Are you a B2B or B2C Business? It Doesn’t Matter, You Need to be on Instagram!

Over the past several years, you have probably heard of all the different benefits associated with using social media. From updating content on your Facebook page to sending out tweets from Twitter, all of these services help expand your marketing footprint and bring in more potential customers to your business, all while keeping current clients in the fold. Now, there are far more social media services than Facebook and Twitter, yet you might feel complacent with only using these two. After all, you have a lot on your plate, so expanding to new social media accounts may not sound desirable. However, Instagram is one service you need to not only look into but take advantage of. It does not matter what your business is, whether you sell directly to other businesses or market specifically for customers, all businesses should take advantage of Instagram.

What Exactly is Instagram?

Instagram is an image based social media service. You take a square image, similar to a classical Polaroid and post it onto your personal page (or in this case, your company page). With the image you can provide a caption and tag it with hashtags, just like Twitter. However, unlike Twitter, you are not limited to 140 characters. You can have as long of a message as possible and you can post up to 30 different tags as well.

Facebook owns Instagram but the two are separate entities. It is possible to take a picture and upload it to your Facebook account at the same time (as well as uploading the image to a Flickr and Tumblr page, in addition to a link on Twitter), but the two are separate accounts.

An Image is Worth a Thousand Words

Chances are you have heard this common saying before, but you may not have completely understood it, at least until looking at it from a marketing standpoint. If you sell a specific product, you can write up the best written description of it possible, the text is just never going to do the same justice as an individual image. With Instagram, you instantly can provide other Instagram users with the ability to see the products you are designing and selling.

An Inside Look

Whether you sell to other businesses or individual clients, entities who purchase products and services from you want to see inside of the company. Offering a more intimate look and providing a more human touch can generate interest from clients who never would have looked at your company before. Sharing posts of the people who work for you partaking in out of work activities, such as a baseball game, a business trip or even photos of the company dinner party, all help not only sell the services and products you sell, but your business itself. Few other social media accounts can provide this inside look the way Instagram can, and best of all, you can still share these images on Facebook, so you receive double the coverage.

The Power of Tagging

One reason Twitter is so powerful is because of the hashtag. It instantly brings you in connection with other users who are looking up a similar tag. However, Twitter significantly handcuffs you with the number of tags you can include. With Instagram, this is not a problem. You can tag up to 30 different times, which brings you more exposure and puts you on the screens of more possible clients. Marketing is all about exposing the most key demographics to your products. Instagram makes this far easier than ever before as now you don’t have to pick and choose necessary tags.