With over 1.074 billion Instagram users worldwide as of 2021, many online businesses owe their success in part to their large following on the visual social media platform called Instagram. The more followers you have from your ideal target market, the more eyes you’ll have on your brand, its products, and services.
Instagram has a young crowd of users, 71% of them who are under the age of 35 who spend an average of 53 minutes of their time scrolling down through the app every single day. With its ability to get 4 x more interaction than Facebook, Instagram is a crowd favorite among brands and influencers targeting the young crowd. With more than half of its users follow brands, Instagram has been a tool to create brand awareness and is a helpful deciding factor for its users to come to a purchase decision.
But growing your Instagram business page organically can be hard, confusing, and time-consuming. That’s why it’s important to use the right tools to help you see the significant growth that you want to see.
In this article, we’ll talk about the top apps and tools you might want to explore on the road to growing your online business’s Instagram presence this year:
1. Later
The first app we’ll talk about is something you’ll find very useful. Later is social media scheduling app that started out exclusively for Instagram use. Later has since grown to include support for Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, making it a great all-around social media scheduling tool for you to use for social media management of your business.
With the use of an Instagram planner, you’ll save yourself a lot of time from actively posting every day, figuring out captions, and preparing edits. Instead, planners like Later will autopublish scheduled posts, so that you can just take a day or two to plan out your posts in a month, and let the app do the rest for you.
2. Canva
If you don’t have a designer on board or if you enjoy DIYing your content, then you’ll love Canva. Canva is a media graphic design tool, where you go when you want to create aesthetically pleasing designs that help you convert your target audience into your online followers.
Use Canva to create your logo, design Instagram stories, edit your images, and to add text to your images in a seamless and visually pleasing way.
On Canva, you can design graphics not only for Instagram, but for all social media platforms, even for your blog or email campaign. Canva is so flexible and populated by numerous templates that people use it for all around graphic marketing.
Canva is free to use, with their webpage just as user-friendly as their mobile app.
3. VSCO
Photo editing and filters are important in social media marketing, and that’s why you need a 3rd party app outside of Instagram to edit and refine your images. While you’ll find countless of photo editing apps that you can use, VSCO are a favorite among many marketers, photographers, and casual Instagram users alike.
VSCO is great for beginners and creative types who love to experiment and create beautiful visuals. Using an app like VSCO to edit your Instagram photos can be highly useful for those who want to create a harmonious and intentional feed. It’s no secret that one of the goals in Instagram marketing is creating a feed that is pleasing to the eye, and VSCO is a great app that will help you harmonize your grid beautifully.
4. Iconsquare
Iconsuare is a social media analytics tool that covers both Instagram and Facebook. It’s a helpful marketing tool that helps you maximize your Instagram performance so that you can make data-driven decisions with the help of their intelligible analytics.
With Iconsquare you can keep track of follower growth, real time post performance, daily lost and gained following, top follower identification, competitor performance tracking, and many more analytics that are easy for anyone to track.
You can also create your own dashboard of the metrics that are relevant to you and your business so that you can monitor your growth over time. You’ll also be able to schedule and manage your posts, track and reply to comments, and it also helps you find out who your most influential followers are. Iconsquare is an all-around powerful tool that can help anyone grow their Instagram page to max out its full potential, in one app that you can use on your phone.
5. Photerloo
Hashtags are a powerful tool in growing your social media page in itself, and that’s why every social media marketer must use them. Photerloo is an Instagram hashtag and keyword generator. Easy to use, you’ll just have to go on their site, drag and drop a photo, and they will provide you with at least two dozen keywords and suggested popular and appropriate hashtags.
On Photerloo, you can also adjust the popularity level of the Instagram tags shown to you, with more popular tags more likely to get more people to view your post. This is great for those who are targeting a niche, where you’ll need the find and use the less common keywords.
Photerloo essentially takes away the guess work that you’ll find yourself doing with every Instagram post you make, giving you better keywords to use in your captions and hashtags that will get you more likes and views.
6. Awario
Awario is a social media monitoring and listening tool. It’s designed to help brands and businesses like yours discover and monitor conversations online about your brand, its products and services. This is a useful tool because you’ll be able to join in or at least observe public sentiments about your brand.
If you want to gather and analyze data that will help you improve your brand’s performance and attract new customers, Awario can provide you with the actionable insights you need to lead your brand in the right direction.
This social media tool is unlike other social media listening platforms because they do not use third party data providers. Instead, they use their own crawlers to scan over 13 billion sites across the web, providing their users with expansive coverage and immediate updates of mentions of your brand across social media and the web.
Awario can be a great customer service tool, as you’ll be notified in real time to follow up on any metions, positive or negative comments about your brand online.
7. Social Insider
Social Insider is a tool that helps you uncover in-depth analytics on any social media profile—including that of your competitors. So if you are someone who likes to know how you are performing compared to your industry competitors, then this is a tool that will help you monitor your growth ad performance along side.
A useful social media tool, Social Insider not only monitors your business profile on Instagram, but you can also use it for other popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
On their dashboard, you can add and monitor your competitor’s social media and your own Instagram business account. The analytics you’ll have access to includes things like customer engagement, global fan count, top posts, what worked, and what didn’t work.
Analytics tools like Social Insider help you make important marketing decisions based on actionable insights that you need to take your business a step forward in the right direction.
Back to You
Every online business absolutely needs to have an Instagram business account, because it’s one of the best ways to draw more attention and customers to your page and website, helping you raise brand awareness, improving your chances of success.
The tools we have mentioned above will help you up your visual Instagram and marketing game. Remember that Instagram is a visual platform where you can create pleasing and harmonized images with easy to use apps like Canva and VSCO, where you can also plan your grid and posts with awesome Instagram planners like Later. Tools like Photerloo helps you find the best hashtags—an ever important tool in gaining new followers, while analytics tools like Social Insider, Awarion, and Iconsquare help you make analytics based decisions that will take your Instagram and your online business in the right direction.
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At Ecommerce Pro, we help entrepreneurs and business owners build better and more successful ecommerce businesses. Have a question or a project in mind? Get in touch with us today!
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