Instagram Tips: 5 Steps To Grow Your Account For Your Small Business

Instagram! We love it, and we hate it! It can be an awesome place to connect with others in our  industry and even find new clients, but the always changing algorithm is enough to make you pull your  hair out! Nut don’t worry, friend, I’m here to help! Welcome back to my channel!

If you’re new here I’m Moriah, the Owner and Creative director of Moriah Riona Branding, helping creative female entrepreneurs build brands with confidence and success.

This month’s topic is social media, and today I’m sharing my top tips to grow your Instagram for your creative small business. So, let’s get started! Tip number one, sign up for a business account. If you haven’t already, you definitely want to sign up for a business account for your Insta.

Business accounts give you a bunch of great features that personal accounts just don’t have, including call-to-action buttons and analytics.  You also then have the ability to do paid advertising through your Instagram account. Back when Instagram started rolling out the business accounts a lot of business owners were nervous to sign up, me included, because Facebook owns Instagram and only a few years before we’d all seen what Facebook had done to business page owners. Facebook rolled out a new algorithm  and suddenly companies that had built pages with thousands of followers were now only seeing a very  limited reach.

Only a fraction of their audience were now seeing their posts.

So of course, a lot of business owners didn’t trust the new Instagram business profiles but after a while I decided to check it out because the thing is, Instagram rolled out a new algorithm around the same time and from what I could tell, everyone’s reach was down whether you were personal or business. So go ahead and set yours up and if you really hate it, you can always switch back to a personal account.  Tip number two, perfect your profile. When someone is checking out your Instagram profile for the first time, this is a very significant event – it’s a make-or-break situation. Listen, there are now a billion – yes, billion with a b – active users Instagram.

That’s insane, right? It’s over one-eighth of the world’s entire population. So, if one of those users is visiting your profile for the very first time, it’s likely the very last time as well…

Unless you can grab  their attention right away! And here’s how to do that. Part one, your profile photo. You get one very little circular photo for the top left of your profile to represent your entire brand, so you need to use this real estate wisely. And I’m sure you’re thinking Moriah, the logo designer, is going to say put your logo there, but that’s not what I recommend.

Unless your business is a massive corporation or has a huge team I would not use a logo.

Instagram is a very personal platform your audience wants to get to know you on there so as a solopreneur or a one-woman brand I say ditch the logo and get a great headshot. It should be zoomed in, and we want to see your sparkling eyes and your big gorgeous smile, which will be interpreted as I’m approachable and I can help you with exactly what you need. Part two, your bio.

One big mistake I’ve noticed with other creative entrepreneurs’  Instagram accounts is their bio.

Often I see a lot of flowery language or cliches without actually  getting to the point or adding value. Again, this comes back to the whole first impression  or one shot scenario. Your bio is limited to 150 characters, which is seriously small, so you need  to make each word in each character count! My best advice is to tell them what you do, why they’re in the right place, and what the next step they need to take is, or a call to action.

And, as one of my favorite online entrepreneurs Marie Forler says, choose clarity over clever.

That means the clear language is always preferential to an attempt at clever that could possibly lose the reader. And part three, your link. If you’ve been on Instagram for any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that the platform gives you one – and only one – link, so use it wisely! Which brings me to my next tip. Tip number three, create a custom Instagram landing page.

Not only do you get just one link in your bio section, you’re also not able to add hyperlinks within your post descriptions. So, yes, you need to use that one bio link very wisely. That’s why I suggest creating a custom Instagram landing page on your website. That way you can direct all of your various calls to action in your different Instagram posts to the same link. Then, you can design your Instagram landing page to have all the info that your audience would need.

As you probably already know, I designe  on the Show Its platform, which makes creating a new landing page super easy. For my Instagram landing page, I include three main sections. At the top there’s a big announcement canvas and I change this depending on the different events or launches that I have going on in my business at the time.  Below that I have a blog feed with my four most recent posts.

This is important because I’ll often post on Instagram when I’ve published a new blog post or video, so I need a way for my audience to be able to check that out.

And lastly, I have a list of important links. Things that I want people to be able to find quickly. Like my services, my freebies and opt-ins, etc. If you don’t have the ability to create a landing page on your website, you can use the link tree app instead. It creates a simple landing page for you where you can add various links.

Tip number four, selfies are a must. Listen, I have been a professional photographer for the last ten years and the thought of being on the other side of the camera still freaks me out. I don’t really like getting  my own picture taken. More than that, I still feel really self-conscious about posting selfies on my Instagram account. Do selfies make you nervous too?

Give me a thumbs up or let me know in a comment down below.

But here’s the thing about selfies, when I actually went back and looked at my feed I saw hands down waiting more engagement, meaning more likes and more comments on my selfies than any other of my posts. Like I said before, Instagram is a very personal platform. People want to get to know you. They need to see your face.

That’s why I recommend having at least one selfie in your top 9, that grid of your last nine posts at the top of your feed. And ideally, I think you to have two to three selfies in there. And don’t be self-conscious, friend, people want to get to know you and a big part of that is seeing your gorgeous face! Pro tip: I regularly get new brand photos taken so that I always have a cache of new, professional selfies then I feel really confident in sharing to my insta feed, and I do the same for my clients. If you’d like more info about my Brand Photography Packages get in touch with me.

I have clients that fly in from all over the country for their Brand Photoshoots and I’d love to help you create gorgeous, instagram-worthy images too. Tip  number five, post consistently. So, you’ve set up your business account, you’ve got a killer  profile, you’ve created your custom landing page, and you’ve even booked your brand photo shoot  for those next level selfies. Way to go, friend! But now what?

Well, you need to make sure you’re actually showing up for your brand on Instagram and that means posting regularly.

I know for a lot  of small business owners social media always falls to the bottom of the to-do list. You know you need to do it, but you have other more urgent tasks always screaming for your attention. So, days, or weeks, or – oh my goodness – even months may go by before you hop on and post again and when you do finally get a minute to post you’re staring at a blank screen wondering what the heck you should talk about.

Sound familiar?

Well, you are not alone. I know a lot of creative entrepreneurs who struggle with this. That’s why I’m actually creating my first ever online course to help you plan a profitable social media strategy. So you know exactly what to post and when and you can build a system to have it run on auto while you get all those other more urgent tasks done. Sound  awesome?

It is! I know from my own experience how life-changing and business changing this  strategy and system are, so click that link down below to sign up and be the first to hear when  my new course launches. In the meantime, I highly recommend planning out your content ahead of time.  Being on the app, trying to think of what you need to post that minute, when you already feel like you’re behind is definitely a creativity killer. That’s what I plan all of my Instagram posts out ahead of time and I use an awesome app called Panoply to do it.

There are actually a lot of Instagram planners and schedulers out there, but I definitely think this one’s the best Panoply is very visual, and it allows me to see how my feed will look before anything ever posts. I can also  use the app to plan out and post my Instagram stories as well. The best part is that with  an Instagram business account Planoly is able to post to Instagram on auto. That way, I’m posting on Instagram with an actual strategy instead of freaking out because – oh my gosh, it’s been three weeks and I haven’t posted anything, and I need to post something, but I don’t know what to post! You get it!

So, click that link below to sign up for your free a Panoply account.

Alright, friend, those were my top tips for growing Instagram for your small business. Give me a  thumbs up or a heck yes in the comments if you’re ready for an Instagram that works for you. And if you’re ready to dive deeper and learn how to not just use Instagram but your brand as a whole to attract amazing clients who love you respect you and are willing to pay what you’re worth – I know it sounds too good to be true, but it’s not! – then click on that video that just popped up.

I’m going to teach you how and why to build a luxury brand. Thanks again for joining me today don’t forget to hit that red Subscribe button down below and I’ll see you in the next video!

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