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Discover Boating Social Media 101: Instagram Best Practices & Tools

| Discover Boating

Discover Boating’s social media team shares more tips for Instagram as part of their Social Media 101 summer series.  
 
Here’s why the social media world is buzzing about Instagram:
  • Instagram has 500 million users, with 300 million people (for reference, U.S. population is currently 318 million!) using the social platform daily, making the photo-sharing app second only to Facebook for best engagement rates.
  • Businesses are on Instagram because:
Below are some best practices to grow Instagram followers and engagements:
  • Like and comment on photos in your niche. Take time each day or a few times a week to like at least 5-10 photos, leave a genuine comment (if you feel inclined) and/or give them a follow. This helps other people discover your Instagram account.
  • Post high-quality content. Make sure the photos and videos you post reflect the look and feel of your brand or company. Some choose to go with a theme, but regardless of what you choose, make sure your content encourages people to follow you and engage with your content. Check out our latest posts for some examples.
  • Bring boating to life. Instagram is a platform to share beautiful images and videos straight from your phone and boating is best brought to life on social networks in photos and video. Did you know there are already more than 9 million Instagram posts using the hashtag #boats? Instagram presents an opportunity for companies to join the conversation and showcase the appeal of boating (and your company/brand) visually to help boost your visibility. Check out our latest posts for examples.
  • Focus on the caption. Captions should inspire and motivate people to engage with your content. Whether you want to keep captions short or take a longer, story-telling approach, consistency is key here. Also, try using emojis in your captions. These have become a popular way to substitute a word or help your caption stand out more visually.
  • Utilize hashtags. Use hashtags strategically to help people find your content. You can also create your own hashtag to help gather user-generated content with approval. For instance, @DiscoverBoating encourages people to tag their photos with #discoverboating to give us permission to regram their images. 
  • Track what’s working. Each month, do a pulse check to see what content is resonating best with your community. Which photos received the most likes and comments? Once you see what’s working best, aim to continue providing more similar content, which will ultimately help increase your followers and engagements.
For more Instagram tips, check out this article from Entrepreneur and this blog post from a social media expert.
 
 Consider utilizing these helpful Instagram tools:
  • Iconosquare: An affordable platform to track your Instagram success.  You can organically track this, but if you need a more comprehensive tool, this one helps you keep track of things like top performing content, best times of day to post, follower growth and much more.
  • Later: A mobile app to help schedule your Instagram posts in advance. Instagram’s platform still doesn’t allow automatic posting, but this provides reminders to help you post on time and easily. Upload your photo and caption to the app and then with one click it takes your saved content to Instagram to post. There are other similar platforms, such as Hootsuite, but research what’s out there to see what works best for your company’s needs. 
 
Follow Discover Boating on Instagram for inspiration, as well as  Facebook and Twitter.
 
Social Media 101 Series:
 
For more information on Discover Boating’s Instagram campaign, contact Colleen Richardson at [email protected].