Beyond the Post: The basics of managing a business Instagram account

We all know that having an Instagram account is table stakes for your business growth. Your customers use Instagram to keep up with friends and family, but also follow their favorite businesses, and many even now use it as a search engine for date night ideas, travel planning, and more.

Taking a photo of a crowd in your space, then posting it with a casual caption is a great first step, but to use Instagram for business growth, there’s much more to it than making the post, including managing your followers, planning content that aligns with your business goals, publishing, sharing, collaborating, and engaging. 

So here’s a snapshot of the things to consider when running your business’s Instagram versus your personal one.

Small Business Instagram Profile Management

Starting at the very beginning, you’ll want to make strategic decisions about what’s in your profile pic, your name, your bio and even your handle itself. You want these things to be descriptive and use your keywords, but also fun and represent your brand.

You also want to go in and adjust your settings to get you the most exposure as well. We recommend making your profile a business account, verifying your account on Meta, going through each item in the settings to make sure you are not only aware of each item, but choose how you want it set up. For example, how you want notifications or direct messages.

Who Should You Follow & Managing Your Followers

Most business owners would say that they want as many people as possible to follow them on Instagram. However, that’s not always a good goal. Instagram actually cares most about your engagement rate. So if you have a ton of followers but very few of them like, comment, share and save your content, that’s not helping you much at all. Ideally, you have a fanbase of whatever size that adores you! 

So the next question is: who do you follow? If you’re a new account, it’ll be tempting to follow a ton of accounts, but you really only want to follow up to 20 accounts per day to avoid looking like a bot or spam account. Similar to direct messages. No more than 15-20 messages per day. Additionally, you don’t want the number of accounts you follow to be significantly higher than the number of accounts who follow you. 

Some businesses choose to not follow very many people at all, but that’s not a great approach either. We recommend following businesses that are similar to your own for two reasons. First, the profiles you follow signal to the Instagram algorithm who YOU are what YOU like and consequently, the algorithm will show your profile and content to similar target audiences. But also, it’s a great idea to kinda spy on your peers and competitors so you can see what they’re up to, what kind of things they are posting and what kind of engagement they are getting.

Small Business Instagram Content Planning

Speaking of ideas of what to post, you’ll want to make a game plan. Start with your “why.” Having an Instagram account is fundamental in this day and age, but you still want to have a clear purpose and goal. Is it mostly customer service? Or perhaps it’s to get more folks to attend your events.

You’ll want to make a plan based on your goals that includes what types of things you want to share with your followers. We call this an editorial calendar with content pillars. It can be as complex or as simple as you need, but we do recommend some sort of plan.

Make a list of the categories you want to post about first. Maybe products, events, staff, and customer reviews. Then you can break it down even further, perhaps its genres of books, varietals of wine, seasonality of plants. Then you can think of fun hooks and content ideas for each of those. Boom, content for the month! If you want more, we’ve got a whole bunch of ideas in our shop. 

Regardless of what you are posting, you also want to think about how often you are posting. Some folks think you should be posting every day and multiple times a day. However, you should consider saturation. Does your audience want to hear from you that often? Thinking about the engagement, are they going to like and share your content every day? Likely not. Don’t over index on the time spent developing content when it’s not going to get you much more engagement or, you know, revenue. You’ll want to play around with frequency and timing as well. What days and times does your content reach the most engaged audience? Post then.

In addition to the content topics, you’ll also want to plan a variety of formats. Static feed posts and carousels actually live in one algorithm, but reels live in another, so that variety is crucial. There are also trial reels you can post to a smaller group of non-followers so you can test engagement before you send it to a larger audience. And, of course, you can’t forget about stories, and even posting things to close friends for a more exclusive content experience. While posts and reels may not need to be an everyday thing, we do recommend a quick story nearly each day, to keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience in a passive way. 

Creating Content For Instagram 

Now that you know what you’re going to post each week, you’ll need to actually create it. That could mean taking video and photos of your events, a busy day in the shop, or new products. But it also might mean making a fun and well-designed graphic with a customer testimonial or event invitation.

You can actually do a lot with the simple tools you already have. Instagram actually prefers you design in the app itself; however, we don’t love the design tools, so we usually recommend something like Canva or even Powerpoint or Illustrator if you happen to have those tools. Canva is truly a belle of the ball though, so definitely check that out if you aren’t confident in your design skills. 

We personally hate the dreaded “what am I going to post today?” dilemma, so we like to batch our content. We get together regularly to create our content and then of course, leave room for spontaneity. 

Publishing Instagram Content For Small Businesses

Once you have everything created, written, and approved, if necessary, then you need to actually push it out in the world. Some types of content are easy to schedule and others require you to publish them immediately. Stories, for example, need to be shared from the Instagram app and can’t be scheduled, but almost everything else can be scheduled under Advanced Settings right in the Instagram app.

Naturally, Instagram wants you to create content and schedule right in the app, but there are third-party tools you may like better, for example, Hootsuite, Buffer, or Edgar. For even more robust scheduling, approvals and planning, Sprout Social or Sprinklr might be good options for you, but they are pretty high end when it comes to budget.

Small Business Instagram Content Engagement

As we’ve mentioned before, particularly on our own Instagram, shares and saves matter most for the algorithm, so you should aim for those types of engagements. However, the timing of engagements matter as well. Your post will really “take off” if you get good engagement right away after posting. Instagram will initially show your post to a small group, and if they mostly engage with it, it’ll spread the post to a slightly larger group, and so on, and so forth. For that reason, you want to make sure you’re posting your content at a time when most of your followers will see it. If you can’t find one perfect time that your followers will see and engage with your new posts, you could try building a cohort of accounts that you can notify when you post so that they can engage with your content immediately. This can be employees, friends, influencers, or even VIP customers. It’ll help give you the algorithm boost you need.

Posting on social media is important but you also need to consider how to be a good community member. You should consider liking, commenting on, sharing and saving other people’s content too, not just when it’s about you, but just things you like or are related to your business.

Measuring Your Instagram Content

So you’ve done all this work and are a total pro on social media, but how do you know it’s all worth it, and how do you know what to tweak moving forward so it’s even better next month?

Set goals related to your business, which don’t necessarily need to be follower count, post likes or other vanity metrics. Off-Instagram goals may be a little more challenging to measure, but it’s possible with coded URLs, customer surveys, and anecdotal feedback. 

Your engagement rate matters most so if you want to measure something easily on the app, calculate the total number of likes, comments, shares and saves on an average post by the number of followers you have.

Some of the scheduling tools we mentioned earlier have awesome measurement capabilities as well so check some of those out once you outgrow your spreadsheet. 

Social Media Innovation and Updates

In addition to all of the above work, you’ll also want to keep up on trends. Not only topics, content themes, trending sounds and songs, and silly concepts, but also changes to Instagram itself.

Instagram (and every other platform out there) is constantly changing not only the algorithm but also the way your content is displayed. We’re sure you’ve seen that they recently changed the aspect ratio of content in feeds and on your profile. Additionally, now your public content can now be found in Google search results. 

We recommend Social Media Today, the Hootsuite blog, and following marketing influencers like the head of Instagram Adam Mosseri and, of course, us (SmallBizMarketingSomms)!

We recognize that not everyone has an interest or skills to do this work well. We kinda view it like cooking dinner. We all CAN cook dinner, but that’s a very different experience than having a chef prepare a meal for us. The same is true for social media. You certainly can DIY this work if you have the passion for content creation and the time and energy to learn how to do it well. But you could also let us take that off your plate too with our social media management services. And we’d be happy to help! Just reach out to schedule a call.