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Instagram has been coming on strong over the last 5 years and if you are a local or small business you need to take advantage.
The average time a person spends on instagram is 29 minutes. In the overall scheme of things this doesn’t seem like a lot of time, but it actually is.
Since the beginning of Covid 19 these numbers might be a little off, but it just means more time on Instagram.
The average person sleeps 8 hours a day and works 8 hours a day. That is 16 of your 24 hours a day already gone. Factor in drive time and you cut out another hour. Getting ready and eating and everything else that can come into play and take out another 3 hours and we are at 20 hours a day.
Now, with 4 hours of free time left, the 112 million people in the US using Instagram decide to spend half an hour on this social media platform. That should put it into perspective a bit.
75% of businesses in the US are marketing on Instagram and 91% of Instagram users follow a business account. This platform can and does make businesses money…and a lot of it.
To understand how a platform can make a company money, you need to understand how it works. Like all social media platforms… it has its own algorithm that does all the work.
Here are the main factors involved:
Relationship
Interest
Timeliness
What does each of these mean. Luckily Evolved is here to help you break it down so you can use it to your advantage.
Relationship – Instagram is a social app. They want people to use it to engage with other people and have a meaningful relationship.
Therefore Instagram is going to highlight posts from accounts that are already connected to the user. So if you are a business the engagement is going to be a huge factor.
Getting involved with Direct Messaging (DM), tagging people’s posts, and leaving real comments is what relationships on social media are all about. So do a lot of it.
Interest – Based on the users previous interest on Instagram (meaning the had some sort of engagement) the Instagram algorithm is more likely to show that user similar type posts.
If a person interacts with car racing type posts, a business that is involved in that industry would have a better likelihood of getting seen than a hair salon.
The Moral of this story is to know your target audience. If they have engaged with a similar type business as your own…it will be more likely to see your posts.
Timeliness – The more recent a post is…the more likely it is to be seen. You need to be in the right place at the right time.
This comes down to knowing when your target audience is most likely to be on Instagram. If you are trying to target business men or women…don’t post it at 10am in the morning…they more than likely will never see it. Why? Because they are not on Instagram at that time and probably won’t be until many hours later.
So what does this all mean for a local or small business.
You need to build relationships with your target audience. That means getting engagement from them on your posts.
Ensure what you post is interesting to your target audience. You can’t just post anything. Thought actually needs to go into what you are posting.
Know when to post and make sure you do it consistently.
I hope this article was helpful. Follow us on any of our social media accounts or subscribe to our blog to continue to get helpful articles such as this.
