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Mastering Instagram for Optimal Business Growth

• Nicole Harlow: Entrepreneur, Designer, Yoga Teacher, Lifehacker + Author

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Ready to unlock the Instagram puzzle and transform your business? This week on Wealthy Wellness Biz, we're pulling back the curtain on the hidden potential of Instagram for your brand. From the power of Instagram stories and Instagram Live to the intricacies of its algorithm, we're taking you on a deep-dive into this popular platform. Beyond being a mere photo-sharing app, Instagram is a force to be reckoned with in brand building, content curation, and relationship building.

Here's a question: What if your Instagram account could be as unique and engaging as a beautiful little snowflake? We've got the answers on how to achieve this, leveraging the different content creation options to captivate your audience. Let's talk about the importance of a strong brand voice and how Instagram can help amplify it. But it's not all smooth sailing; we also discuss the challenges of the platform, from grappling with the algorithm to facing stiff competition. Tune in to uncover the invaluable insights that could redefine your Instagram strategy and propel your business to new heights.

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I run three award-winning marketing / automations, branding & podcast production agencies for wellness brands, health-based businesses, health clinics and clinician entrepreneurs

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Speaker 1:

Hey there, and thanks for joining me on this episode of Wealthy Wellness Biz. We are right in the middle of a social media series, and each episode we're taking on a little bite-size episode about a specific platform, and in this week's episode, we're going through a platform that's actually one of my favorites Instagram. So you might already have a love-hate relationship with Instagram. You may have a personal account and find that you spend way too many hours scrolling on Instagram. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad to say about Instagram as a platform and in society in general, but that's not what I'm here for. So I'm not here to do a social analysis of platforms. I'm here to make sure that I'm sharing some relevant information about why you would care about this platform as a business owner and just break down some of the pros and cons of each of the platforms and what you can expect. I remember back in the days when Instagram first came out and it was a photo sharing platform, and in some ways, it still is, but it's actually grown to be so much more, and I think part of this little mini episode about Instagram is usually just breaking down the different components and how you can use Instagram, because isn't that as simple as just sharing a photo and a caption and that's it. But surprisingly and shockingly to me, even though a lot of platforms have kind of risen and fallen to the wayside, instagram has had this tremendous staying power. Facebook feels like it's pretty irrelevant at this point and Instagram's still there as like the top platform that I would ask any of our social media clients to be on. It's the platform that I expect all of our clients to be on and it's the platform that I would recommend. When I'm researching a brand, the first thing I do is go to their Instagram. I'm going to see how they communicate on social, I'm going to see how many followers they have, I'm going to see what their brand looks like, how they express their brand through Instagram, and so it is a powerful platform that I would recommend as a starting place for, besides a Facebook business page. I would say it's a starting place for all of our clients, unless they're, every once in a while, a client that has like an ethical reason why they don't want to be on Instagram or something like that but for 99.9% of our clients, instagram is a great place to be for lots of different reasons, but I would say kind of top level. What I love Instagram for is, even though it's a highly visual platform and still has that element of photo sharing and aesthetics, it's a very aesthetic platform. It's also a place where people go to learn.

Speaker 1:

I regularly, in my own personal Instagram, have folders that I'm going through and I'm saving, like social media. I'm saving business advice, I'm saving health advice, I'm saving skincare routines, exercise routines, recipes that I want to try out, places that I like to visit. It is really a catch all for so much content, including little pieces of, you know, frippery and some word frippery I don't know. I'm going to stay with it little pieces of frippery and little things that can improve your day. I don't know Videos of. Before I recorded this episode, there was a video of a baby dolphin that just made me smile.

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot of content out there on Instagram and it really is a place similar to a TikTok. It is a place where it's algorithm based and it's everyone is seeing a different Instagram, right? So some people like who you follow and who the algorithm is also recommending you to follow, and you can see that in the last year, 18 months, that Instagram has changed a bit more, especially kind of with TikTok as a driver, creating some competition. It used to be where, with Instagram, you would only see the content of who you followed, right, so you needed to follow somebody in order to have their content on your feed. And if you've noticed on Instagram just recently I'm recording this in September 2023, there's a lot more found content that's starting to mimic TikToks for you page, where the algorithm is kind of serving you up content and saying we think that you'll like this. Right, you've liked, you know, a cute baby animal account over here, so we think you're going to like some of this content. Or you like a Huberman Lab podcast, so we think you're going to like this content. So, really, each Instagram account is curated for you, right? You start with a blank slate and they're going to serve you up like five different people and say like, do you want to follow the Kardashians? Do you want to follow Drake? And you're going to be like no, and you go off and you start, you know, creating the curating and creating the content that you want to see, and so every Instagram is like a beautiful little snowflake. I'm sure some are not that beautiful.

Speaker 1:

What I love about Instagram is, as a business owner, we can. There's several ways that we can really utilize Instagram to grow our brand, and I would say top level here. Instagram is a great relationship building tool and we can do that through several of their tools that we have at our disposal. One is just in our general content creation on the feed itself. So I'm going to do super basic. You log into Instagram I know pretty much everybody knows this, but just there may be people out there that are just getting started. So as you get on Instagram, you're going to see at the top circles and those are the stories and I'll talk about those in a second and then, as you scroll down, you're going to see your feed. That's been created for you based on an algorithm, based on who you follow, and they may give you follow suggestions and things like that.

Speaker 1:

So when we create content that's for the feed, we have a few different options. One is to just create more static posts for the feed. So that takes, you know that could just be one picture, it could be one canva template. There's something called carousels, which are you can swipe through them, and it is a few different static images stacked together that you can swipe through. So we have a few different options for how we can create content, and those are the static side.

Speaker 1:

But then we have things like reels, which are similar to, like TikTok videos, which are short. They, you know, tell a story. They allow us to use video, and video is always awesome because it gives us a chance to show our personality. Video can be, you know, micro content that comes from recording a podcast, where you set up your phone and just record some video content while you're talking. That could be reels that you create specifically around the topic. You get to dance here, you get to use music, you get to use humor if you want to, or you can use them purely as a place to. You know, they could be places, spaces to entertain, but they also could be spaces to educate, right, and I think for most of our wellness brands they hit a place between the two, right? So it's maybe a little bit of entertainment, but it's mostly educational.

Speaker 1:

And then some clients are kind of on one side or the other where their content is more entertaining and funny and referential and also trendy. And then there's also more educational content, and there's not a right or wrong here. There is a right or wrong for your brand right, if your brand is, error is more on the side of kind of educational and serious. I mean, like, could you ever see Huberman, andrew Huberman, doing TikTok dances or having reels that were like silly? I mean, he may have them, but I wouldn't feel like that wasn't really like on brand right. Or how about, like Peter Atiyah? Like, so you get to decide, right, you don't have to.

Speaker 1:

This is where I kind of said in episode one of the series that we don't have to follow trends, we don't have to chase trends. Like, we can create content that is specific to our brand and our brand voice, right, some that are, you know, empathetic and maybe more somber and serious, and some that are just like super light and funny and vibrant and maybe on the side of feeling a little like frivolous, right, but that's that message just matches so perfectly with our brand, or our brand is about having fun, right, and enjoying life. So, and everything in between, right, you get to decide. And this is where having a good sense of not only your brand voice and your brand message, but who you're communicating with is really essential, because Instagram is a place where you can really amplify that and you can actually get that message out.

Speaker 1:

And the people that we follow on Instagram I mean most Instagram users are on there every day. So when you follow and you love a brand, you can see them every day right In your feed. So we've got the feed posts, but then we also have access to stories that show at the top of your account, and stories are only available for 24 hours and they, if your feed, is where things are really a little bit more polished and aesthetic. The stories are where we get an opportunity to showcase behind the scenes. These are, you know, a little video about what we ate today and this is what my office looks like and hey, I'm going for a walk with my dog, but I'm thinking about this topic that relates to our business, right? So with Instagram stories, you get the opportunity to create a little bit more like unpolished content, and what's great about that is you know it's hard for the perfectionists among us to be like well, you know everything has to be like perfect and polished.

Speaker 1:

But what I love about, if you can kind of get past that point and get into the spirit of creating stories on Instagram, you can really like, share your day with users. You can really start building relationships with potential clients, or you can deepen relationships with people who already are clients and customers just by showing the real side of your business, right. So like showing your team, showing behind the scenes, showing you working with the customer or client. These are all places and spaces where we can create a little bit more like organic content. And, yes, it does go away after 24 hours and that kind of feels sometimes like oh man, you're creating something that disappears. But I like to think about it more as just like creating a touch point with clients, like every day or a few times a week, to kind of let them in behind the scenes so they can see that you're a real person and a real brand. So that's stories.

Speaker 1:

And then there's two other ways besides paid advertising that we can really utilize Instagram to grow our business and grow our brand. And one is through the power of Instagram Live, which is a feature where you can actually go live on your channel so people who follow you will see that you're getting your broadcasting and they'll get a notification at the top and it's nice because it gathers attention and kind of like Instagram stories. It allows you to like depending on your business message you can go on and share and educate. You could share behind the scenes, but it gives people that kind of immediate feedback to you and your business and your brand and allows them to develop a relationship. And then the last thing I would add for Instagram which I see as a positive is the opportunity to create conversations both in like direct messaging, dms, but also within comments, without having to follow somebody, so unlike Facebook.

Speaker 1:

I guess Facebook pages have changed this a little bit, but Facebook started out where it felt like you needed to be friends with somebody in order to you friend them, and it feels like it should be somebody that you kind of know, or maybe you preferably know them, but you don't really go up to strangers and just start like friending them. I think that's become a little bit more like of a common practice, especially in the business world just in the last couple of years, but used to be where, like Facebook, felt more like friends and family, where Instagram is a little bit more like you know someone you don't know it's totally appropriate to go and follow them like, especially if they're a business, or a little bit more like they have a public profile and not a private. I understand that, like people also use Instagram for more private profiles where they share like pictures of, like, their kids and family, but I'm talking more kind of on a business sense. People who don't follow you can come onto a post and comment and you could start building the relationship that way. So what I love about Instagram is it adds like one piece and one level of communication without even having to follow someone first, and that's great because it's these little micro interactions. Like you know, when you're looking to engage with ideal clients, you can go and you can leave some comments on their profile. You can start the relationship, these little micro interactions, and they can come to your profile and they can see what you do and they can start following you and then, once they start following you, they'll see your content and it just starts to organically build and I feel like for me, that's one of the more positive aspects of Instagram.

Speaker 1:

Now, on the negative side, I would say that it's super crowded over there. Sometimes it's hard to get seen through the feed. Sometimes you have challenges with the algorithm around actually getting your content out to people so you can post and it doesn't get seen by a ton of people. It's not like I mean, back in the day the Instagram feed used to be just based on time, so you would just see the most recent posts. They've changed that a lot in the last couple of years so I can't pretend to know all of the inner and outer workings of social media algorithms. These are like proprietary, like murky kind of things. But I know it has changed in the last couple of years where you don't always see, you're not seeing like the most immediate posts the algorithm is serving up based on a bunch of different factors like how you get seen.

Speaker 1:

So if you're just getting started out, if you have a small following, if you don't post all the time, if your posts don't get a lot of engagement, you might find that your posts are not getting seen by a lot of people, in which case you know and we can go in further episodes kind of a little bit more deeper into strategy of like how to get follows and engagement. But you probably need another tactic to stack on top of your content that gets more engagement on your page. So we can go into that. But I think this is a good wrap up of Instagram. Like I said in the beginning, I feel like it's an appropriate beginning social media platform for almost every business that we work with and have fun out there playing on Instagram, developing a strategy and get out there talking to people. Thanks a lot and I will see you next week as we dive into the wild, wacky, weird world of TikTok.