's how you can take full advantage of the features that Instagram has to offer.

1. Reels

   There is no doubt that almost everyone is aware of this feature, which is why you shouldn't miss out on any opportunity to create wholesome reels. The power of reels lies in their ability to reach and engage audiences. To stand out, you must constantly direct your creative energy toward creating unique and engaging reels. You need to also keep up with the trends. You need to act upon these trends as soon as possible before it saturates and loses their hype.

   Tip: You can identify a trending song with the upward arrow on the left of the audio name and use it to create fun, informative and engaging reels.

   

2. Hashtags

   How many times have you, knowingly or unknowingly, made the mistake of randomly typing hashtags without proper research? Hashtag research is a very important aspect of Instagram. Your reach as a beginner depends on your hashtags. Your hashtag can help you reach out to your target audience if used wisely. Instagram recently added a feature that allows you to see how many people found your post through hashtags. This allows you to measure how effective your hashtags are at generating engagement.

   Tip: Ensure your caption has a balanced mix of hashtags based on these categories: Location, Brand, Industry, Community and Descriptive.

   

3. Stories

   Stories are the easiest and the most effective way to get in touch with your audience. It allows you to create a connection with your customers, which is beyond the buyer-seller relationship. Your stories must have a perfect balance of BTS, quizzes, Polls, Countdowns and regular updates. These, in turn, add to the engagement and impressions you desire to have for a successful growth pace for your company.

   Tip: Try being as regular as possible with your stories. This helps your audience stay in touch with you.

4. Stickers in Stories

   Stickers that you use in stories are highly effective as they enhance the experience of the story. You can use various stickers that are relevant to the content in your reel. Stickers also allow you to create story art to share your posts, which makes them all the more attractive and engaging for your audience to click on. Stickers such as quizzes, polls, and countdowns help create hype by adding a touch of engagement.

   

5. Live Sessions

   Live sessions are vital for any business to engage with its audience. Live sessions must not exceed 30 minutes, as it is proven to be just the right duration for a live session. To get more audience to watch your live, you could post stories to inform them about the same, like a countdown would be perfect in such cases. Another way to make live sessions more engaging and interactive would be to invite influencers or famous personalities who are relevant and belong to your niche, this way, their fans or followers will be just as intrigued to watch your live session.

   

6. Direct Messages

   Like they say: "Slide into their DMs", as cliche as it sounds, it definitely works as it adds a personalized touch to your marketing strategy. Your customers get an opportunity to communicate with the brand and feel like they are in control of the conversation. How do I do this? There are multiple ways to do so, drop a message to your most active customers about new collections, reply to their comments through DM, explain the unavailability or price of a product, send your most recent post to them, or reply to the post or story they have tagged you in. It's your choice and your approach on how to message, but what matters most is how creative you get with the messages.

7. Active Participation

   An account that is merely utilized for posting is equal to an inactive and DEAD account. Your Instagram account is only going to thrive when you are actively participating and engaging with other accounts that are both your followers and non-followers. Keep a close eye on who is tagging your business and interact with those posts/reels by commenting or posting it on your story.

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