Positive news continues to pour in regarding Instagram and its impact on brands that want to communicate and sell online [Read also “ How to sell on Instagram ”]. The most recent is the one related to the enabling worldwide, without restrictions , of the possibility of advertising on Instagram : if Google Adwords always remains quite difficult to deal with without due preparation, Facebook and Instagram open up new scenarios and become refined and affordable tools in the hands of the much-maligned Social Media Specialists . The figure of the professional who works online, on Social, goes from a simple communicator to an “advertiser” with exclusive, economic and incredibly effective skills and means. In my opinion, this is a significant evolution.
As business and interest around the platform grow
So do the studies that demonstrate how to be successful on Instagram, which recently surpassed 400 million users . The most interesting thing, in my opinion, is how a common thread is emerging between the production of online content (for your sites or blogs) and the best practices to follow on particular and apparently simple Social Media like Instagram. Wanting to summarize this direct thread between blogs and Social in a very dry bullet list… 1. Publish a lot The frequency of publication combined with a clever use of tags to narrow down your topics guarantees you an exponential visibility to those users who are interested in that specific topic (for example, appearing in the random image stream more frequently or in keyword searches). 2. Show your face I’ll explain this better later, but as with sites and blogs, the more personal and subjective input, the better the results .
People want emotions, opinions and personal experiences
3. The importance of texts Beyond the tags, which are a must, even in a totally visual Social Network like Instagram, texts and captions play a fundamental role in contextualizing images and supporting storytelling (which is so cool… “if you don’t do storytelling you’re out!”). Even calls to action and the simple insertion of the word “like!” in the iraq email list comments would cause a surge in engagement and likes (sources at the bottom of the article). The success among Social Media Strategists and Copywriters of apps like , as they tell you how effective the copy you are writing is. In short, people’s online way of thinking tends to be uniform over time and across the different social touchpoints available to the various brands that sell and tell their stories online.
And this is a great opportunity to get in touch more
Here, then, is a handbook that comes from statistics on almost 1.5 million photos analyzed and over half a million Instagram users… 6 Best Practices to Know When Using Instagram The more tags you insert, the more likes and comments you get . Unlike Facebook or Twitter, the ratio on Instagram is directly proportional. So go ahead with the tags, since there is plenty of space (up to 30 can be added). The most effective photo filter? None . Yes, NoFilter is the best choice, followed closely by Willow, Valencia and Sierra (I would have said Lo-Fi and X-Pro II, oh well…). Color saturation in photos: better low saturation, with soft colors .
Between the maximum saturation and the minimum
There is a difference of almost 600% in terms of likes and comments, in favor of desaturated colors. Photos with faces get more likes . Dan Zarrella conducted a survey for Hubspot that showed, thanks to a facial recognition algorithm, that images with people’s faces get as much as 35% more likes. Call to action and captions work : even in this case, the parallel with other web tools is evident, given that even on Instagram the use of motivation and accountability captions, comments and direct calls to action (“like”, “like!”, and similar) makes your publications very effective, increasing the number of likes (+89% of likes). It is increasingly easy to come across accounts like that of Elise and Scott Grice , who in fact use captions as a real space to exchange love letters .
A sort of Instagram Social Blog
Warm colors or cold colors? Somewhat surprisingly, in my opinion, cold colors have a much greater impact on Instagram users: blue, green, and grayscales. Still on the subject of colors, it is better to prefer bright colors, with bright images, with yeezy 350 boost v2s less contrast. According to Dan , brightness and less contrast would multiply by 5 the number of likes and comments you can get. Will we soon talk about Social SEO ? In my opinion, the figure of the Social Media Specialist is increasingly complete and certainly strategic : communication, branding but also performance , with direct results in terms of visibility for a brand and contacts with potential customers (both “organic” and paid).