Instagram for your food brand

Plenty of articles including this one are suggesting that Instagram isn’t ready for businesses due to a number of reasons:

– Hyperlinks aren’t live within posts

– Analytics aren’t available within the app itself

– There’s no in-app regramming function (although this can be downloaded separately)

– There’s no function to manage multiple insta accounts off one device.

Using Instagram as a business while maintaining a personal account can be a pain, but let’s talk about the ways you can use it in its current format:

Wait – before we do that, check out these amazing food art images we found on the app!

Okay, back to business. Here’s how to insta for business:

1. Set up an Instagram account under your brand name

2. Search for hashtags mentioning your brand, or subject area of interest to your brand. E.g. for a bakery it might be #bakingtrends or #bagel or even #Australiaday for Aussie-themed cakes & sweets on our big national day.

3. Comment on images, where users have hashtagged your product or service. Be friendly and say thanks for the shout out, o ‘look yum’ or something friendly and completely without sales motive.

4. Post images of your people/company/operations using the brand account, making sure to tag with the hashtags you follow regularly, where relevant.

5. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

6. In your account bio, be sure to direct people to a social media account that you do actively manage and they can engage with you in real time, perhaps facebook, twitter or LinkedIn.

7. And if you do use twitter,  link your instagram account to your twitter account, thereby posting to twitter each time you upload an instgram image. This means your images will be searchable in twitter (providing you write a good description and tag that bad boy!)

While Instagram might not be perfectly geared for business at the moment, it is a hub of authentic user content that is too good to pass up! Even if you log in once a week and monitor your favourite hash tags, it is worth the investment- you’ll likely discover a range of content that can be shared on multiple platforms!