Welcome to Part 2 of 3 of our how to make the most Instagram for your business marketing on line; in this edition Gina (our guest blogger from Homer Green Senior School) looks at the best way of sharing a photo on Instagram and also give us her five top tips for best use of the platform.

How to share a photo & top 5 Instagram tips

How to share a photo

1) Click the middle tab along the bottom. Here you get the choice to either take a photograph or video on the camera, or to upload a photo taken previously on your camera roll.

2) Editing the photo: you can edit your photos by cropping it, changing things like the contrast and saturation of the photo and you can choose between over 20 different filters.

3) Tag the people: you can tag the people in the photo and choose whether or not to tag your location, then hit share for all of your followers to see. It’s social media, so the idea is to share to as many relevant people as possible.

Instagram users have shared over 40 billion photos to date and share an average of 95 million photos and videos per day.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are where photos can be shared in a different section of Instagram, and can only be viewed for 24 hours. So I suppose it’s a bit like a highly visual newsfeed.

Instagram stories have become very popular in the past month with 1 in 7 Instagram users posting a Story within the past month.

How to create an Instagram Story

Simply swipe right and press once for a photo, hold for a video.
Stories can be linked with new features of Instagram including the new face filters and Boomerang.

Boomerang

Boomerang is an app that needs to be installed separately, but is posted on Instagram.

These are one second videos that are played on an infinite loop and can be posted as a video on Stories or on general posts.
Stories can be linked to live videos as well.
Users can choose to go live, followers can watch you as you’re filming at that point in time and comment and like.

These Instagram live videos will come up as a notification on your phone/ tablet so you never miss one, and can be viewed by clicking where Stories would be, at the top of the screen.

Top 5 Instagram tips!

• If you link your account to Facebook you can find your friends much more easily and get more followers straight away.
• If you add a hashtag to your photo when you post it, statistically it should get 12.3% more views!

These are the most popular hashtags #love; #instagood; #me; #tbt; #cute.

• The most likely time your photo will be viewed and liked is 5pm on a Wednesday. People view Instagram most when they’ve just woken up in the morning and when they’ve just got home from school or work - which gives a strong hint as to the age range of viewers on Instagram - this is changing though as more businesses adopt Instagram as part of the marketing package.

• The more you like and comment on other people’s photos, the more they will like and comment on yours! Be active on Instagram for the most active followers back.

• Get creative with your photo editing. You can download apps such as pic collage which means you can post more than one photo on your account to change your layout and make your profile stand out.

Hope you found that useful. In the next part we’ll be looking specifically at the ways in which Businesses can use Instagram to improve their marketing results.