Today, Instagram has been so popular among other social media; in fact, its popularity has clearly beaten Facebook. It shows how people are getting more interested in images than words. No wonder many companies and business owners see this media as a tool to promote their products. For some companies, their products might be sold very well, but others may find themselves still struggling in getting involved. Why? Surely that creativity matters a lot in this media, but not everyone knows that there are some SEO aspects in this strategy. It doesn’t mean that the work might be as hard as SEO service does, but at least you have to know some basic SEO strategies on Instagram that you will find it important to elevate your business promotion. Here are the things you should know:

Do Keyword Research on Hashtags

It can be said that keyword research is one of the traditional SEO techniques onto the network. Even though Instagram is not a search engine,  it does have a search function. You can search anything you want with hashtag “#” put initially before typing for  a keyword. For maximum exposure, you can utilize the hashtags that are getting the most search volume and that are relevant to your photos. Another cool thing as opposed to keywords is that you can add many hashtags up to 30 hashtags at the end of your post. You don’t have to worry about keyword stuffing, for you can simply list the hashtags at the end of your post.

On Instagram, you don’t have to use keyword planner, for you can determine which hashtags that will be relevant. The important thing is never over-used the keywords. Furthermore, you may not have Keyword Planner like you usually have for Google. Therefore, it enables you to determine which hashtags are relevant, but not overly-used.

You can create your own, unique hashtag, but this means you have to compete with other big brands. However, you can ask people to use a specific hashtag in a contest; you could start carving out your own hashtag to get going in the future, which brings us to our next point.

Hold Contests for Prizes

You may have heard this tactic as this is a common social media tactic, but why do we keep mentioning this again? It’s because many companies are still not offering prizes on Instagram. Remember that prizes will go a long way on social media, so create a contest and spend some money here. You can follow what Neil Patel do; he leveraged his giveaways to get more followers and “a single giveaway could score a few thousand extra followers.”

You can select variety of ways to create a contest for social media, but choose the one that will work best on Instagram. Usually, the contest might put focus on images and hashtags to get the most engagement.

Partner with a Nonprofit or Charity Organizations

Companies that support communities usually get more likes from people. For example, you can help  nonprofit or charity organizations that are still related to your industry. This strategy is great for your business and your website in general, but it’s especially helpful on Instagram because images can be so powerful. Furthermore, it’s a good strategy as any partnership could work if done right as long as they are not your competitor.

Make Use of Instagram’s Business Tools for Advertising

Many people usually use it for connecting with the audience through stories, relevant photos, utilizing the right filters and getting the images out of the right people, and then the next step is oftentimes paid advertising. Even though this is the most common facilities, you can also try other features that are created specifically for businesses. Through these features, you can see metrics on how certain posts are performing, so they’re essentially the Insight option of this social platform, and they’re available to everyone. You can find many data for your paid advertisements, such as impressions, engagement and shares, reach, insights, and more.

Buy an Instagram Account with Already Established Followers

Another idea that is also quite popular is buying audience. You can buy audience from an established account, but the biggest problem with this approach is that the audience may be completely irrelevant with your business. No wonder in many cases, once the account is changed, you will likely lose the followers. This is because the audience considers your activities not interesting to them anymore.

Try Influencer Marketing

Using influencer marketing is also another great idea. Many companies partner with influencers within their niche and in turn, the influencer promotes the business. This is because some companies know that when an influencer promotes a brand’s product or service, it works like recommendations in a natural way. In fact, influencer marketing helps build a strong link profile and increase the overall reach and impact of your content. Moreover, this type of campaign will leverage your business credibility and appeal among audience.

Use the Instagram Storiy Feature to Personalize the Brand

A recent feature on Instagram has enabled businesses with a channel to bring their brand to life. This strategy will prevent you from flat posting on Instagram or spammy postings. Story is a great form to space out posts while still staying active. Besides, it helps businesses seem more personable to audience.

So, how does social media relate to SEO especially in this case,  Google? Actually, Google never says clearly whether or not search engine algorithms account for social signals. However, since search engines are continuously tailoring the search experience to be more personal and specific to its users, so it’s entirely possible that social signals will eventually have a part in SEO.