12 Reasons to Use Instagram for Your Business

What is Instagram?

Instagram is a photo- and video-sharing social media platform owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook. It offers businesses the opportunity to connect with users in a visual way, which helps to build a strong relationship between audience and brand.

“Instagram is a highly visual platform, making it ideal for businesses to showcase products and services creatively in their own voice or through influencers and brand loyalists,” Roxy Hulyk, account director of influencer marketing at Acceleration Partners, told us.

Businesses can leverage Instagram to better connect with audiences by:

• Creating photo or video posts
• Selling directly to users with e-commerce tools
• Making Instagram Stories that live on your profile for 24 hours
• Engaging in conversations with Instagram Threads
• Creating “Reels,” or short-form videos, up to 90 seconds long
• Livestreaming video
• Sending private messages to other users through Instagram Direct
• Running advertisements or sponsored posts for business marketing

Businesses targeting millennials and Gen Z can find their audience on Instagram in significant numbers. According to Statista, more than 62 percent of Instagram users are 34 years old or younger while 16 percent are between 35 and 44.

Why your business should be on Instagram

Businesses can turn Instagram content into new customers with just a bit of social media savvy. If you’re not using Instagram for marketing already, there are plenty of good reasons to establish a presence on the social media platform.

“Instagram is more than a tool for promotion; it’s a platform for building a community,” said Pamika Horsaengchai, founder of Sapiens Growth Marketing. “When businesses focus on understanding what their audience enjoys and values, they create content that resonates and builds long-term loyalty. Social media success comes from putting the audience first and offering something they truly connect with.”

Businesses can make money on Instagram.

Instagram isn’t just a platform for marketing a business, it’s also a place to do business. You can sell to customers directly on Instagram, drive organic traffic to your e-commerce pages or advertise to Instagram users far and wide to turn engagement into cash:

• Direct sales: Instagram allows businesses to access several “shoppable” features to sell directly from the platform. For example, they can create shoppable posts and stories and “tag” products with descriptions and prices. Interested buyers can then select Shop Now and head directly to an online store.
• Advertising on Instagram: Instagram has numerous advertising options that can fit easily into any business’s marketing budget. For example, sponsored posts, stories and videos can help you target specific audiences to drive traffic and sales. You can turn any post into an ad instantly by “boosting” it; you can also access the Ads Manager for more strategic campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.
• In-app checkout: Businesses can set up their Instagram shop with in-app checkout, which makes purchasing seamless for buyers and boosts conversions.
• Partnerships with brand ambassadors: Businesses can partner with brand ambassadors through sponsored posts and affiliate marketing. These partnerships can help you generate more sales leads and increase sales.

Level Up Your Digital Marketing

Improving your digital marketing can result in more leads, more sales and improved brand awareness. These digital marketing resources can help you go from a digital marketing newbie to a seasoned expert. If you’re ready to tap into an online audience, build strong relationships with users and drive more business, these guides can help:

• Social Media Marketing Step-by-Step Guide
• Email Marketing Step-by-Step Guide
• Text Message Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
• How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Strategy

Instagram helps businesses reach new customers.

Instagram offers multiple ways to expand your audience and reach new customers, including the following: 

• Instagram ads: You can use Instagram ads to target specific demographics. These ads can link directly to your website, products or services, making it easier to convert viewers into customers.
• Search & Explore: Instagram’s Search & Explore page can help your business appear in front of audiences who haven’t interacted with your brand but may be interested in it.
• User-generated content: When you encourage your Instagram followers to create and share user-generated content about your products or services, you boost your credibility and exposure to potential customers.
• Collaborations: Collaborations with influencers or partner businesses can help introduce your business to new users.
• Reels: Your Instagram Reels have the potential to go viral and reach users beyond your current followers. 

Businesses can use Instagram to boost audience engagement.

Instagram offers useful tools for engaging your audience on social media. With Instagram, you can get customers involved daily with engaging stories, new content and conversations in comment sections and direct messages. By using these tools effectively, you can show your audience that you’re more than just a company — you’re real people that they can relate to.

Here are some useful ways to engage your audience better beyond simple feed posts:

• Post Stories regularly: Instagram Stories are photos or videos that remain on your profile for 24 hours — and they also appear atop your audience’s feeds. They offer another opportunity to get your content in front of your audience and, the more often you create stories, the more chances you have for users to engage with them. 
• Run giveaways and promotions: You can use Instagram to run giveaways and promotions, offering free products or discounts to a lucky user who likes and shares a post and follows you. At the end of a set period, pull the name of a user who meets this criteria randomly and they’ll be your lucky winner. You can turn the giveaway itself into more content if the winner agrees to it.
• Host live events: Instagram live events can help you build trust and credibility with followers. You can host live Q&A sessions similar to Facebook Live Q&As. Promote your live events ahead of time both on Instagram and other channels, such as via email newsletters or with physical advertisements, to boost your audience. These live events also help to inject personality into your brand and forge more meaningful connections with your audience.

The more likes and comments your Instagram content gets, the more visible your brand will become on the platform. These tips are some of the ways you can create engaging content on Instagram. Get creative and test new ideas to see what your audience responds to most.

Businesses can partner with influencers on Instagram.

The rise of influencers has created another opportunity for businesses to leverage Instagram to reach a wider audience. Influencers can help your brand grow by promoting your products and services in their content, usually in exchange for a fee. This investment may be well worth it. However, as influencers are high-powered social media users with huge, loyal followings. When you get influencers to market your product, they can publicize your business to thousands or millions of followers with a few posts.

Influencers offer an alternative (or supplement) to traditional advertisements in a few ways:

1. Influencers usually speak to a specific audience: Whether it’s a particular demographic or interest group, you can choose to work with influencers who have a following of your likely customers. While you can fine-tune the targeting of Instagram ads to some degree, influencers may have more sway with a specific type of potential customer, helping you dial in on that segment of your audience.
2. Influencers can bolster your brand’s legitimacy: The best influencers are selective about their sponsored content and are good at making their recommendations come across as genuine and organic to their audience. Even though this is a paid partnership, the right influencers can make their audience feel like your brand is legitimate and worth considering. 
3. Influencers can grow your following: When an influencer promotes your business, expect to pick up plenty of followers from their audience. This gives you the opportunity to continue surfacing content to these users even after your deal with the influencer has come to an end. By piggybacking on an influencer’s already established following, you can help grow your own. 
4. Influencers have a better chance of going viral: Influencers are known quantities on the internet, and there’s a better chance that their mention of your brand goes viral than one of your own Instagram posts. Influencers are adept at getting noticed and making waves, and all it takes is one viral post to bring a lot of attention to your business — just be selective about who you work with to ensure that viral attention is positive. 

Working with influencers is becoming a standard part of social media marketing. While the biggest names usually want a lot of money to promote a brand, you can also find microinfluencers with a sizable and engaged audience of your potential customers that are willing to do business for a reasonable cost.

“Influencers aren’t just about follower count; they’re about influence. Microinfluencers, especially in your local area, can be gold for small businesses,” said Nadia Kaminskaya, founder and CMO at Branding Bosses. “They have tighter-knit communities, higher engagement rates, and they’re often open to partnerships that don’t break the bank.”

Businesses can reach mobile users more effectively on Instagram.

Instagram is a “mobile-first” social media platform, meaning it was primarily designed for the mobile experience. That seems to have paid off, considering that more than 35 percent of the world’s 5.68 billion mobile phone users access Instagram. Of those Instagram users, 63 percent use the app at least once daily and 42 percent check it multiple times per day.

Since you’ll be engaging a mostly mobile audience on Instagram, consider the following tips to optimize their experience and increase the odds of them entering your sales funnel:

• Make use of Instagram’s e-commerce tools: Mobile users generally prefer not to navigate away from the application they’re using, so make it easy for them to buy from your business without going anywhere else. You can use Instagram Shopping and Checkout features to sell your products directly from the platform. You can also place “product tags” on your advertisements that enable users to quickly and easily make a purchase without leaving the app. 
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly: Sometimes you may want to drive traffic to your site from Instagram. Understanding that most Instagram users are navigating the app on their mobile device means ensuring they land on mobile-friendly pages when they choose to click through to your website. Maintaining mobile-friendly pages is a standard best practice anyway — search engines prioritize mobile-friendly websites when deciding who will appear on the search engine results page.

Keeping in mind how your users are engaging with your content on Instagram can help you better anticipate the experience they’ll have overall. If you can tailor your content to deliver a positive experience, that will keep them engaged and coming back for more. 

Businesses can monitor competitors on Instagram.

Instagram offers more than just an opportunity to engage your audience — it also allows you to keep tabs on your competition. At a basic level, you can follow their profiles to see what sort of content they’re posting and compare their engagement levels and followings to yours. 

“Observe what your competitors are doing, but focus on analyzing what’s actually working for them,” Horsaengchai said. “Are their followers engaging with behind-the-scenes content, memes or tutorials? Take note of these trends and adapt them to suit your unique voice and business goals.”

If you want to go a step further, though, third-party social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social offer social listening features. These tools can monitor ongoing conversations about your competitors and provide sentiment analysis scores to see how well-liked they are by your audience.

You can also use these tools to monitor conversations about your own brand, making it easy to compare how well you’re doing against your competitors. Social media listening tools and competitive analyses make it easy to identify where you’re succeeding and where you could use improvement, helping you refine your strategy in a targeted way.

Businesses can use Instagram Insights to improve all of their social media marketing efforts.

Instagram business account users can access Instagram Insights — a valuable tool that provides specific, pertinent information about your followers, content performance and more. Use this data to inform and improve your other social media marketing campaigns. 

“Instagram Insights provides data on post-performance, audience demographics and activity patterns,” Hulyk said. “Analyzing these metrics helps businesses optimize posting schedules, identify successful content types and refine targeting strategies to align with audience behavior.”

The Insights tool provides crucial social media metrics and information about your followers’ ages, locations, time spent on the app and more. You can also see how well each post performs and the best time of day to post.

Instagram dos and don’ts

As with any social media or marketing vehicle, there are ways to get the most out of Instagram, as well as mistakes to avoid. 

Instagram dos

Follow these tips to improve your Instagram presence: 

• Post consistently: Experts recommend posting between three and five times per week for the best results. You can and should use features like Stories to surface content more frequently, though. Posting to the feed is far from the only way to engage your audience on Instagram.
• Leverage your Instagram bio: Use the link in your Instagram bio to promote specific products, business blog posts or landing pages. Make sure whatever page you’re linking to is mobile-friendly, since most users will be using Instagram on their mobile devices.
• Connect other digital marketing channels: Instagram shouldn’t be the only digital channel you use. Use your Instagram to grow your following on other social media platforms, build your email contact list and drive traffic to your website. If you’ve gotten big enough to outsource the job, consider hiring a digital marketing agency to bring your whole digital ecosystem together, monitoring it daily and offering highly responsive management. 
• Interact with other accounts: Engage with other Instagram accounts by liking and commenting on their posts and following hashtags. Respond to comments you get on your own posts too to show your audience that you’re interested in interacting with them.
• Seek feedback: Connect with your followers by asking them for their opinions and customer feedback. This data is essential for your market research plan.
• Create a signature style on your Instagram grid: Your Instagram posts should have a consistent style that complements your overall branding. For example, use specific colors, filters and angles.
• Use hashtags thoughtfully: Your hashtags should make it easier for people to find your content. You can include up to 30 hashtags per Instagram post. However, too many hashtags can appear “salesy” and off-putting.
• Tell a story: Instagram users want to feel emotionally connected to the accounts they follow. Post some behind-the-scenes videos or photos, and give users a peek into your company’s processes or history they otherwise wouldn’t know.

Instagram don’ts

For the best results, don’t make these mistakes on Instagram: 

• Inundating followers: As a rule of thumb, posting more than three to five times a week tends to annoy followers. However, this number varies by industry and product type, so do your best to determine what your audience’s expectations are.
• Being too sales-oriented: Posting sales-oriented content nonstop is a mistake. Followers don’t want to feel constantly pressured to purchase. Consider following the 5:3:2 rule for social media: For every 10 posts, curate five posts from other content, create three posts that are relevant to your audience and use two posts to share fun content that humanizes your company.
• Buying followers: Although a high follower count may look good initially, fake followers only hurt your Instagram marketing results. These followers will not engage with your account and they have no genuine interest in your company. 
• Being inauthentic: Never use auto-commenters or post generic-sounding comments. Authenticity is prized on Instagram and being too robotic will cost you followers.
• Posting clickbait: Although you should post interesting and engaging content, don’t add completely irrelevant or sensational content just to get reposts.
• Neglecting captions: While Instagram is primarily visual, you can benefit from writing thoughtful captions for your posts. The captions should add interesting information, context or humor to the image or video.
• Ignoring negative feedback: Instagram is a highly interactive platform and those who post negative comments expect a response. Pay attention to positive and negative feedback, and show your followers you care by responding thoughtfully.

Instagram is a must-have social media platform for businesses

More people than ever are paying attention to Instagram, making it a powerful platform for connecting with potential customers. While advertisement and sponsorship opportunities exist, an Instagram business account is free and businesses can establish a significant following without spending a dime. If you haven’t jumped on the Instagram bandwagon yet, you may be doing your business a disservice.

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.