Time to learn about Social Media Marketing: Chapter 5

 In Chapter 5 in "Essentials of Social Media Marketing," I learn how businesses use Instagram to help market themselves. One of the sections that interested me the most was "Instagram Content Strategy." This section talks about how businesses can take certain steps to increase engagement in followers. A couple of things that I learned is how businesses can utilize using Instagram stories and live videos to launch new products, showcase products, deliver special offers like coupons or promotions, make big announcements, show behind-the-scenes footage, conduct a live Q&A or chat with followers, or even feature influencers or guests by having them present live videos on a business account. In this section, they talk about how IGTV is now starting to gain traction among brands and followers but some businesses are experimenting with it to see how it engages their followers. 

    Another thing I learned is that Instagram allows business profiles to feature their products. They can do this by tagging up to five products per image, up to 20 products on multi-image posts, or by adding product stickers to the Instagram stories. Businesses use Instagram to promote themselves is by using influencers to promote their brand. Why would businesses use influencers to promote their brand? You might ask. The reason being is it increases their exposure and boosts engagement, leveraging the influence and followers of the influencers and often offering value for both parties involved. Instagram has a built-in geo-tagging which allows users to add a location to every post. In fact, posts with locations receive 79% more engagement than posts without. How would this help a business? Because if someone were to click on the location of the name or search the name of the business in Instagram they would see posts about the business. Then, it would allow businesses to easily find and share user-generated content from Instagram users who visited their location even if the business was not tagged in the post. I could keep going on about more strategies in Instagram that businesses can use to market themselves but I think we can understand how using these certain strategies can help businesses. Overall, I think this section in this chapter showed me how you can use different types of strategies in Instagram to increase engagement in followers.