Some quick tips to get you started and doing well on Instagram

Instagram, which launched in October 2010, is an ever increasing platform that has a healthy 800 million users nearly 60 per cent of who are 18 to 29 year olds.
 
Australians are using Instagram an average of thirty eight times each week and we’re spending 24 to 27 minutes on Instagram, so you have to make sure your posts are eye catching.
 
The advantages of using Instagram are that it:

• is a great visual aid
• reaches a slightly different audience than Twitter and Facebook
• can link to Facebook (Facebook now own Instagram), Twitter, Flickr and other social media accounts, which is a great way of efficiently providing content
• is fun
• has built in filters and photo effects to enhance your pictures

offers an insta stories function, which means you can share your life in real time and it disappears after twenty four hours. Insta stories has 100 million daily active users in just two months. 

• can be great for hashtag competitions
• has a lot of celebrity users
• is mainly used by a younger demographic.

 
The downsides of using Instagram are that:
•          it’s mainly a visual medium, so it’s rare that you will get to provide a lot of text
•          a wider audience don’t get to reach you as easily as on Facebook and Twitter
•          it’s not ideal as a standalone, it works best in conjunction with other platforms,
•          the use of hashtags are paramount with Instagram
•          it’s predominantly a mobile phone app so you will need a smart phone to use
•          if you offer a service which doesn’t have a lot of visual aspects, it can be hard to come up with content
•          you can’t hyperlink posts, meaning that people will have to manually type in your URL, which greatly reduces the chance of them doing so.

Since seventy per cent of posts don’t get seen, here are four key tips to keep in mind whenever you post to Instagram. 

1. Post one to two photos per day. Tailwind recommend posting daily for best effect. In fact, they have shown that ‘…you can more than double your follower growth rate again by moving from posting 1-6 times per week to once or more per day.’

2. Include relevant hashtags. Posts with at least one hashtag average 12.6% more engagement.

3. Make sure there is a clear link back to your website in your bio. If you are posting a photo or image that you own, make sure there is a watermark with your website URL, logo, name or that it’s mentioned in the caption section.
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4. Keep your aesthetic consistent. That means all your images should look similar and your captions have a similar message. ‘60% of the top brands on Instagram use a consistent filter,’ according to Hootsuite.

And finally, CoSchedule has handily discovered that the best time to post on Instagram for the most engagement is at 2pm or 5pm on Mondays or Thursdays.

Drop your Instagram handle in the comments below! For some Insta inspo check out Great art in ugly rooms and Spike the beetle.