Using Instagram For Business

Creating a business account with Instagram, to promote your staging and decorating services, is going to be fairly similar to running an account on Facebook. In this chapter, we'll go over the best tips to helping you get word out to your local community about your newly certified skills, so you can start picking up business in no time.

YOUR PROFILE INFO: When building out your profile, the first thing you want to add to your account is your profile photo. If you are building a brand around yourself, you can use a professional head shot. If you are building a brand around a company name, you can use a condensed version of the logo - like an icon. Remember, the logo portion will be small, so if your logo has a lot of words on it, you don't want to make that your profile image - no one will be able to read it. So showcase a beautiful icon or the initials of your company name.

For your business page tag, do your best to make sure it's exactly the same as the name of your business. We never settle on a brand name without verifying that it's available as tags on social media sites and as a personal domain. Having the same names across all of your accounts will solidify your brand. Also add that into the page name as well - which is separate from the page tag, for example @theinteriordeco. Fill out your "about" section with a fun and clever bio that includes at least 2 emojis. Emojis are a great way to make a page feel more personal and interest people to read it. Don't forget to mention where you're located so you draw the right market audience. Lastly, don't forget to add a link to your website or a landing page. You want a way to be able to capture leads.

YOUR THEME:

Themes are already important from a branding perspective. It's the theme you choose that will connect with your niche preference that will make you the most successful. But choosing a theme to the content you post is even more so important on Instagram. Do you ever visit a page and think, "wow, this page is really pretty." The Instagram page probably has a style to it that they stick to, including a color scheme, that really helps tell the story about the page, like the samples shown below. The stick to a certain variety of colors to help it visually pop, and they pick 3 different styles of content they will generally post about to let the audience know, "Hey, this is what you get with my page."

YOUR CONTENT:

You want the content that you post to your page to correlate with the industry you are in - that's how you're going to draw in followers that turn into clients. So in this case, you'll be posting interior photos of homes that have been staged. Both by you and by others. And you HAVE to make sure the photos are professional quality, or it will not get engagement. You're on a platform based on photos, so you need to make sure yours stand out by their quality and uniqueness. You can mix in a bit of other content onto your page, but you don't want to stray from posting home photos. If you do post different types of content, make that 10% of your page, and 90% around homes.

HOW TO GET FOLLOWERS:

Getting followers on your page is really easy, you just have to engage with others. Search key words and tags for people in your local community, and start liking and commenting on tons of photos. Doing this daily gets your name around and starts building your personal account. We did this for 2 months and got over 3000 followers on one of our pages, without spending a penny. This is why it's important to have your information on your page filled out, because people will be more interested in following you if they see you are local and they see the content you have posted is something they will be interested in. And most people are interested in homes.