Instagram — A medium of Visuals! An instant Visual!
People choose Instagram to get influenced, impelled, and inspirited.
The visual essence of Instagram makes it more popular and more popular.
Quite a lot of interesting part moves you into Instagram.
Instagram is not only of visuals it also contributes to the caption beneath.
Instagram Stories allows Instagram users to share photos and videos, and link them to their “Story.”
Gliding towards the origin of Instagram…
Instagram Origin
Instagram— the largest-growing, well-liked, and well-linked social-media platform. It was a quick hit as soon as it was launched with millions of users, within two months of its launch. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger developed Instagram in San Francisco.
Systrom had experience in marketing and studied engineering that gave him exposure to coding. He created a prototype app called Burbn, which allowed people to locate each other or, where they are grabbing a coffee or seeing a concert.
At some point, Systrom along with Mike Krieger decided to make some changes in Burbn to make it distinct from other apps. Therefore, they stripped out all the features from the app apart from the features like uploading photos, commenting, and liking. The app was renamed Instagram—a type of instant telegram.
Instagram—launched on 6th October 2010, the growth was felt instantaneously. It gained huge momentum and became the number one photography app with 1 million users in two months. It was bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012.
Instagram now has over 600 million active users, and the number is still increasing.
Why Instagram is so popular?
Some highlights for the success
• People nowadays, don’t prefer reading long text want to read long texts, they are more interested in watching videos and images, and this is the basic prototype of Instagram.
• Instagram allows you to publish your favorite photos by making its stunning one — a compelling one too.
• Simple, easy to use, and free!!!
• Includes a lot of fun features.
• The daily needs of users have been updated.
• No frequent display of too many frustrating ads, and pop up.
• An excellent platform for a business profile to make a lot of money—being an influencer.
• Lastly, Instagram focuses on one thing that creates clarity among the users, rather than trying too many things that confuse them.
Let’s get started!
Instagram allows individuals who have created a free account to upload media–both photos and videos. Editing the media uploaded with filters and organizing them with location information and hashtags.
And to move straight with the wonderful options of Instagram…
Hashtag — a word or phrase preceded by a hash sign(#) that is used primarily on social media platforms to identify posts about a specific topic. Instagram’s ideal hashtag limit is 30 hashtags.
Public (or) Private profile options of the users allowed.
Public profile — a user’s photos/videos are viewable by every other Instagram user.
Private profile — users can choose who they want to be able to view their posts. Instagram’s users can find other users’ photos and videos by searching for their hashtags and locations.
The user can also find out and scroll through an aggregation of trending content and communicate with other user’s photos and videos by clicking on buttons including a post or write a text comment to a post.
Follow mode — When a user prefers to follow another user it means, that the specified user’s photos and videos get linked to their feed.
The very first version of the Instagram app strictly allowed users to post the media file in a square aspect ratio.
A square aspect ratio is a ratio where an image’s height and width are the same. In later versions, the users were able to upload media that were larger — up to 1080 pixels.
A recent inclusion seems to be one of the apps’ most popular features is — Instagram Stories. Where in, users can post photos and videos to a separate feed of content within the app. These types of posts can be viewed by other users or followers for 24 hours, after the time of the posting. These features fetch millions and millions of audiences using Instagram every day.
Social media advances rapidly; and Instagram is rolling out new features at a bullet-speed rate.
Shop on Instagram — An Instagram Shop, the latest feature, exhibits your product catalog integrated with your Instagram profile.
A new way to promote your products directly to Instagram users through Posts and Stories, in the Explore tab, and in a special Shop tab on your profile.
Link to Know More:
These updated changes are evolving out to stay ahead of the competitors and for the effective reach of the target audience. The outlook of changes also ensures how the existing and new brands are benefited by making use of these platforms.
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Instagram is home to over 1 BILLION active users, 55% of whom are aged 25-55. It is not only a hub for people’s vacation pictures and videos but also visual experiences like ASMR-inducing fitspo and enjoyable memes!
There are a number of opportunities for the business community on Instagram—An ideal way to connect to the ideal customer.
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Let’s plunge into lively options of Instagram for writers which you might have wondered about!!!
Your feed, favorite captions, exciting stories, hashtags, algorithms, DMs (Direct Messaging), tagging, followers, following, unfollowing, your extraordinary profile, unique highlights…
Winning Instagram as a Copy Writer
Moving Forward…
What does your Brand Indicate?
Identify!
1. What your brand tells your viewers and which community you want to reach consistently.
2. Identify your Brand’s Tone and Voice.
3. Create your own style to convey your audience (Your way of using your palette).
4. Know your best reachable audience.
Hashtags Usage:
Before you get preoccupied with hashtags, look out for the following:
-Personify your brand and know the brand personality.
-Fix the voice of the brand.
-Visualize your brand – choose 2-3 favorite colors, 1 or 2 font types, also pick a photo filter. The best deal is to keep it VERY SIMPLE.
-Choose your primary message to convey.
-Your Target Audience.
-Prove your values, genuineness, and the most appreciable traits that will hit the nail in your reader’s mind.
Top Challenges:
Make a point to use your personal notepad (use new Google doc or any of your writing notebook) to draft your points on the above-discussed ones, make it handy – will be helpful for your future reference.
Note the points answering questions from the perspective of the client in an informal and relaxed tone with lateral thinking, this will work out as a beginner.
Based on the ideas of what your peers, family, and relatives expect from a brand as the user – get the idea of what info they would like to know additionally on the brand, review on the past info, and what more is appreciated, this will work out as an intermediate.
Think out how to amplify your ranking and reach out to the maximum audience through Instagram. Find out ways to backlink your post that will optimize your post.
Get engaged with posts of others and find out how they rank. Create the “call to action” in a unique way rather than redirecting to the link in the bio. This will serve as the best way to expertise the post.
In this way, you can work out the set of guidelines to bring a winning post.
Tips for writing best Instagram captions
How a visual coupled with a winning caption can attract the audience?
According to the Dual Coding Theory, Allan Paivio exhibits a fact that our memory has two codes or channels that deal with visual and verbal stimuli as well. Although stored independently, they are linked, linking the words to images. Those linked memories make them recollect much easily. The word or image stimulates retrieval of the other mutually.
The Dual Coding Theory by Allan Paivio. Courtesy: www.mysimpleshow.com
Thus the visual of an object can remind us of the word for it.
For instance, a picture of a beach bay may convey different meanings for different audiences. But if you mention beach sports and summer vacations in the captions, you can help what customers might imagine when they see the image.
This is where captions are playing a mighty role in Instagram marketing.
In brief, they:
• Help you reach out to people who rely on text to understand information
• Help you control what people think about when they see your visuals.
Instagram caption ideal character limit: 2,200 characters.
A visual with a well-crafted caption will transform your engaging visitors into the captivating audiences. That will be a fascinating response! Isn’t it?
In the above instance of visual from Starbucks, the visual is quite creative and interesting. And read the caption that is quite engaging and has got responses from the audiences too – the reader has been enthralled by the caption.
Plan the voice that will resonate well and reach the target audience and the one that suits your product or service.
Select the appropriate tone of your product or service to approach your intended audience (followers) and maintain it consistently in all the posts.
Let’s get through the other example( above), a caption from Dominoes. The visual engages the users with an activity of filling the missing letters and finding out the word (dessert they promote).
And thereby giving the offer to initiate their marketing – “Drop your answers in the comments section and get a chance to be one of the lucky winners to win 100% cashback”.
Fun-Filled Emoji Text
Emojis (Emoticons) are meant typically as a resource to convey emotional messages by faces. They pour out your feelings from happiness to sarcasm and thereby leading to a jazzy conversation.
They are meant to ignite emotions in your text in a fun-filled manner at the same moment it ensures effective delivery of emotions related to your post.
Enchanting Emojis. Courtesy: www.unsplash.com
Will Hashtags roll out Eyeballs over your content? YEP!
Hashtags and Instagram are twined to go hand in hand. Hashtags enable new followers to catch your content as well as encourage your audience to share their posts related to your brand.
A brand-specific hashtag is a crucial requisite for the promotion of e-commerce brands. According to research – “2014 Simply Measured Q3 Instagram Study”–Instagram posts including at least one hashtag had about a 12.6% higher engagement rate than those without any hashtags.
On Instagram, a maximum of 30 hashtags per post will be allowed–but that doesn’t mean you need to utilize all the 30 for your post.
A wise choice of the hashtags relevant to your content will definitely serve the purpose.
The above post of Coffee Day has many hashtags included that directs to the wonderful recipes the audience can enjoy with the coffee of Coffee Day.
Posts are also created using another Instagram account to maximize the engagement of the followers. This is like cross-promoting your partners in business or helping you to connect with more active audiences.
Instagram Algorithm
The Instagram algorithm is the one that decides which posts people see every time they open their Feed.
To maximize your potential customers from Instagram, it’s important to write a post on your brands on a regular basis.
This means posting at least daily and staying in the good graces of the Instagram algorithm means publishing will keep your followers engaged.
Tips to improve your algorithm:
• Posting consistently.
• Remixing your already-posted content has two benefits: you already know the algorithm likes it as well as it’s gonna save your time.
Talk to followers: Scope to write grows on…
The more your presence on Instagram, you’ll find more and more customers buzzing with queries and suggestions – That sounds good!
Instagram can be used as a customer support panel to guide your followers and answer their questions to help them think over and fall into action on a particular purchase.
Also leave a humanly reply, offer value, and expect nothing. And thereby create a like and trust relationships. This will lead to a perfect conversion into a potential buyer.
Instagram Stories – Will they Promote Sales?
A type of content that’s dominating Instagram right now is Stories. Stories offer brands a myriad of creative freedom in terms of promoting products. Do you want to post your nail art selfie? An awesome product photos with a specifically crafted call-to-action? Stories allow you to perform both by putting your brand front and attract your followers’ into Instagram feeds.
Make your story ranking by using the questions, sliders, and valuable poll stickers in your stories to encourage and enjoy interacting…This will center your text!
Polls on Instagram. Courtesy: www.techcrunch.com
How to tell your Stories Better?
A story in a visual format that is ephemeral (disappears after 24 hrs). It was modeled after Snapchat. Not displayed in the Instagram news feed thereby avoids overloaded visuals.
Stories break the wall of Instagram aesthetics on using your phone videos.
Catch out the editing icons and make your story appealing:
• Save
The save icon enables you to save the image you are working on, either only the image or an image with edits you have included. Addends like gifs or music, it will by default be saved as a video file.
• Linking
The linking icon allows you to add links to your story supporting the topic you choose and allows users to navigate externally.
Instagram doesn’t allow users with lower than 10,000 followers to make use of this feature unless links directing to your own IGTV video.
• Accessories
The accessories icon are additional features to get the audience engaged and stickers are highlights and can be accessed by swiping up from the editor screen.
• Filter
The filter icon allows you to add in some of the VR filters.
• Drawing
A handy one, ready to use handwritten text or drawings using a variety of available brushes as well as erasers is available. You can use color selection tools in addition.
• Text
The text icon allows you to add-in text, can be initiated by tapping anywhere on the screen.
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Presenting the text-only images on Instagram…
How to post cool text-only images on Instagram?
Use the Create Mode
• The top left corner of the home screen shows a camera icon – Tap it.
• You can find options – Live, Create, Normal icons. Go ahead with the “create” option
• Tap your screen to add your text.
• Use the slide bar to adjust the font size.
• Click “Next” on completion.
• Use the colorful circle icon in the top left to change the BG.
• Go for the “Send to” icon to add it to your stories or use “save” at the top of the screen to save to your phone.
• Then post the customized story text to your grid.
Let’s Wrap up,
The Instagram caption can be a valuable platform for the copywriters to bring a great impression on the Brands. Writing an appealing caption or text (in the post) on Instagram takes a significant time as well as a worthy task, as it will help you in bringing potential audiences through well-built relationship or engagement. This will lead to a valuable sales conversion.
So are you ready to use the tips you have read in this article? Hope you are likely to share your comments…
Really Informative article with do-able tips.
Thanks Samhita!