Steps We’re Taking to Improve Our Business: For Starters, Instagram

If you’ve already been following us on Instagram for a while, you probably know that we have recently stepped up our Instagram game. Big time! If not, we invite you to start following us today! If you’re not on Instagram or don’t know how it works, we can help!

A little background:

Like so many businesses out there, we are constantly soaking up new knowledge about how to attract our ideal clients (amongst a plethora of other tips, tricks, and tidbits of advice). We are frequently taking courses, signing up for more email lists, and doing our best to avoid SOS (shiny object syndrome).

With all the advice and new technology out there, plus actually getting the real work done for our clients, it’s hard to actually implement all of the things we’re learning about. And, as you may have guessed, Instagram is one of those tools that we kept hearing about and needed to at least TRY!

And we KNOW that if we don’t try at least one of the strategies we’ve learned about, we won’t know what will or won’t work. So, in the spirit of baby steps and honing in one thing we can do to improve our business, we decided to try out this whole Instagram madness!

If you don't try something, you won't know whether or not it will work. Click To Tweet

We were already on Instagram, but we were posting random photos, graphics and captions. We were scattering random hashtags here and there, but we really didn’t have a plan or strategy of any sort.

After multiple free Instagram courses, webinars, and ebooks, we set out to JUST DO IT!

So, what exactly have we been doing?

• We started a spreadsheet to analyze our social media followers (on all platforms), website traffic, email opt-in subscribers, etc. Of course, we filled in the numbers and set a reminder to update the spreadsheet each month. We’ll be posting traffic reports and what we’re learning and changing from those numbers soon.
• We cropped a ton of photos and graphics into squares so they are Instagram-ready (anything to be efficient now, which equals saving time later). We also gathered a slew of inspirational quotes, website and biz tips we wanted to share, and client sites we wanted to showcase and put them into a document so we could grab each blurb and add it to one of the photos or graphics we already created.
• We signed up for the Later App so we could upload all of our graphics, write the captions and hashtags for each post, and schedule each post. Immediately, we found it helpful to see what we were posting and when – all on one screen. We knew that a good rule of thumb was to post at least twice a day and that morning and evening were good times.
• We joined a few more Facebook groups where we could meet like-minded people and share our Instagram link so others could follow us and vice versa.

What have we been posting?

We are posting a mixture of inspirational quotes (Monday Mojo), Tuesday Tips (website and general techie tips), Wednesday Websites (featuring our clients’ sites and testimonials), Thoughtful Thursday (inspiration, sharing blog posts, etc.) and Friday Finds/Fun/Freedom (tools, tips, and more related to freelancing and entrepreneurship). According to the experts out there, consistency is key. So, that is always in our mind when writing out the captions and hashtags for our posts.

Why Instagram?

Instagram has made it to the top of the social media pyramid in terms of visitors – 500 million monthly users; 300 million daily users.

We know that we can’t depend on just one platform to deliver content. So, if you don’t happen to randomly come to our website to check out our latest blog post or services; if you don’t see our posts on Facebook; if our newsletter goes into spam; and/or if we don’t send out a newsletter every single time we have a new blog post or service, then you may not know what we’re up to and you may miss out on valuable information. But, if you’re on Instagram (or any of the other social media platforms we regularly post on), you won’t miss a beat! Plus, it’s easy (for you and for us) to hop over to our Instagram account and see all of our posts in a visually-appealing grid layout.

The bottom line is that everyone has their preference on which social media platform(s) they prefer to visit. So, if we skip one that we know our ideal clients are probably using, then we are missing out on potential relationships and engagement.

We’ll be back to share whether or not we have seen any success with Instagram. Success to us will mean multiple things, though – not just new clients. It will mean increased followers, engagement from those followers (likes and, preferably, comments or questions), opt-ins to our valuable freebies, and yes, hopefully, some new clients. What we can say now is the numbers don’t lie. Since we’ve upped our Insta-game, we’ve more than doubled our followers!

Over to you…

Are you on Instagram? If so, are you following us yet? We’d love to connect with you (and follow you back, of course!).
If you’re not on Instagram or want to know more about it, let us know in the comments below.