Instagram for Business Strategy Guide

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Choose story themes that are authentic to your brand. This will enable your brand to create content that follows themes
Instagram for Business Strategy Guide Instagram provides a platform for businesses of all sizes to reach a captive audience and visually inspire people with their unique point of view.

The Instagram Community Instagram is one of the fastest growing communities online today. Our community is now at over 300 million monthly actives. Engagement on Instagram is incredibly strong. When it comes to content production, people upload about 70M and Like about 2.5 billion photos per day. The immersive nature of the product enables people to produce and consume a lot of content, and yet it also remains a relatively lightweight experience.

@bananarepublic

Community Best Practices Engaging with the Instagram community is essential to your success on the platform because your brand is a part of the community. In addition to posting high-quality content, you should follow other accounts and respond to comments on your posts. We recommend the following: Accounts to Follow Follow your brand’s partners, advocates, and influencers in the community whose content may relate to your brand.

@patrickworkman

Account Moderation Set up policies and procedures for responding to questions and negative comments. Determine how you will handle offensive or inappropriate comments on your content.

@tacobell

Business Strategy Guide

Content Best Practices for Brands The best way to build and maintain a following is to create authentic, highquality, on-brand content that the community wants to see in their Instagram feed. Tell an interesting brand story through your images and captions. Focus on your brand’s objective Consider how Instagram fits into your overall brand marketing strategy. Is your objective to increase awareness, shift perception, or reach a new audience? Pick a goal or two that can be achieved by connecting with Instagram's highly visual and creative community.

@tieks

Be consistent Choose story themes that are authentic to your brand. This will enable your brand to create content that follows themes for a diversity of content but also remains consistent over time. Create high-quality content Work with your brand or creative team to produce images and videos that are well-crafted and fit within the platform.

@domestikatedblog

Text Keep captions short and fresh. Incorporate hashtags where relevant, but not so many that they detract from the simplicity of the post.

Additional Guidelines Organic publishing Unlimited number of hashtags are allowed but less is more. Linking to other profiles and attribution to other profiles can be determined by brand.

@habashi

Sponsored publishing Instagram captions must not exceed 4 lines of text, around 120-150 characters including spaces. Sponsored posts (ads) cannot exceed 3 relevant hashtags. Profile linking & attribution must be agreed upon by both parties.

@mercedesbenz

Business Strategy Guide

Creative Best Practices for Brands Brand presence is important It’s key that there is branding present in images for paid media to ensure brand recall. If there is not enough brand recall the posts will not perform. Unique perspective Focus on details that are exclusive to your brand. Without careful consideration of the elements that make your brand unique, you may not add any valuable brand equity through your campaign.

@erlebel

Creative should ladder up to objectives Choosing a way to compose an image can be just as important as what the photo is and can provide creative structure and give a deeper meaning. Strong focal point Avoid using imagery that is a busy or complex composition. Your content needs to stop an audience in their feed and leave a lasting impression. @levis

Framing & balance Subtle details such as the rule-of-thirds, straightening, and symmetry make a big difference in the overall polish of an image and affect the tone of your shot.

Video Best Practices for Brands Sound By default, all video will auto-play without audio. It’s important to craft your content as if it will play silently and consider audio a value add. Your audience can activate sound by tapping. If they do, we suggest considering sound that ramps in slowly so the experience will not be jarring or cause your audience to move on.

@habashi

Motion As a general rule, consider having motion within the first few frames of your film. We’ve found that an audience might overlook video if they don’t notice movement, assuming it’s a still. @capitalone