10 Reasons Why Marketing on Instagram is In

Social media has been one of the perfect ways to share your business and make it popular. It has been closely as effective as word of mouth, which is almost the same because most people spend their time in front of their computers, logged in to their social media accounts, whether it be for personal or business use.

Instagram is one of the the few social media sites where marketing has been a blast. At first, Instagram was just a mobile application where you can post and share your everyday photos. As the years pass by, it is proven to be one of the most effective marketing platforms for entrepreneurs to advertise their business and to reach their target audience.

Here are the top ten reasons why Instagram will help your business grow:

1. Instagram is a visual platform.

What customer wants in an advertisement is to clearly see what a business offers them. Customers want to keep it that way: advertisements with visual and short messages. By that way, it makes them more interested on what the business is offering.

2. Instagram reaches a wider audience.

According to Craig Smith’s By The Numbers: 51 Interesting Instagram Statistics, since its launch date in October 2010, Instagram instantly grew to 150 million users as of December 2013, over 50% of these are retailers. With this large number of audience, why would someone not notice your business?

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3. Instagram is user-friendly.

Even kids nowadays have an Instagram account. 8-year-olds already have their own accounts, most of them are child entertainers. In due course, these kids will also be your audience. They’ll check up on your account and see what you’re offering. And eventually, they will also be your future customers.

4. Instagram is a common contest area.

Most companies with Instagram accounts hold photo contests, wherein they ask their participants to repost the pictures with hashtags of either their company, product, or taglines. Mostly, companies do a random search for a winner and reward them with a specific product they are featuring. By this way, your product will easily reach the audience using the participants. This type of Instagram contest is one of the many examples of how to gain Instagram followers easily and increase your followers’ participation on your brand.

5. Instagram can be connected to other social media platforms.

The “Share Settings” of Instagram can be set so your photos can be shared to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, and e-mail with just a click. Less effort, isn’t it? In just one post, you can reach far beyond your expected market.

6. Instagram can easily let followers know what’s going on with your business.

Participating in a bazaar? Your shop has a sale? Company has an ongoing contest? Simply post the details on your business’ Instagram account and it will easily get viral. Posting events as it happen using Instagram video feature is one of the many ways of how you can inform your audience about your business.

7. Instagram can go behind the scenes.

According to Sarah Harris’ Why Startups Should Use Instagram for Marketing, one of the best ways to showcase events is through a collection of pictures and videos that can easily be wrangled together on Instagram with a couple of the same filters that make them feel like a collection. Everlane, a clothing design and manufacturing company, has stunning pictures of where their goods are manufactured to the actual goods pictured with simple backdrops. Scrolling through their account, you can see clear collections of images grouped together. By this way, the company is being transparent on their customers on how they work.

8. Instagram posts can be seen 24 hours, 7 days a week.

By this statement, you can say that you can have a market for your product every time and any time that you post a photo. Instagram users are interacting to anyone every hour of the day, especially that this application works on mobile devices and you don’t have to turn on your computer monitor just to check some new photos of your chosen product.

9. Instagram doesn’t require an age or gender for you to sign up.

Whether you are a kid, teen, mother, father, oldies, organization, institution or a business, you can easily sign up. Government branches and even pets also have their own Instagram accounts to update their followers.

10. Instagram is free!

Just go App Store for iPhone or Play Store for Android, search for Instagram and have it downloaded on your device. Once it’s done, register with your username and password, and you have just saved a thousand bucks for this marketing strategy.

So if you're planning to start your own business but has a low budget in terms of marketing, sign up to get your business' Instagram account and link it to other social media sites!