With over one billion monthly active users, Instagram is a much-favored social media platform for marketers of every hue, big and small. According to https://business.instagram.com, more than 90% of accounts on Instagram follow at least one business. If you own a small business, you can significantly improve your marketing performance by using some of the tools described here:
Grum
Grum is a simple and easy-to-use content scheduling tool that you can use to schedule your posts so that they are published at the best times when your target audience is the most active. It eliminates the tedious task of having to remember to follow your content calendar and post the photos and videos manually. Grum ensures that you never miss an opportunity to connect with your target audience as you can plan and implement a content schedule much in advance. The tool that you can operate from your desktop allows you to publish content from multiple accounts simultaneously while being able to tag the users too.
Awario
Marketers need to keep a sharp eye out for mentions of their brands on social media, websites, blogs, and news forums so that they can know of both positive and negative feedback to help them improve their product quality or marketing. Awario is one such user-friendly tool you can use to monitor the online space, including Instagram so that you can find out who is cheering the most for you and what is the brand sentiment among the public? Most usefully, Awario can be used to analyze the reach and growth rate of your brand mentions and also inform you how you match up to your competitors.
Buffer
Buffer is another popular content scheduling tool that marketers can use to schedule their posts not only on Instagram but also on other popular social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Buffer is sophisticated enough to allow you to post the same content across some or all the networks or different ones according to a predetermined schedule without any manual intervention. The tool also allows you to monitor the performance of your posts in terms of likes, comments, shares so that you know how good your engagement with your target audience is. Buffer permits use by up to 25 members with different access permissions that you can set.
HashtagsforLikes
As every marketer knows the use of the right hashtags can mean a world of difference to the discoverability of content on Instagram. HashtagsforLikes is a great tool that can give you suggestions on the most relevant and trending hashtags to make your content more visible and attract a larger number of followers. However, it is much more than a simple hashtag generator since it comes armed with analytics that let you identify the most optimum hashtags and track the performance of your posts. Marketers get to choose from three different categories of hashtags like “Related”, “Popular”, and “Trending”, however, the last two categories are accessible only when you upgrade the package. The tool also has a handy display that informs regarding the number of unique posts, average likes, and reach. Immediately below, you get to see the top 10 hashtags that are used with your target keyword along with the percentage figure mentioned indicating the number of Instagram posts featuring the hashtag.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare is among the leaders in social media analytics tools used by Instagram marketers. The tool gives marketers all the important metrics of the performance and engagement of their posts, as well as vital information that facilitates the understanding of the behavior of their followers. These include the best times and the days of the week for posting content that results in the best engagement, including real Instagram likes. The tool also gives insights into the performance of your Instagram Stories. In addition to its analytics capabilities, Iconosquare also permits marketers to monitor tags and comments as well as schedule posts on Instagram.
Canva
Canva impresses marketers with a collection of graphic design tools for designing marketing collaterals and social media posts. The tool is available for use on desktops as well as Android and iOS. Canva scores big on its user-friendliness and a short learning curve that makes it very easy for beginners to start designing Instagram posts. It also has the advantage of a large collection of templates and predesigned graphic effects that users can use to create virtually kind of visuals, including Instagram Stories with eye-catching appeal. With an intuitive interface, Canva aims to a universal solution for graphic design, especially for the users who do want to deal with the complexities of advanced design software. The only cons are that to unlock the best features, you need to subscribe to it, and it only works when you are online.
Shortstack
There is perhaps nothing better than conducting contests on Instagram to raise the level of engagement. You can not only drive more traffic to your website but also access loads of user-generated content to take the pressure off your content creation team. Contests are also a great way of increasing brand awareness and building your follower base. With Shortstack, creating, and managing Instagram contests become very simple. It monitors the performance of your campaign on all vital metrics like traffic and engagement. It also collects all user-generated content that has been posted by your followers to participate in the contest.
Soldsie
As marketers very well know that selling on Instagram is anything but easy even though it has relaxed its tight controls somewhat by allowing shoppable posts. With Soldsie, the process becomes easier as now marketers need to only upload images of their products along with the relevant product information on which, if a user comments, it can be converted into a commercial transaction. By subscribing to the higher versions of Soldsie plans, marketers can also integrate with Shopify.
Conclusion
The marketing environment on Instagram is not only extremely dynamic but also intensely competitive. Marketers need all the help available to be able to cut through the clutter and make an impact on users. Using the tools described here will help them to make their marketing efforts more productive and their Instagram accounts for more appealing to the target audience.