Instagram, this is a social media platform pretty much everyone is crazy about. From the boomers to zoomers, millennials to gen z, you can find everyone on Instagram, clicking pictures and capturing moments over posts, reels, IGTV, or stories.
With such popularity and usage, Instagram is no more limited to a platform for personal profiles meant to connect with friends and families. Instagram introduced business accounts way in the past and businesses have left no stones unturned to leverage the benefits out of this.
The platform is not just for making some new friends or connecting with the old ones, but the businesses efficiently salvage it for gaining more leads and conversions and establishing their brand value.
Moreover, there are many other monetary benefits hat businesses can achieve through Instagram and they surely want to leverage those benefits too. In all these attempts, every Instagram Business User is in the race to get more followers so they can turn to social media influencers.
However, most of the times, businesses have to get it the hard way. But there is no reason you must struggle to increase your followers. There are many simple ways for that, and none of that is paid.
Yes! You can get quick and easy organic leads; all you need to do is strategize!
One of the easiest strategies is using the Instagram Stories to the fullest.
While everything keeps changing over Instagram, stories are a feature that remain constant. You get additions to them, but the way you upload the stories and use them never changes. Yet, they remain a less explored area.
Businesses remain so busy keeping their focus on posting that they just unknowingly ignore the power possessed by Instagram stories to gain more followers and grow the accounts to convert monetary benefits. If you are doing that too, it’s probably time that you start exploring this unexplored area and leverage it for your social media presence and growth.
There’s no reason that your stories need to show only for 24hours. The “Highlights” feature can help you keep stories on your account forever.
Leverage this feature to create your brand story. Create stories explaining your brand, mission, and vision. Put your services and solutions on the stories. If you are an e-commerce store, you can probably put up some offers that you are always going to offer to your customers in the highlights section.
Such highlights will make your account more appealing; people will be able to know you better, connect better, and that simply shall mean more followers and more engagements.
This trend came in and went out before you could have known a lot about it. That’s a shame!
Takeovers have tremendous capabilities to bring social media success for your business. You can connect with influencers and request them to create exclusive content for your brand that will be more relatable to the followers. This will help cross-direct the followers to your account as well as the influencer’s account and that will be a win-win for both, your brand as well as the takeover host.
You can promote the takeover on your story as well as the influencer’s. This will create a traction. The influencer can run stories on your account and people will surely be interested in them. This will not be something like a sponsored post or sponsored story on any influencer’s account.
Instead, you will be able to personally connect with the influencers, they will personally handle your accounts, and instead of just promoting your brand through a tag on post in their wall (where you can only wish for some followers to come through), they will give people an insight into your brand, create your brand story, letting people know what your business does. This will be more authentic and you are sure to see your follower count jump with this.
These are the features that make Instagram stories all the more different and beneficial for the businesses. People are always interested in answering questions or voting between options available to them. This is what makes polls and quizzes on Instagram a great way to engage people with your brand.
Not only will people engage with your brand, you can use the polls and quizzes for audience research as well. You can conduct polls driven at finding audience interests. You can ask people what kind of content they are interested in. This will give you a much better insight into content creation for your social media accounts and you will be able to exactly deliver the content that the audience waits and searches for.
When you offer the audience what they want, there is no reason for them to not follow you. So, you get quality follower, who not only follow you but also engage with your account and enhance the scope of lead generation and conversion for you.
Good content shall give better results when presented in the best ways. This is what you have to do when designing your Instagram stories. With Instagram, you have unlimited capabilities for spicing up the content you are posting. You can add GIFs and stickers, you can play with the fonts. Do that!
People love to see the contents that have a unique edge to them and you can create that for your stories by using different font styles for the content and adding up relevant GIFs and stickers.
You can even add custom stickers and GIFs that may have your face or something more personally related to your product and services. That will come as a personal branding.
Using these options is very engaging and when you are able to bring engagements, you can expect to have increased number of followers.
As a business, you surely have competitors. However, when it’s about social media, the focus remains on converting the competition to friendship.
You don’t really have to go by the ‘Competitor Who?” approach here, but you don’t need to be a rival with the competing brands either. In this business world, keeping in a friendly competition is the fair and more strategic way to go, especially on the social media. So, giving shoutouts to your competitors may seem like throwing an axe to your own feet, but it’s not at all like that.
It’s more like a way to build relations with your competing brands and you can surely expect a shout back. If that happens, you are driving followers to your account too. Even if that does not happen, you are putting content on your account and that’s going to bring engagement is some way for sure.
So, it’s a win-win for you and you have really got nothing to lose by giving or taking shoutouts except for some more time of your in welcoming the new followers and thanking the brands that are giving a shout back.
So, these are some ways you can leverage the Instagram stories to bring in more followers to your account. Besides stories, you need to make sure that you are regular with your posts and are delivering great content that appeals to your followers as well as the newer audiences so that you not only have followers in your list, but engagements too.
Social Media is a great channel for you to grow your business and the only way to go is leveraging it through unique and creative strategies. So, go for it and see your business become a brand.
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