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If you’re trying to engage more with your customers, Instagram is a great platform from which to do this. According to a recent study by Forrester, the site is the king of social engagement. 

The study involved the analysis of more than three million user interactions with around 2500 brand posts across seven social networks. On six of the seven networks, the brands studied had an engagement rate of less than 0.1 per cent. Or, to put it another way, for every one million Facebook fans a business accumulated, their posts received only about 700 likes, comments or shares. It was a similar story on Twitter, where user interaction was about 300 per one million followers.

On Instagram though, brands received an interaction rate of 4.21 per cent – so 58 times more engagement per follower than on Facebook, and 120 times more than Twitter.

With this in mind, here’s a few tips to increase your presence on Instagram:

1) Utilise user-generated content

People love to be involved and recognised, so make sure you’re highlighting their content. If you’re using customers’ content, they are far more likely to share your page with their networks. Go Pro does this well. have a look at their Instagram presence here.

2) Keep it consistent

It’s a tried and true method – consistency is key across all marketing channels, including Instagram. While ensuring your brand’s voice is consistent on other platforms or outlets, doing this using only imagery can be a little more trying. However, one way to ensure your business is recognisable and consistent on Instagram is to use your logo as the profile picture and your brand’s full name as the user name. Another trick is to create a watermark of your logo that is attached to all images you post. Only posting images that are in line with your branding or brand’s philosophy is important, whether that means they encompass the ‘spirit’ of your brand, such as Nike’s ‘Just do it’ concept, or they are useful, interesting or inspirational. It’s important to remember that people will judge your brand based on the content you upload and share so ensuring all images are aligned well with your brand is central to developing a cohesive presence on Instagram.

3) Use #tags

Just like other social media platforms, hash tagging is the way to go on Instagram as well. It’s an easy way to keep track of interactions on the site, and a good way to drive your presence. Whether you’ve got your own brand-specific hash tag that you’re encouraging your fan base to use when they upload an image, or if you’re looking at popular hash tags and incorporating them into your posts, it’s worth taking a moment to #tag. You can find a list of the top 100 hash tags on Instagram at webstagram.

4) Cross-promote

No doubt your brand has a presence on a few social platforms so why not use Facebook or Twitter for example to encourage more Instagram views or followers, and vice versa. If your primary social media platform has more followers, there is no sense in wasting the opportunity to promote your other online content. It also lets people know your brand has a strong online presence and offers different types of content.

Do you use Instagram? What are the best ways you’ve found to increase your presence and engagement on the site?