Lessons
Class Introduction
03:51 2Why Instagram
05:02 3First Steps: Goal Setting
04:12 4Instagram By The Numbers
04:06 5Business Profiles
08:30 6Profile Setup
13:33 7Content Best Practices
21:37 8How To Leverage Hashtags
19:27Lesson Info
Business Profiles
Let's talk a little about business profiles. So, your business profile really enables you to display slightly different information than a non-business profile. So, when we start on Instagram, we all have the same profile, right? It has the same sort of spaces for us to fill in to create a nice profile. If you do something like create or turn your personal account into a business account, what you will be able to do is display more prominent contact information. You'll have access to Insights. So right now Insights are only available to business accounts or people with large accounts, and I think it's like significantly large before they turn that feature on. You can then deliver ads to your followers, or to sort of any audience demographic that you select, and that's all kind of tied into Facebook ads. You can offer commerce features. You can take advantage of Instagram's commerce features. And the thing to note is you really you hafta have a Facebook business page to have an Instagra...
m business profile. And that's because they talk to each other, and I'll show you when we get to a later slide what fields kinda come directly from Instagram, and then the important thing to also remember with that is because it's important to tie it to Facebook because the ads come, you direct them through Facebook to Instagram, 'cause Facebook owns Instagram. They all have all the information about them, about us, that they could ever want, so when you wanna deliver an ad, you can select what specific demographic you wanna target. So you can say I wanna deliver this ad to not just women, but women who live in San Francisco, who are over the age of 25, who earn an average household income of, you know, $75000, who have expressed interest or who have said they like shoes and makeup, or whatever. Like you can get so specific with your targeting, it's really impressive. So the backend of Instagram ads is really what Facebook has to offer, so that's one of the important tie-ins. So, here are, for those are you that don't have Insights on your own account, who haven't really seen it, who haven't done the research. What I've done is screenshot some of my own Insights, so you now know all of my secrets. I have nothing left to hide in this world. But it's just kinda interesting to see the things that you can access through these insights. These insights are Instagram's version of Analytics. So you can see how many people are tapping in on your profile. So that's the profile tap or clicking on your website. How much reach do you have on a certain day, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. But you can see of these views and interactions on each post. On your Instagram Story you get a breakdown of the demographic. So I feel like this is really fishy. Like, why is it aways exactly 50%, but that's kinda what it's been from the beginning. You see an age breakdown of users that are following you, and then a location breakdown by city and country. And it's really interesting to see those insights overall, and then also interesting to see them per post. So here's a post that I made a few weeks ago. At the bottom of the image it says view Insights. So if I tap that, this little thing pops up on the bottom, and what it tells me is how many people have liked it, how many people have commented and bookmarked it, how many people from seeing this post have then clicked into my profile, and what the overall reach is. And that reach really includes the number of impressions, so like how many times has it been loaded and seen, and how much reach each post had. Reach is how many individual unique accounts that I've reached with this post. If you slide this up, this is what you see. So this is just an expanded view of this. So you'll see that 242 people tapped on my post or my profile. So they've seen my profile or they've gone into my website. And then this is like the big engagement number, the overall reach, the number of individual unique accounts that I've reached with my post. And then it just breaks down everything for you based on like number of people who've clicked on everything, so it's kinda cool to see that. What I wanna say though is that what I find, you know, this is nice and useful. People who hire me to do jobs are now asking me to screenshot this type of information so that they know sort of what the really full reach of whatever they're hiring me to post on my feed is gonna be. But there's a little bit of a limitation in what it offers, and so as a result of that, I would like to mention some of these external tools for analytics that are really helpful. Iconosquare is a really good one. If you sign up for it, it is a paid service at this point. I think most of these might be paid services beyond a certain point. But it's really helpful to see all the little detailed analytics if you're really into that. I honestly don't use any of these 'cause I don't want to burden myself with that extra level of having to pay attention, but I also am speaking from a point of privilege where I haven't really had to think much about that. If I was a smaller business and trying to build, it might be something that I find really useful. Sprout Social is another good one, and Hootsuite, and I think a couple of these, Hootsuite especially I know, they tools for scheduling out your social media posts, including your Instagram posts. There's not right now a way to, you can schedule thing like your tweets, right? Like I want this to be tweeted out Tuesday at noon, but you can't currently do that with Instagram. They keep that end of it locked down for some reason, at least at this point. What you can do, using tools like Hootsuite, is you can lay out your posts. So you can put the photo in, do the geo tagging, all of the captioning and everything, so it's basically ready to go, and then you can say I want this to go up at Tuesday at noon, and what it will do is ping you. It'll basically give you a notification on your phone saying hey it's Tuesday at noon, you might want to make that Instagram post that you have ready to go. So, that's kinda the work around that these third-party tools have done to make that work for us. I wanna share a screenshot of some of the commerce features of Instagram. I feel like I don't encounter them too often, so I had to kinda dig around and ask for recommendations to find somebody who's profile I could screenshot here. So you'll see this with a lot of, I think, bigger businesses are doing this, but I think it's maybe even more valuable for small businesses who don't really have another commerce area on their website or something. So here's the actual feed. So you're scrolling through the feed, and if you see this little icon, if you can't see it closely, it's a little shopping bag in the top right corner of the image. That indicates that the commerce features are on that particular post. So here's someone I clicked on. It expanded and opened up into this. There was a little icon for the shopping bag at the bottom left, and then what happened automatically is that these white dots showed up, these three white dots showed up. And that's just a visual indicator that hey if you tap once on this, what's gonna show is that you can actually purchase these items. You can click on these and it'll take you to the website where you can actually make the purchase. So it's a really powerful tool if you're selling products, and this is a great way to have your catalog be on Instagram. That's fairly new and seems very effective.
Ratings and Reviews
fbuser e957a995
I thought this class was great. It was more of like a beginner's crash course into Instagram, so I would have liked more specific actionable steps as to how one could grow an audience versus an overview of what Instagram is. Yet, I would still recommend the class to people since it's a good launching pad into instagram.
Margaret Lovell
For the most part, I used Instagram in the most basic way. Because I want to promote my photography, I have to get better about how I use it. I took this class because Pei is also a photographer, and I specifically sought out her opinion on the platform. For those more intermediate and advanced users, they might not get as much value from it. However, I recommend the course to others who want to build their profile and understanding of how Instagram can be beneficial to their business.
chrissy hormann
Definitely not for "growing" your audience. Class is for absolute Instagram beginnners. Worked for me, but the title is misleading. She teaches the basics of setting up your profile, etc. I was expecting to learn some tips and tricks about photography for IG, given that she is a photographer, but it was more about administrative things, captions, connecting with your audience. All good points, just not quite what I was expecting. Glad I got this on a large discount deal. Ok at that price but I'm glad I did not pay full price for this.
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