Opus Communication is all about social media marketing. As the world is being more and more advanced so it’s better to go with the advanced technology. It provides benefit to both the market and the buyers. The global market has become a giant and instagram is one of the most advanced mediums of social media advertising.

The service rapidly gained popularity, with over 100 million active users as of April 2012 and over 300 million as of December 2014.

How to Create an Instagram Marketing Strategy

Instagram, with more than 30 billion images shared and 300 million monthly active users, generates an average of 70 million photos per day. The mobile-based photo- and video-sharing social network powers the sharing of images and creation of community among users around the world. At only five years old, the platform has shown significant growth in its overall user base and in almost every demographic group in the past year.

As people join Instagram in droves, brands have a unique opportunity for engagement with their fans: Instagram posts generate a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21 %—58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter.

Success for brands on Instagram takes more than publishing attractive images— it is the product of thoughtful strategy, a well-defined brand identity grounded in visual creativity and effective community management. As you explore the potential of Instagram for your business, keep in mind the particular strengths of visual social media for telling a compelling story about your brand.

Advertising on Instagram

Have a great new product or service? Show followers what it does or how it works by posting photos of it in action.

Determine Your Objectives

Whether you haven’t published a single photo or you want to elevate your existing presence, consider the following when creating your strategy for Instagram:

• What will Instagram allow you to do that other platforms don’t?
• Who is your target audience?
• Which members of your audience are on Instagram?
• How will Instagram integrate with the other networks in your social media strategy?

Instagram’s focus on visual sharing offers a unique platform to showcase your culture and people in addition to your products and services. The mobile nature of the app lends itself to quickly capturing moments, giving followers a chance to interact with your brand in a way that can feel more casual and instantaneous than on other networks. Depending on your industry, brand and key performance indicators, your Instagram strategy might include many of the following objectives:

• Increase brand awareness.
• Demonstrate company culture.
• Showcase your team and recruit new talent.
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty.
• Showcase products and services.
• Enhance and complement event experiences.
• Incentivize consumer engagement with your brand.
• Share company news.
• Grow your community.
• Connect with influencers.
• Drive sales through a third-party app.

Develop A Content Strategy

Content is the foundation of your Instagram presence. Based on your target audience and objectives, develop a plan to deliver eye-catching content to your community on a consistent basis.

Determine Types of Content & Ratio

Instagram started as a photo-sharing app, but its wide base of creative users is publishing everything from graphics to animated GIFs. As you plan out your content, consider a balance of content types that will work best for the resources you have and the engagement you want from your audience. If video enables you to tell a compelling story about your product, work it into your content more often. If you don’t have the resources—time, skills or comfort level—to execute video at the level you want, you may choose not to publish video at all or to reserve it for specific campaigns and promotions. With composition for Instagram, quality matters, and it is worth spending the time to create the best possible content.

Set a Content Calendar, but Be Flexible

To establish and maintain an active presence on Instagram, determine the frequency with which you will post, and develop a content calendar that cycles through your themes and integrates key dates and campaigns. Instagram does not have a scheduling function, and it does not grant third-parties API access to publishing, which means that you cannot schedule posts directly on Instagram or through your social media management tool. That said, you can easily prepare content (photos, videos, captions) in advance and create a content calendar so that your team knows when posts should go live.

Some of the best content for Instagram will occur spontaneously, especially if your aim is to highlight company culture or events. By preparing content and setting a general schedule in advance, you can allow the flexibility to take advantage of opportunities when they occur. During events, be ready to publish quickly to take advantage of real-time social engagement.

Consider Curating User-Generated Content (UGC)

If your Instagram community members are sharing their own content featuring your brand, you have access to a repository of potential content gold. Curating content from your fans allows you to foster audience engagement and create an incentive for your audience to share their own creative ways of interacting with your products, services or company.

Post videos: Instagram gave short-form video platform Vine a run for its money with 15-second Instagram videos. Get creative, mix things up and take advantage of this new feature by posting videos in between images.

Using Filters, Lux & Creative Tools: Instagram offers several ways to edit photos and videos. Review filters and their effects to select a handful that fit your brand’s aesthetic and ensure visually consistent content.

For photo editing, you also have the option to apply Lux or use creative tools. Lux (the sun symbol) adjusts the contrast and saturation of your photo. Tools (the wrench symbol) allow you to individually adjust brightness, contrast, warmth, shadows, color and more. For video editing, you can select a filter, trim content and choose a specific cover image that will show up in the News Feed.

Captions: Approaches to writing Instagram captions vary—captions are limited to 2,200 characters, which means that while some users omit captions altogether, others approach sharing as a form of micro blogging and write a short story to accompany every post. Don’t worry about long captions deterring followers from engaging with your content: according to Simply Measured, there is no statistically significant correlation between caption length and engagement.

As with all aspects of style, consistency is key. Your copy guidelines should include whether sentence fragments are acceptable, whether you will use emoji and hashtags (and how many to use in a given post), and what your policy is around @-mentioning other users.

Hashtags: Hashtags allow Instagrammers to discover content and accounts to follow, so using them is a good way to connect with new followers and increase engagement on your posts. A study by Track Maven found that, for Instagram accounts with less than 1,000 followers, posts with 11 hashtags received the most interactions (likes and comments). For accounts with more than 1,000 followers, posts with five hashtags received the highest average interactions.

Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post or comment, so decide whether your brand will use them, how many to include in a typical post and whether you want to create branded hashtags to align with your content themes. In terms of copy guidelines, you can use hashtags within your copy—“welcome to #NYC”—or at the end of a post. Which looks best to you?

Add to Photo Map: Location tagging, or geo-tagging, using the Add to Photo Map feature is another way to increase engagement and allow new users to discover your content—posts with a location receives 79% higher engagement than posts without. For organizations that use Instagram during travel and events, at multiple sites or to promote destinations, geo-tagging is a particularly useful feature.

Tag People: If you tag other Instagram members in a post, it will show up on their profile under the Photos of User section. You can use this functionality to tag individuals or brands featured in your posts, and users will be able to tap your photo to view and click tagged handles.

Social Sharing: Instagram allows you to connect your profile to accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and Foursquare and automatically push your photo to those networks. Determine whether you want to cross-post or promote your Instagram content in this way. If cross-posting is an important part of your strategy, make sure that anyone managing your Instagram account has access to linked accounts in case they need to reauthenticate the connection.

Following Accounts

What kind of content do you want to keep a pulse on through Instagram? Following influencers in your industry—for example, if you are a clothing retailer, following top fashion bloggers—will help you keep an eye on interesting content and even find inspiration for your own posts. It helps to set basic guidelines around who your brand will and won’t follow, taking into consideration a few things: private accounts (the user must approve your request to follow), employee accounts, relevance to your brand and appropriateness of content (nothing that’s not safe for work, whatever that means in your industry).

Managing Comments, @Mentions & Direct Messages

A common practice on Instagram is to @mention other users—sometimes in a descriptive caption, sometimes in a comment—to give credit or draw their attention to a certain photo or video. If you receive notifications that your brand is @mentioned, it might be worth spending a moment to acknowledge an on-brand fan photo with a Like or a quick comment.

Analyze Your Result

Tracking how your content performs and how your following grows will allow you to adapt your Instagram marketing strategy over time, delivering more of the content that your audience responds to and optimizing your plans for future campaigns.

The Goal Of Social Marketing Is To Achieve More Audience Which We Want For The Promotion Of Our Business.

Instagram has been growing immensely from the past one year, where in 2013 Instagram was growing slowly in 2014 there has been a boost in its usage and acceptance as Brands and Companies have realized the true potential of the platform and have integrated it into their digital strategy.

We at Opus Communications strongly believe exploring new opportunities and capitalizing on those opportunities in terms of innovation, as we like to challenge our traditional ways of communication and come up with something that’s not already there.

Visual content is now becoming one of the biggest communication tools that’s now being used aggressively by almost all of the Brands and companies. A famous saying that “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Is a statement that is followed by many marketers as consumers now only believe in what they see and since the marketers have identified the true essence of visual representation of the content.

According to the Social Habit survey of ALL Social Media users surveyed, 48% affirmed they are using Instagram more habitually. This propels the other major platforms out of the water. Of those who have an Instagram profile, 83% use it at work-again outshining even Facebook by a long shot. One rationale could be that sharing on Instagram requires no typing. You just snap a photo and post in seconds. Today, 67% of Instagram users are under the age of 34. The Projection is that there could be a huge good thing across demographics because everybody loves sharing photos. And it’s so easy to use, even the non tech-savvy can master it in minutes. Since Instagram is a mobile-only application, its adoption will increase as the trend toward smart phones continues in 2014.

Instagram is primarily becoming an important social media marketing tool as it fully accentuates the significance of visual advertising in structuring brand knowledge, enlightening brand allegiance, and mounting sales. To influence the power of visual content, marketers can augment their brand’s existence on Instagram by setting up a schedule for regular content sharing. Social media marketing results show that effectual use of visual content such as photograph, imagery, and short videos presents a massive occasion for brand marketers to connect present and probable customers and improve the bottom line.

Social media marketers who realize the best practices and how to use Instagram techniques to compel better commitment often incorporate marketing on Instagram into their overall digital marketing strategy

Guys, we all us Instagram on personal front but have you ever tried using it for your business? Let Opus Communication help you understand how Instagram can prove to be a fundamental tool in marketing your business.

You may think it’s a great idea for your business to jump on the Instagram bandwagon but aren’t really sure what to be taking pictures of or what to be sharing? It’s really dependent on what type of company and/or industry you’re in. For some people it’s easy to know what to post. If you’re an event company, or a sports team it’s pretty straight forward the things you can be posting that your followers will want to see, but these are some ideas to help get the wheels turning for your businesses Instagram profile.

Show a behind the scenes look into your company

Showcase the things that not everyone gets to see about your company. Things that are happening in the office, cool stuff some of your staff members did, profile your current staff, showcase behind the scenes of events, conferences etc. People love feeling as if they’re getting a secret look inside your company. Plus this really puts a face behind your brand.

Showcase your products and/or services

A picture says 1000 words. Show off your products and your services through visuals. Do you offer business card printing? Show some sweet examples of business cards you’ve done for people. Do you sell different types of products? Snap a picture and showoff your newest products that are in store. Nothing beats visuals.

Show off your customers

Showcase your happy customers. Did someone just purchase their first ever cell phone? Feature them on your Instagram. Did a customer come in with a cool story? Showcase them! Customers are your brands greatest advocates, and by showcasing them, you make them feel like a celebrity, plus show them & other customers that you actually care about your customers.

Run contests

Instagram is a great place to run fun photo contests and with apps like “Repost” this allows you to easily share your entrants great photo submissions. Providing you with great content, and something fun for your customers.

Connect with your followers

Just like any other social network, interact with your followers and/or people that are already posting about you. Search hashtags that are relevant to your business. For example, if you’re a restaurant people are probably regularly posting pictures.