Taking your Instagram game to the next level
With nearly a billion monthly active users, it’s no secret that Instagram is a popular social channel with plenty of engaged users (to say the least). Now, when it comes to using Instagram for your business, you are presented with a great opportunity to market what you do in a casual and fun way. An Instagram account also helps humanize your business by bringing you closer to the people that want to hire you! Sure, Instagram might seem like a “highlight reel” most of the time, but luckily, you have plenty of highlights to share. Houses, projects in progress, kitchen or bathroom remodels, your team, your office … the list goes on and on. You’ve got plenty of cool things to share whether you realize it or not, so let’s dive into how you can utilize your awesome content and take your business’ Instagram game to the next level.
1. Pay attention to your profile details.
That Instagram profile picture may be small, but it makes a big impact, and so does your handle, bio and other brand footprints. Make sure your picture and bio are consistent with your brand and messaging. Your best bet for brand visibility? Use your logo as your profile picture and your company name as your handle (aka account name).
It’s simple to create an Instagram account, and when it comes to setting up a business profile, Instagram lets you include the perfect amount of detail — where you’re located, what you do, a phone number and email address, and a link to your website (or to whatever featured content you want to drive traffic). Does your company have a hashtag you want people to interact with? Throw that in your bio, too!
Pro Tip: Use your profile’s Highlights to increase your brand footprint. Create customized icons for each of your Highlights to showcase your color palette, brand theme and personality. Free icon creation tools, like Canva, can quickly, and easily, output icons that represent your company and brand.
2. Show what you do (creatively, of course).
Your most important asset on Instagram? VISUAL CONTENT. It’s the whole point of Instagram, and as a construction company, you’ve got plenty of it! Progress photos, before and afters, completed houses or remodels, your team in the field, “how-to’s” on the jobsite, your favorite tools, home show exhibits, trending finishes… should I keep going?
As a company that works closely with the construction industry, we’re here to tell you the content you’ve got is REALLY COOL, seriously. We enjoy seeing what you’ve got to share, and so will the rest of your followers, so long as you’re staying creative in the way you do it.
What exactly does that mean? From what we’ve seen for years on Instagram, people love details. When you post a picture of a new home build, share some of the fun details that went into the project (ex: paint colors, appliance brands, etc.) and you’ll keep your followers coming back for more.
Talk about the not-so-fun stuff, too! What held you up on your last project? Talk to your Instagram community about it — chances are it’s happened to a few other people, and it’s a great way to start a dialogue on how to combat those issues in the future.
Pro Tip: The best place to share more casual content? Instagram Stories. Use your Stories for the content you don’t want living on your feed forever, but you still want to share. And, if you’ve got stories you want to stick around for longer, be sure to add them to a highlight on your profile so people can reference them for as long as you want.
3. #Hashtag, #necessary.
It’s no secret that one of best ways to organically reach more people through your Instagram posts is to interact with hashtags. If you aren’t already using hashtags, start with a little #research.
Instagram makes it easy to find which hashtags are the most #popular, so do a little in-app searching to get started. From there, figure out which popular hashtags apply to your company, brand and content, and keep track of the hashtags you use and which perform the best with your content.
Pro Tip: Be mindful about where you add hashtags. Want to add a few to the end of your caption? Perfect. If you want to add more than three to one caption, though, try adding them them as a comment or at the end of your post with a few little dots. This tactic will help keep your caption readable and digestible.
4. Collaborate.
If you get the chance to collaborate with other industry professionals, brands, influencers, whoever, take it (if it’s a good fit — which is totally up to you and your team). Collaborations are a great way to get your name out there, get the collaborators’ names out there, and get some mutually beneficial attention!
Pro Tip: Start your collaboration efforts with a company that has a number of followers similar to yours! That way, your profiles, and possibly company and goals, are likely a good match.
5. Utilize user-generated content.
No matter how you collect it, do something with the content your followers and customers publish. Take us, for example. We love to see projects that are #BuiltWithBuildertrend, and we equally love to share this content on our Instagram feed!
Pro Tip: If you see content you want to repost to your Instagram feed, be sure to reach out to the content owner and get written permission to repost it. This will protect both you and the content owner from copyright issues. You can take this one step further and ask for a signed release form.
6. Use a call-to-action.
We’re not saying this needs to be an every-post kind of thing, but it may not hurt to insert a little call-to-action at the end of your post to entice followers to take an action – like fill out a form or contact you. Direct people to the link in your bio, or utilize swipe-up capability in your stories if you have it … do what you need to do to get your followers to land exactly where you want them. Whether it’s prospective customers to your website, or viewers to your YouTube channel, a call-to-action can lead where you need at the time.
Pro Tip: You need to have at least 10,000 Instagram followers to enable the swipe-up feature. While this number feels a bit daunting, there are a ton of tactics to get you to that magic number. Do a bit of research and find the magic sauce that you feel will work best for your brand.
Buildertrend provides residential construction companies a user-friendly, web-based software to help them build more projects, complete projects faster, reduce costly communication errors, and maximize customer satisfaction. Discover how our software can work for you by scheduling a live demo.
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