Instagram is quite intimidating to business owners. It has a reputation as a time-waster, a distraction or “not worth my time”. I’m here to say: you could not be more wrong!
In the past six months I’ve seen a massive shift in my own businesses fortunes because of Instagram. I’ve previously talked about how much I love the micro-targeting that you can get with this platform.
Today my account hit 800 followers which is a pretty huge milestone considering I had zero followers six months ago.
There are three reasons I was able to achieve this:
- I got committed to mastering the platform and dedicated about 15-30 minutes a day in my account. When I’m on Instagram I do two things. Follow back the people who liked my content and make authentic comments on other peoples posts I connect with.
-
- I started using HopperHQ to automate my efforts. I work on social on Mondays and try to schedule for a week or two in advance. If I don’t have new content, I recycle and sometimes, I’ll change up the hashtags. The other thing Hopper does is SUGGEST hashtags. This feature alone is worth the $19 a month. The reason is that it shows you how many people follow any given hashtag. Why post to an audience of 200, when you can post to an audince of 250,000! This has also allowed me to create new audiences. For example, I do a lot of medals for Beach Ultimate Frisbee. I started tagging #beachvolleyball and got a heap of followers.
- I stopped being afraid to post too much. Neil Patel says to post every 3 hours! Yikes! Great advice for huge accounts. But for accounts with less than 500 follower, it may be too much. Watch Neil Patel’s Video.
Take a moment to watch my screencast that shows you about the scheduling and hashtag suggestion tools.
