Business account on Instagram paid or not. SMM tactics for promoting a commercial account on Instagram
Instagram it has long been transformed from a platform with a huge number of personal accounts into a commercial territory where both small and large companies are successfully developing. Today it has become more convenient thanks to another innovation. What it is and how it works will tell ussmm-specialist,Evgenia Ashirova.
This article will focus on the business account on Instagram. This option has long been expected, since the organization of work with personal accounts did not always meet the needs of commercial users. And finally, Instagram has become a commercial site officially.
How to connect a business account on Instagram?
At the moment, this function is available for all accounts - just go to the settings and switch to the commercial profile. But for this you will need a pre-created business page on Facebook with administrator rights.
The mechanism itself is quite simple:
1. Go to the settings.
2. Click "switch to company profile".
3. We pass authorization through a personal Facebook account.
4. Select the desired business page in the drop-down list (if you have several).
5. We go to the field with the information - if necessary, edit it. The caveat is that Instagram automatically reads information from a page on Facebook. Therefore, if you have already filled in all the columns (phone; address with an index and city, which must not be typed manually, but be sure to choose from the drop-down list; email), then you do not need to enter anything. You can always go into editing profile information and change all this information to current.
6. Save and watch the result.
What will the business page on Instagram look like?
Below are screenshots of examples of how your page will look:
Consider each new design element separately:
1. An active contact button appears in the commercial account - this is a huge plus, since it takes the need to copy something in order to call or write a company. When you click on the button, a drop-down list appears - make a call, write to email, see the path. 
2. A column is visible below - in which the direction of activity of this commercial account is indicated in light gray — it can be an organization, a blogger, a writer, a photographer — you can change all these settings in the information column on Facebook.
3. The address of your organization or point of issue appears, and this is undoubtedly a huge plus, since the information is presented quite fully and the precious place in the BIO that we previously spent on describing the location of your company is freed up.
4. The most interesting is the appearance of statistics, which is visible as a bar graph in the upper right corner:
The statistics themselves are quite limited in terms of indicators - this is only data on reach, engagement, impressions of posts and data on subscribers, age and gender characteristics and geo-positioning. Statistics can be viewed for each post separately or in a general summary. It’s great that this function appeared, since now you can track the conversion of the post - the number of people who viewed to those who completed the action and understand in detail which audience is subscribed to your page. Based on this, you can build your advertising campaign and content strategy.
Today this option looks very interesting. But time will tell how much it will pay off and whether it will be necessary to abandon commercial accounts in pursuit of a cheaper click on promotion. The fact is that Instagram continues the policy of Facebook, and they have a clear attitude to commercial projects - if you want to be seen, pay. But at the same time no one limits us, and at any moment we can switch back to a personal account.
In the meantime, we will wait for additional advertising options to be connected for business accounts, which I will tell you about.
Work for Two is a creative project promotion agency founded by Daria Shcherbakova and Evgeny Lyudny just a couple of months ago. In addition to creating visual content and promoting in social networks, the guys offer services for the development of web design and advertising campaigns in any area of \u200b\u200bbusiness, as well as shoot and visual merchandising for fashion stores.
Despite the fact that the project is very young, both of its founders managed to get good experience in the field of fashion and smm. Daria works as a stylist and for about a year has been developing her own brand of knitwear Knitwear Studios: she designs models, develops content and promotion strategies. Prior to that, she was a stylist in Want, Russian Room and Gate31.
Eugene has long been involved in the management of retail stores of various segments, from working with commerce to staff and visual merchandising. About three years ago, he founded his own clothing brand Selfhood.
Work for Two is currently partnering with the Seasons Store, osome2some and Jana Segetti. We talked with the founders of the agency and found out what content on social networks can increase audience loyalty, whether it is worth specifying open access prices and how to properly configure mass follow-up programs.
How to plan content for social networks
As for the text: write briefly and on the case, adding a little mood to the text. The golden mean is important: the text should not be too big, but not small. If the account is commercial, you need to write so that you buy. Indicate how and where you can buy the product, what number to call or write the article on which the thing can be found in the store.
Visual content for Instagram is best planned at least a week in advance. For convenience, you can make a collage and compose photos in different ways to see what is combined with and which pictures are better to interchange. There are many programs for collages. You can, for example, make them in Frame artist directly on the phone.
Try to keep the content varied, create your own “headings”: layouts, details, materials, tips, breakfasts, etc. It’s better not to mix commercial and personal content in your account. It looks strange when, after beautiful photos from a lookbook, your selfie appears on the background of the sea.
In order for your account to be beautiful and sustained in a single style, you need to constantly arrange “taste injections”, be inspired by European brands, and look at Pinterest. Find a brand with a similar style and don't be afraid to copy any ideas, tricks. Anyway, you will get a unique product, something of your own.
How to create visual content
Shooting on an iphone or camera is a personal matter for everyone who likes as much as possible and how best it turns out. But, probably, shooting on the phone is a little easier, because you can take a lot of frames and immediately process them in a photo editor.
The purpose of a commercial account is to sell, so the product must be clearly visible. In terms of lookbooks, white or gray backgrounds are best suited for this. To get a good photo, you must first make a high-quality shooting: find good light, think through the composition, correctly convey the color of the thing. Then you need a minimum of processing and it can be done directly on the phone. If, for example, your account is designed in light colors, and a yellow tint appears on the photo, this can well be fixed. If you shoot on a camera, you can set the “white balance” function, if on a phone, you can whiten a photo using the Facetune application to get an emphasis on things, rather than on a yellow wall.
Photos from Instagram Knitwear Studios
There are many editors for processing photos, and we usually use VSCO, Facetune, InstaflashPro, Snapseed, PS Express and Adobe Photoshop on PC. For example, for a Knitwear Studio account, we most often use VSCO filters. But all is well in moderation: it is important not to “twist” the filters at full power so that the picture looks natural.
For each account, it is important to consider a single graphic style: one or two fonts suitable for each other, graphic solutions for different needs - from the inscription sale to the competitions.
Prices: indicate or not
When a person logs into the store’s Instagram account, the first thing he wants to know is the price, the material and where the thing can be bought. There should be as few steps as possible between the first impression of the thing and the purchase, then the visitor is more likely to become your buyer.
In addition, marketers and advertisers argue that the value of a thing needs to be written, because otherwise a potential buyer can make a conclusion about the price himself. Another effective trick is to write a lower price threshold if it varies, for example, for different models.
Photos from Instagram Knitwear Studios
Even if the Instagram account of your brand is more fashionable, and the prices you specify on the site, try to inform your account visitors about this promptly and in a polite manner.
Despite all these arguments, we cannot say that prices should always be indicated. In some cases, if you indicate the price and it is low, this may give the impression of a cheap Chinese store. And if your brand produces or sells expensive things, the high price may scare the buyer at the first stage, and he will not want to find out what the price is justified for, but simply leave the account.
Emoji, tags and geotags
Emojis on Instagram are perceived normally if they are in moderation, one or two. The same story with tags - ideally, there should be three or four, certainly not more than ten. When you develop a brand, you can put more tags, but when a brand is already recognizable, you can leave only your personal tag, for example, with the name of the brand. If three years ago all SMMs wrote that tags are a mandatory item in marketing, now a large number of tags attract only spam.
Geotags are often set taking into account the most popular places in the city. And, probably, this works if you took off your jacket, posted it with the “DLT” geotag, and users subscribe to you and think that your store is located there. But this is a cheap and not very correct way of PR.
How to increase audience loyalty
Need to communicate with the audience, ask questions. The comments under the photo are an indicator that the brand lives and is interesting to people. Some photographs can collect 20 comments, and some none. Perhaps your customers prefer to communicate in direct, but there should still be comments under the posts. If they are not, ask your friends to at least put “hearts”. It is almost like a desire to go to a store where a lot of people are crowding. And most often I don’t want to go to an empty store.
Another way to increase loyalty is through contests, but they should be as simple as possible. For example, a good gift for repost and the waiting period for the results of the draw is not longer than a week, otherwise the participants will simply want to remove the picture from their account. But contests have their drawbacks. Firstly, this is a decrease in sales, while the participants are waiting for a debriefing. Secondly, there are always “freeloaders” who participate in all contests and are unlikely to plan to buy anything from you in the future. The third minus is the high costs for each subscriber in case of unsuccessful organization of the competition or an expensive prize. Therefore, it is worth considering the cost of the competition: divide the budget of the competition by the number of participants and get the cost of each new subscriber.
How to “upgrade” your account
An example is the brand of knitwear Love to Knit. Daria reports: This is a family brand that we came up with with mom and sister. Initially, the brand did not exist on a professional level, but rather as handmade. We knitted something, took pictures and several times a month posted photos on Instagram. Over the three years of the brand’s existence, there were approximately 3000-4000 subscribers in our account.
Instagram Knitwear Studios
At some point, I decided to come to grips with the account. To begin with, I completely changed the concept and began to position knitwear as something fashionable, rather than ordinary handmade. She began to take new photos, while trying to shoot content with a margin of a week. Then she began working with bloggers and connected promotion programs. Over the year, the number of subscribers has grown to 15,000 and sales have increased significantly. After that, word of mouth began to work and there were regular new customers. I can say that now through Instagram brand sales are much better than through showrooms. At the moment, the brand has undergone rebranding and is now called Knitwear Studios, and my sister continues to work on Love to Knit. ”
How to set up mass follow programs
In order for the audience you want to subscribe to, you need to configure filters and set fairly stringent conditions in mass follow-up programs. For example, you can select a language and set the Cyrillic alphabet, then the program will like and subscribe only to those who have Russian under the last 30 photos. Or you can put the filter in Arabica, Chinese or Indian. You can also set the preference for a certain number of subscribers, subscriptions and photos of the user, the presence of avatars and publications in the account.
Many people think that a large number of subscribers is the main thing. But in fact, there should be a balance of the ratio of likes to subscribers, and the most important thing is the comments and messages in direct. We specifically “clean” subscribers when we start working with a new project and understand that these are bots and not our audience at all. If after promotion under the posts in the account spam appears, it must be deleted so that there is no feeling of an inactive account.
Analytics Software
The innovation of this summer from Instagram is the ability to translate the page into a business account. The page owner has access to analytics under those photos that were posted after connecting a business account. Try to record statistics every week, so you can analyze your account and understand which visual content works best.
Personal analytics can also be viewed on iconosquare or through Work for Two: we recently launched the new Instagram Promotion product. In your personal account you can track your statistics, analytics, as well as request analysis of competitor accounts. Another resource for competitor analysis is
We continue to search for solutions for ordinary business. What to do if you do not have an IT company, an Internet marketing agency or monthly millions of dollars? Sergey Smorovoz, a recognized master of promotion on Instagram, answers this question.
They often tell me: "D and it’s great to promote selfie sticks on Instagram, phone cases and more, and you try to come up with tactics for a normal business!"OK, no question. Consider the tactics of SMM promoting on Instagram a commercial account of a company engaged in the construction of wooden houses.
A couple of years ago, I was commissioned to audit the site by the Finnish company IKIHIRSI®, which manufactures wooden houses in Finland with the aim of opening a Russian branch. The business is seasonal, but, as it turned out, with a very large non-profit semantic core that can be spud year-round, from alpine slides and paths with natural stone in the spring to heating systems and stoves for the winter. It is this feature that I would recommend taking as a basis for the basic tactics of year-round promotion of an account for wooden houses, without going into seasonal hibernation.
Tactics number 1. Attracting a New Audience
Take all semantics from the SEOs, filter out queries containing phrases such as “how”, “what”, “what”, etc. Break them down into seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter, all-weather. Then filter queries, contents: “decoration”, “wiring”, “system”, “installation”, etc. Break them into seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter, all-weather. So you can form quite a lot of different groups of requests that describe the problems and concerns of users at different times of the year. To verify this, you can check in Yandex.Wordstat.
The graph shows that the highest interest in home insulation occurs in October-November and January-February of each year. Surely, other interests of users who are interested in the subject of “wooden house” also fall on this period.
Knowing this, you can prepare a whole series of photo publications with expert comments to satisfy the interest of users, and at the same time, together with the company that produces “SUPER-LUBRICANT” for insulation or “SUPER-BATTERIES” for heating, you can conduct a joint campaign and earn more on their advertising .
I specifically took the period of the “dead season” in the industry to show on this example how to work with a potential audience all year round.
Tactics number 2. We work with existing subscribers
If in the first tactic the emphasis was more on attracting a new audience and increasing subscribers, then in the second tactic we will analyze an example of how to constantly keep existing subscribers “in good shape”. Indeed, sooner or later, most people cope with current problems, and looking at the same thing every year becomes boring. So that they do not lose interest in your account, you need to come up with a multi-part story. And what could be more interesting than watching live, how is another house being built?
So we made the formwork for the foundation of the future home
With a frequency of 1-2 times a week, when the season has begun, photographs of the phased construction of a house or a group of different houses with comments on the features of this particular construction and accompanied by photographs of the surrounding nature and its beauty are uploaded. Here, another variant of various advertising bonuses and co-branding may arise. The owner of the land for construction, as well as various contractors can also be advertised in these publications, as was the case with heating batteries in tactics No. 1, well, you understand 🙂
Tactics number 3. Beauty will save the world
Construction and repair - this is certainly useful, but without beauty on Instagram - nowhere!
It is simply necessary to dilute all this technical photo-documentary and delight the eyes of users with various beauties and seductive pictures. Beautiful photos of finished houses, beautiful decoration and interior in the house, beautiful paths, slides and ponds - all this should be in every visible area of \u200b\u200bthe screen on your mobile phone. Considering that on average the user always sees 9 photos in full and plus another 3 photos in part, it is necessary to post 1-2 pictures with various beauties at least every 6-9 photos and please their subscribers:
So you will not only save everyone who has subscribed, but also gain new subscribers, any beautiful photos are appreciated on Instagram.
Tactics number 4. Use tags correctly
This tactic applies to all options for publishing photos that were listed above, and it consists in the correct selection of hashtags by the type of three waves, which I described in my blog (there you can also find a hashtag selection service). The essence of tactics No. 4 is simple: it is necessary to maximize the reach of a potential audience located in a "cloud of non-commercial interests." It is important to understand that people do not sit on purpose and do not monitor the issuance of photos by hashtag #wooden house. All these people need to be constantly sought and interested in their usual environment and the sphere of their interests at the moment.
It is also necessary to take into account the emotional coloring of the state of people who publish their photos with a certain hashtag and look at other photos on the same pool of hashtags. Most likely, people who publish a group selfie from a wedding or from a conference will not be interested in your photos of houses and especially photos on floor insulation. More thematic here may be such hashtags as: #rest, #nature, #sunset, #dawn, #two, that is, everything that suits a calm, cozy and romantic atmosphere. This list can be continued and expanded.
Suddenly two young people are sitting in a country house drinking #coffee # alone, and the floors in the house are cold, and she already told him more than once, here bang, your photo appeared with floor insulation in the tape using the hashtags #coffee and #one, next to their romantic photo. An accident? I don’t think so! 🙂
Here the field is not plowed and for each type of photo you need to select your hashtags that contain not only your thematic ones - # house and # wooden house.
Tactics number 5. Try auto promotion
Most likely, many of you have already heard about the automatic promotion services on Instagram. To convince you that they are not worth using, or vice versa, I will not recommend any of them for promotion. I can only say if you are planning to use such services, I highly recommend not contacting any web services, it’s better to have desktop programs that run from your computer, and then with all the precautions and with an eye on limits that should not be exceeded.
Why? I will explain. Web services for the most part use your username / password and sign you up without asking for your Instagram accounts. No one will give you guarantees that they will not use your login and password to subscribe you to any other account in their own selfish interests. There are also no guarantees that their service will not be hacked by hackers and will not steal your data, which attackers can then use to hijack your account. Therefore, it is relatively safer to install software on your computer and independently manage the process, although there are a lot of nuances here and the risks are not completely excluded.
Audience: Example
Here are 5 simple tactics for working with a commercial account on Instagram, which I often use myself. That’s how it all works, gathering a target audience from the social network to commercial sites, which is sometimes even more targeted than the audience attracted to the site through other channels.
This audience within one Instagram can also be segmented by various parameters and highlight the most effective methods of communication.
In Metric, traffic from Instagram is defined as “Direct Visits,” which many sites are very lame, I must say, but this is not in our case. The comparative table below shows two segments for the same time period in each. The left column is “Direct calls” to the traffic from Instagram, and the right column is “Direct calls” taking into account the traffic from Instagram:
On Visits there was an increase due to Instagram by 60%, on Failures an improvement by 14%, on Depth Views an increase by 35%, and by Time on the site the increase was two-fold! In general, this gave an increase in targeted out-of-search traffic and improved the overall picture on the site. I think that comments are unnecessary here.
Have a good promotion and more loyal customers, but do not forget that in many respects customer loyalty also depends on your promotion tactics.
Promotion of a personal account on Instagram cannot be successful without this. To sort the tags, you can use the manual mode or a special program, of which there are many in the network. In the first case, we independently generate hashtags for our publication, in the second case, the generation is performed by a special program that also shows us the quantitative data of a tag. When promoting a profile on Instagram, we must use both Russian tags and tags in English, French, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc. This will bring a greater response. When promoting a business account on Instagram, we should use only Russian, Latin or English tags, unless your business is focused on foreign customers.
User activity
There is not much to write here. Instagram developers recommend that you post and click publications of other users more, may even launch automatic likes to get their loyalty to your page.
Promotion of a commercial account on Instagram
Promotion of a commercial account on Instagram is slightly different. Various channels are used for promotion. The most interesting and useful Instagram publications are broadcast on the company's personal website, in communities, groups, and on other pages of social networks. This is the simplest thing you should do. Next, we’ll analyze a few more practical recommendations.
Instagram Orientation
Statisticians found that the promotion of an online store on Instagram is more suitable for those businessmen who sell clothes, cosmetics, exclusive products made by their own hands, etc.
Subscribe to Instagram for Business Blog
Optimize your Instagram
Instead of a photograph, a company logo or main product. Nick is the name of your company or the essence of your business. The description briefly about your proposal, contact details and a link to the site.
In the photo tape of goods
Let your tape become a storefront. Professional photos, although not a priority, but if you can make high-quality photos, use this.
In the tape entertainment photos
From time to time, you can upload photos of an entertaining nature. Do not overdo it. No black humor and a religious component.
Hashtag Analysis
Be active
As in the case of promoting a personal account.
Post a video
A very powerful thing, especially when you are promoting a home goods store on Instagram, etc. Demonstrate clearly what your product can do.
Contests, contests and more contests
Get the attention of users and new subscribers. Reflect the course of the competition in great detail in the tape, attract the target audience.
In addition, to promote business accounts on Instagram, you can use additional discounts for subscribers: new, old, all. Be sure to collect statistics using standard metrics. The recommendations given are only part of the overall strategy. A product promotion plan on Instagram can be much larger.