I think it’s safe to say that we all know I’m a massive fan of Pinterest and love to help other businesses with their accounts.
But just as I wrote previously here, there are some massive similarities between Pinterest and Instagram with them being visual based platforms and both using keywords to aid users discovering content that they’re looking for.
So it makes sense for me to also help small businesses who use Instagram as an aspect of their social media strategy.
Today I am going to be talking about Instagram, how you can use it within your business, but how you can also use it to learn about your audience, but more importantly how to learn about the audience you actually want to be targeting.
If Instagram is where most of your ideal clients hide, utilise this to your advantage when conducting market research.
It will enable you to discover the level of brand awareness when it comes to your target audience and your business, it also lets you ask questions to your audience directly to gain feedback!
However, what I think is the best is the chance to discover trends in consumer behaviour across the industry as a whole.
Here are 6 ways you can learn about your target audience on Instagram:
1: Check Your Audience Insights
Whilst I go on about a target audience, bear in mind that there might be people out there who don’t fit your audience archetype. With this in mind it is worth reviewing your audience insights as it might actually prompt you to expand who you target and might even reach a completely new customer base!!
2: Assess Your Content Analytics
Demographics and interests can tell you a lot about your audience on Instagram. Seeing what they respond to and how they react helps you create content that they want to see.
Check out your analytics for the content that you’re putting out there. Identify the content that generates the most engagement and recreate it over and over again (obviously don’t over do it and post too close together.) Make sure to separate the caption and image to test whether it is actually the image or the caption that is what the audience wants to see more of!
Using your content analytics, it will enable you to discover what kind of content or topics your users respond to? With this information you can put out content that will gain massive results.
3: Review Your Comments and DMs
Find your top-performing posts and read through the comments to gauge the response. Do the same for your DMs too.
From this you can get a general idea about what people think of your business, but remember these comments and DMs are only sourced from when people speak directly to you, so those who talk about you indirectly are impossible to gauge.
4: Analyse Tags and Mentions
Instagram may not have an official review platform. But that doesn’t stop people sharing content about your business. Find posts where you’ve been mentioned or tagged as it can help you understand how users view you, your business and quite often it can be used to create user-generated content (UGC).
5. Search for Relevant Hashtags
Searching for different types of hashtags can help you understand trends and emerging behaviours as well as being able to take advantage of opportunities to grow your business. You can try a range of things from industry terms to branded hashtags.
Searching for industry terms can also help you understand consumer trends and emerging behaviours. If you can identify a growing demand within a certain niche, you can take advantage of opportunities to be able to grow your brand. This is commonly known as social listening.
6: Ask Your Followers
It’s so simple, yet so effective! Just ask people their thoughts!
In conclusion, if your target audience is often found on Instagram; this platform will more than likely give you plenty of data that you can use to your advantage. If you use the above tips you will more than likely see your business grow in the right direction and sales should be on the rise soon enough!
Do you use Instagram as part of your target research? Let me know by hitting reply!
CLICK TO PIN THE IMAGE BELOW:
