Marketing Instagram Style: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Instagram for marketing?

Are you wondering how you can grow an Instagram following that will build your business?

To learn how Instagram can help you engage your audience, I interview Jenn Herman for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jenn Herman, who blogs at Jenn's Trends and is one of our top 10 social media blog winners for 2014. Her blog focuses on social media management. She's author of the ebook, The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Instagram.

Jenn shares why marketers should consider Instagram for their business.

You'll discover the types of images that will engage your audience, how to drive traffic to your website and examples of marketers who are successful on the platform.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show.
Instagram Marketing
Why marketers should consider Instagram

Jenn explains how a lot of people use Instagram for personal communication. Many people believe that it's a platform for selfies and pictures of food. However, Instagram is much more than that and goes a lot deeper.

The marketing aspect is so much stronger now, and will only continue to grow.

So far this year, the main buzzword has been visual marketing, with Facebook and Twitter embracing visual content.

Not only is Instagram a visual platform, it also gives you the capacity to create visual content for other sites. With the Instagram tools available, you can create fun artwork to use on your blog, website, Facebook and Twitter. It's very useful for cross-promoting.

Right now, 65% of the world's top brands use Instagram and Jenn says the number continues to grow.

There are 200 million monthly active users on Instagram, 70% of which log in daily. This is a huge base of people for marketers to reach. No matter who your target audience is, some of them will use the platform.

You'll hear why you can reach people more clearly through Instagram than you can with any other platform.

As a marketer, you should aim to create original images for Instagram. There are many different ways to incorporate your products and services into an image to make it look more native and get better engagement.

Listen to the show to find out what our 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report revealed about visual marketing.

Marketers who use Instagram well

The first brand example that Jenn talks about is fashion designer Michael Kors. The way they do product placement on Instagram is amazing.

The images they create for their fans are behind the scenes at fashion shows, photo shoots and great shots of their products. These types of images can help you to connect with your audience.

Although Jenn loves the images, she says it's their lack of engagement that lets them down. Instagram is a highly engaged and active environment.

Jenn advises marketers to be aware of this, and make sure that you're responsive to your followers.

Listen to the show to hear the type of images we used to create some buzz prior to Social Media Marketing World this year.

Engagement on Instagram

Jenn states that engagement is considerably higher on Instagram than it is on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. When Jenn tests her blog posts on all of the different platforms, Instagram almost always comes out ahead.

One way to create engagement on Instagram is to ask a question in the caption. This encourages your readers to start or join the conversation.

When they start to respond, you receive a trail of comments.