How to keep your brand competitive on Instagram: Tips for increasing your Instagram RIO

How to stay competitive on a platform that has grown to 800 million users since 2012.

  • Currently Instagram is headed towards overtaking Facebook as the most important Social Media
  • Separate Facebook and Instagram ads, different platforms require different visual strategy
  • Big push to focus on Stories and Live over regular content
  • Brands need to focus on the strategy and consistency.  Brand ambassadors need to tell a consistent story and stay on theme and topic for their channel, instead of posting random photography
  • Shouldn’t alienate older consumers, older people are spending more time on social media
  • Don’t try to be everything to everyone, don’t jump on every train “shiny object syndrome”

Find out who your audience is and tell the stories they want to see, whatever makes most sense for your brand

  • Don’t waste time/energy on things that aren’t going to benefit your client.
  • Switch all Instagram accounts to Business Accounts if you haven’t already, offers limited set of metrics, but they are better than nothing.

If you’re selling something online, there are new experiments with Shoppable – tagging products and linking them directly to a purchase page

  • RIO isn’t dollar for dollar online – Fail Forward/Go and try everything and ask for forgiveness later
  • Move away from stock images, people want to see real content.  Regular photos from consumers have consistently generated more engagement and impressions than high quality photography on Instagram.
  • Find ways to have organizations tell their story through employees, who usually don’t have a say
  • Spend time planning instead of creating content
    • Build out process behind content/brand templates

Sometimes it’s good to share exclusively on IG stories as the comments aren’t front facing like on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn – Great for day of events sharing

  • Staying competitive on Instagram requires focus on the following:
    • Having process is place to save time and give you peace of mind
    • Having a long-lasting archive of stories
    • Having content that visually last longer through use of stories