Did you catch our recent webinar: “Social success: How to leverage Instagram to grow wine brand awareness” by Trish Barry? If you were, you’ll know the social platform once deemed “hipsters-and fashion bloggers only” is now as widespread and mainstream as it gets in the popularity stakes. It’s also rapidly outpacing most of its social network peers in terms of user growth, and return on investment for businesses.

In-fact, parent company Facebook is reporting that 70% of Instagram’s users are outside of the U.S; a promising sign of continuing global appeal.

As with any rapidly growing and constantly changing digital platform, there’s a lot to keep up with if you want to get the most out of new features and trends. The major point here is this: Instagram is hot right now, and your business can be too if you ride the wave of growth in the right ways.

Unsurprisingly, given the sheer dominance of Zuck’s suite of platforms in the content race, one of the best sources for best-practice business tips and tricks is Instagram itself. So, when you’ve finished reading this post, make yourself a nice hot skinny-mocha-tiltshift-chino, and take a look at Instagram for Business .

You might recognise a few of the tips on the site from our webinar – it’s always nice to know we’re on the money with our advice! Here are a few more nuggets of advice from Mastermind Consulting to help drive success and increase your ROI through using Instagram for business:

  1. Show off your history by jumping on #TBT (ThrowbackThursday)

Remember though, nobody likes a brand trying too hard to get their love and attention on social media, so if you’re going to do it, do it well, and be 100% authentic.

  1. Video is your friend; and the internet (your customers) love video.

Get to know your phone’s capabilities, and you’ll be turning a snap of your shopfront into something straight out of Hollywood in no time. Have a play with slo-mo and invoke some emotion. Oh and check out Hyperlapse, too.

  1. Put your call to action link in your bio.

Drive traffic wherever you want from your posts by pointing people to the “link in bio” you’ve provided. Use a tool like bitly.com to analyse your success and measure what traffic is coming from Instagram across to your website.

  1. Embed your Instagram feed (or even individual posts) in your website.

Lots of businesses are embedding an Instagram feed in their sites now, but did you know you can also embed a post, even if it’s not your own? Click the three dots for “more” in the bottom right corner of the post on the desktop Instagram site, and voila: embed code to play with!

  1. Share some user generated content

Let your fans know that you’re loving seeing their content and feature their images in your feed. Tools like Repost for Regram App will help you search for the content and repost it easily.

Don’t forget to give our team a call if you’d like some help or want to discuss some case studies in more detail.