Member Article

Creating a commercial Instagram profile with real personality

A commercial Instagram profile gives you a terrific opportunity to put a human face on your organization. Even if you’re working for a major company with hundreds of employees, spotlighting the experiences of a few “behind the scenes” workers can make it much easier for followers to engage with your brand.

Bear in mind that you don’t have to (in fact, you shouldn’t) make every Instagram post a marketing push. You can just share pics you find fun or enjoyable! These sorts of casual pictures can end up being your most popular posts. Don’t obsess over your promotional plans every time you contemplate pushing the “Share” button. Remember that Instagram is a platform designed to foster lively person-to-person interactions.

Make your pictures look their best before you upload them to your Instagram account. You can find many easy-to-use photo-editing apps available that can polish up your pics before you share them. You’ll find a selection of some great ones right here:

Instaframe

Instaframe is a free tool that can significantly expand your options when you’re preparing photos to show on Instagram. This is far from the only photo collage app out there, but it happens to be my absolute favorite. Take a look at the snazzy photos UberSF assembled with this app to publicize their Uber ice cream event.

Squaready

As you probably already know, Instagram will crop your photos to a square shape by default. Although the app itself gives you some basic control over how your photos are cropped, Squaready goes a lot further to make sure that the best features of your picture are preserved when it goes on Instagram. Squaready is quick, handy, and best of all free.

Vibbi

Getting more Instagram likes can be a struggle at times, however looking popular can be a great way to entice more people to follow your profile. Tools such as Vibbi make it easy to add likes and then make your account more popular.

Picfx

Instagram is all about filtering your pictures to make them more striking, but if you want to get the most eye-popping results you have to expand your toolkit a bit. Picfx is a premium app with a £1.99 price tag, but it gives you access to over 100 textures and filters to really draw out the very best from your snapshots. As an added bonus, it handles Instagram cropping too.

Camera+

Camera+ is one of the world’s most popular photo-editing apps even though it comes with a £1.99 price tag. It will give you total control over your images’ lighting, brightness, clarity, and contrast. Camera+ helps ensure that you take the very best photos you can so that you’re starting your Instagram posting process with the highest-quality material.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to your followers for ideas on making your account more popular. The caption area attached to your pictures gives you enough space to ask viewers what they’d like to see from you next; go ahead and get their opinions! The more often you ask, the more guidance you’ll receive.

If you’re looking for more engagement, Instagram video is a powerful tool to put to work on your business’s behalf. Videos allow you to tell stories, introduce your products, amuse potential customers, and share the benefits of your expertise. We’ve already taken a closer look at the way Instagram video has been used as a great marketing tool in one of our Small Biz Social Friday features; check out the stories of four companies who are getting the most out of video marketing.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Cormac Reynolds .