Instagram is one of the most popular social networks in America with over 600 million active users per month.

Now, think of how many followers your brand has compared to the amount of Instagram users.

That is much room to grow.

These tips are meant to get your account visible to the most significant accounts on the platform, which will help you get the attention of even more Instagram users.

This might sound difficult, but it is actually much more comfortable on Instagram than other platforms like Facebook or Twitter. On Facebook, less than a third of users even engage with brands or influencers. The platform is just not set up with that goal in mind. Those that do interact with brands often do so because the brand has paid for impressions.

Instagram is different. Over two-thirds of the users interact with an influencer or brand. In fact, the primary purpose of Instagram seems to be to interact with brands and influencers. This makes it the perfect platform for a brand to promote themselves.

Focus on the community

The first step to using Instagram, for any business, is to develop a strong sense of community around your brand.

The fastest way to do this is by interacting with your followers. You can do this by reposting user-generated content, hosting a Q&A, doing a weekly live stream, and responding to comments.

Really, the number of ways that you can interact with your Instagram followers are endless. Anything that gets you talking to your followers and interacting with them is good. Most accounts fail to do this, so everyone will be shocked when someone decides to make an effort to interact with followers.

Use a strong call to action (CTA)

If you have built up an active community, then the next step is to use a strong CTA. This CTA can be to visit your product page, but it does not necessarily have to be that.

Other calls to actions can be getting people to visit your website where you can collect their email address. This puts them in your sales funnel, which will allow you to sell to them later on.

Now, a strong CTA will have a few different components to it.

First, you must give a strong reason to get people to take action. People will not just take action because you ask them nicely. Companies will typically offer something in exchange for an email address, or there will be something good when they click.

The other important about a CTA is making it powerful. You do not want a weak CTA. A weak CTA would be something that uses weak language and is just not very persuasive. A strong CTA will use powerful language that gets people excited. It should also use bright colors and be clearly visible.

Have a good landing page

You cannot have a good Instagram with a bad landing page. If you do, then you will just have a low conversion rate. This will put all the effort you put into building an Instagram page a waste.

In fact, building a good Instagram should be secondary to building a good landing page or website.

A good landing page will be mobile responsive. Mobile responsiveness is a necessity in 2018, and it is even more of a necessity if you plan on linking from Instagram. This is because the vast majority of Instagram users are mobile users.

If they get to your landing page and the page does not load properly, then they will almost always exit out of your page. At that point, getting them to revisit your page is difficult, if not impossible, so make sure you have a good landing page before you start building up your Instagram.

Another part of a good landing page is to make sure that it matches the brand messaging of your Instagram. You do not want someone to visit your landing page from Instagram and be confused at what he or she sees. This will also cause them to quickly exit the page because they will just be confused.

Some reasons they might be confused include the text not matching, a different color scheme, or a diverse product offering. Basically, tell a person where they are going and make sure that they are going to the place they expect. No surprises.

So, for this point. Make sure you have a mobile responsive landing page and website. It would help if you also had the same brand messaging on your website and Instagram. You do not want people to wonder if they are at the same business when they visit.

Automation is your friend

Finally, automation is your best tool for growing your Instagram account. This does not mean you should automate following accounts, liking pictures, or commenting on posts.

Instead, focus on automating your posting schedule. Many tools offer the ability to put all your photos in a queue and automatically post them to your Instagram. You can choose the date, time, and caption.

This means you will never forget to post another post on your account. Plus, you can easily build out a large amount of content at once. Many businesses will spend a week creating all the content for the entire quarter.

However, just because you can create all the content in one week does not mean that you should only use that content. You can still post spontaneous posts or use other user-generated content. If you just started a new Instagram account, you can start off on the right foot when you buy Instagram followers and establish some Social Proof.

The important part with automating is that it frees up your time to focus on the other parts of Instagram, which include commenting and responding to direct messages.

Final Thoughts

All in all, building up an Instagram account to promote your e-commerce is not particularly difficult. Contrary to popular belief, focusing on posting pictures of your products is not usually the way to do it, which is why that was not mentioned on this list. Instead, it would help if you focused on building up a community before posting product pictures.