Instagram Content Strategy for Businesses

Social media engagement is a major piece in the puzzle of modern marketing. Whether you love putting content on social media or it makes you nervous, having an Instagram content strategy when doing so can make all the difference in terms of effectiveness and easing social media jitters. 

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Today we want to talk about Instagram. The popular social media app has almost 1.5 billion users and an incredibly diverse range of content- there’s something for everyone. According to Social Pilot, 83% of Instagram users discover new products and services on the platform. What does this mean for your company? It's a great way to reach potential customers that might otherwise not know about you by creating an instagram content strategy.

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Side note: Facebook and Instagram are both owned by Meta, which has allowed the two to have a lot of synchronous posting and analyzing abilities, even within their separate formats. You can post on both at the same time, which is a huge time-saver. Even if you are posting a reel, which is Instagram specific, you can promote it on Facebook, allowing a larger range of audience members to view your content. We highly recommend taking advantage of both of these platforms to maximize your business’s reach.

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Recent updates to Instagram curate a user’s Home Page to be very Reel dominant. Additionally, the Explore Page (a page to discover content and creators beyond your following) features predominantly Reels, which means that static content such as posts and stories just aren’t getting the visibility that they used to. This is a big adjustment for users, as Instagram has been a photo-focused platform since its conception. With that being said, Instagram Reels are a great way to reach an audience beyond your following because of Instagram’s nature of pushing reels to the Explore page.

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However, we didn’t want to just tell you this information. We decided to take to Instagram to show you exactly how this plays out. We created some content for our passion project, Mmm…Boards, a website that creates charcuterie content and how-tos so that every meat & cheese lover can achieve their charcuterie aficionado dreams. We noticed an up-and-coming trend: chewcuterie, aka charcuterie for dogs. We created a blog post about the topic and how to create one yourself, and then created social media content that promoted the post, and then watched the engagement results. 

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For context, Mmm…Boards has a relatively low Instagram following of 67 followers. We posted one carousel grid post of still images and two reels of our dogs, Finley and Chocko. Here the are stats a few days after posting:

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Our still grid post had:

93 total impressions (statistic only available for grid posts)

5 likes

82 accounts reached 

0 shares

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Reel Number 1 had:

209 plays (statistic only available for reels)

7 likes

202 accounts reached 

2 shares 

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Reel Number 2 had:

163 plays (statistic only available for reels)

10 likes

161 accounts reached 

0 shares 

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Obviously, there is a huge difference here. Our reels reached over two times more accounts than our grid post- an impactful difference. Not only that, but our reels reached almost three times our following, whereas our static post reached just over one time our following. This means that your Instagram content strategy can be largely affected by the types of content you are putting out. 

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Lastly, let’s talk hashtags. Yep, they really work. Let’s take our grid post for example. We included a number of hashtags in our caption that helped our post find its target market. We researched popular hashtags then included ones like #barkuterie, #dogmom, and #dogsofinstagram. Total impressions for the post were 93, and the impressions from our hashtags were 74. This means that just about 80% of the people who saw our post found it through a hashtag. These statistics are a great representation of why we think hashtags are absolutely essential to an Instagram content strategy. 

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Instagram is an incredible tool for business to reach potential customers, especially when used strategically to optimize your reach. Want professional help to reach your social media marketing goals? View can help; learn more about our social media services, which includes helping you with your Instagram content strategy, here.

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