10 tips for optimizing your company’s Instagram account

Use your company’s name as your account name and do it in the simplest possible way so users can find you easily. Add a representative profile photo (your logo, for example), a complete biography that describes your products and the services you offer, as well as a call to action to invite people to visit your website. If you have time, add one or two hashtags that represent your niche or your offer of products/services.

Don’t forget to add a link to your website and to make sure that your profile is a “Business” account.

Instagram is a visual platform. When consumers land on your profile, they decide in a fraction of a second whether the content is interesting and whether they’re going to subscribe—which explains the importance of having a complete description and professional visuals. It’s recommended that you use square photos (1080 x 1080) to give your page a more uniform look.

Need tips on creating beautiful visuals?

It’s important to regularly post content to attract new subscribers, stay in the good graces of the algorithm and, most importantly, retain your current subscribers. This gives you credibility and makes you show up more frequently in your subscribers’ feed. It’s recommended that you not publish more than once per day. Have fun creating varied content: photos, videos and reels.

58% of Instagram users say they’ve developed an interest in a product or a brand after having seen them showcased in the company’s Instagram “stories.” And half of them say they’ve visited a website to buy a product or a service after having seen it in stories.

Stories are a popular, effective and quick way of sharing information – but also for developing a relationship with your audience. Show them the human side of your company, like videos of your daily tasks, snapshots of upcoming products or simply the “behind the scenes” of your company.

Try to publish between 3 and 10 stories per day. They remain available for 24 hours, but you can save them on your profile in your “highlights.

While Instagram is a visual platform and it’s important to come across in a professional way, having style without content isn’t an effective strategy. 58% of users say they prefer when brands share spontaneous, imperfect content. Don’t let the fear of not having “perfect” content keep you from sharing it.

Your company’s target audience becomes the target audience of your Instagram account. Publish content that interests them. You can learn more about your subscribers’ behaviour in the Statistics section of your app. This will help you know, for example, when your audience is most active, so that you can publish your content during the periods of highest traffic.

The Instagram Shopping tools are key for online companies. 44% of Instagram users buy every week on the platform and 1 out of every 2 customers uses Instagram to find new brands. Instagram Shopping allows you to create a catalog of products that can be entirely and directly purchased on Instagram – and it allows you to link the products in your posts and stories, too.

Hashtags help users find you and your content more easily in the search tool of the application. Even though Instagram has long emphasized the importance of using many of hashtags, the app specialists have recently confirmed that using between 5 and 15 hashtags is now sufficient.

Choose pertinent hashtags that represent your content well: #sale #womensfashion #deluxeshoes #Montréal #deals #onlinesales #warehousesales

Respond to all your private messages and comments. Yes, it increases your engagement rate, but even more importantly, it encourages your future customers to start conversations with you. Over time, these conversations become the basis for how they see your brand, which has a huge influence on their purchasing decisions.

Making live videos (to show your new arrivals, for example, or provide an overview of a sale that’s underway) is also a good way of attracting attention. You can then post your live video for your subscribers who weren’t able to be there for it. Share the video in your story and voilà!