How to Drive Website Traffic With Instagram

Instagram is currently one of most influential social media platforms. If you can match the trends and maintain interest, you can use Instagram to boost traffic to your online store.

Business Instagram account

It is necessary a separate business Instagram account. Why? Because promoting a business from a personal Instagram account will yield worse results than a separate business Instagram account. Avoid mixing personal and business posts, it is unlikely that potential followers that are interested in your product or service will be interested in posts about your pets. 

To boost traffic to your store via Instagram, you need to do three things:

A) Increase the exposure of your Instagram posts. Your posts need to be seen by more of your target audience.

B) Your target audience needs to be interested enough by your page to keep looking and to follow you.

C) You need to link to your store via your Instagram bio.

Increased exposure to your target audience

Gaining followers on a new Instagram account is difficult. Share your first few posts with friends and family, through Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and other platforms and ask them to re-share. If you already have some followers on your business page, you’ll have an easier time. Instagram is setup to increase the following of on trend pages, people and businesses in two ways:

• People seeing your content, and liking it enough to share it with their followers, and so on. If you can produce content that people want to share you can increase your following exponentially.This is the organic way of increasing your Instagram exposure. However, it requires you to out compete other private and business Instagram users, all of which are trying to achieve the same thing.
• Using popular Instagram hashtags. People search on Instagram via hashtags in order to find pages and posts that they may be interested in. If you can match the hashtags on your posts with popular searches you will be able to increase the amount of users that stumble across your posts.That said, you need to be careful to use on-trend, popular hashtags that are broad enough to capture a good amount of traffic, and yet narrow enough to avoid being lost in a sea of other posts.For example, using a hashtag such as #VintageBrogues rather #Shoes is likely to have a much more positive effect.

Instagram automation is becoming an increasingly popular and affordable way of increasing Instagram exposure. These services provide a time efficient and cost efficient ways of boosting your Instagram profile. Instagram automation is a particularly effective way of boosting your Instagram profile out of its early stages, but can also be built into a longer-term strategy. These services work by targeting Instagram users that use specific hashtags. Hashtags chosen by you that apply to your business or products. For instance, if you program an automator to target users that use the hashtag #VintageBrogues the automator will like posts of these people from your profile, increasing the chance that these people will click on your business Instagram page.

Gaining and retaining followers

Even with the help of Instagram automation, if the content on your page isn’t engaging or interesting then people aren’t going to follow you. Use professional quality photographs

• Instagram photos are square, so make sure that the composition of the initial photograph is designed for a square picture. Also, don’t over-edit! Over-editing can make photos look really fake, whereas your business should always look authentic and genuine: Check here the right Instagram photos size.

Add a lifestyle aspect to your Instagram page

• Include photos of activities that relate to the lifestyle that you want associated with your brand. If you are running a health based business, then people exercising or healthy food alongside your product or service is more likely to appeal to potential followers.

Don’t push your product or service

• Try not to post pictures of a product that you want to push, alongside a price and description. Instead include your products in all of your posts, but aim primarily for o- trend, good looking posts.

Keep the caption short and interesting

• The best kind of caption is a caption that encourages a second, or more engaged look at the picture. The picture is always seen before the caption, so encouraging another look increases the amount of time users spend viewing your posts, and therefore increases the likelihood of them visiting your page. And more visits = more eyeballs on your products = more clicks through to your site = more orders.
• Some ideas to achieve this are asking users a question, or asking if they spotted something hidden. Try to be original, but unfortunately originality in caption writing is something you will have to work out on your own. Every page is different!

Add a website link or store in your bio

Your bio is the writing at the top of your business’s Instagram page. This is the one place on Instagram from which you can include external links. And therefore, the only place where you can place a link to your store’s page. Your bio should also be interesting and original, as well as including an external link to your store.

Try to make it the kind of short taster-teaser that encourages follow up. Write a bio that will make people likely to follow the link to your store. This can be done in much the same way as the caption writing mentioned above. Make sure your bio isn’t too long as users are far more likely to read something that is succinct.

Try our Metricool SmartLinks feature. It will create a page where you can add clickable buttons and Instagram posts to drive users to your website or online store.

Overall, an Instagram page can be a huge and consistent source of customers for your e-commerce store. Each businesses strategy must be unique when it comes to Instagram, but this article has outlined some general points for consideration. The best place to start when building your strategy is always to imagine being one of your own customers. What sort of photos would you like to see?

What sort of caption and bio would actually draw your attention? Remember, the customer is always right!

Anniston Ward , 19 March 2021