One of the reasons I love social media marketing is its continual evolution.
It never stays the same – platforms add new features and ingenious developers keep coming up with innovative tools.
For this reason, as business owners or marketers, we can’t rely on a static set of tactics. We can’t remain stagnant, even for a few months – without constantly experimenting, testing new platforms and trying new tools. Without trying out new and improved ways to grab your followers’ attention, you’ll soon be forgotten (by your users and the algorithm)
With that in mind, here are some of the best apps that we’ve found for Instagram, which can help to add something fresh to your presence on social media.
1. Later: Schedule Your Instagram Posts and Stories
The biggest constraint in managing your own social media is… TIME. So often, we have training clients come in and ask where to start. Well it’s all about planning and using a scheduling tool. When you do your social media on the fly, it becomes ill thought out, rushed and stressful.
So how can you maintain consistency, be present to your audience all without having to constantly be online? Because, we all have businesses to run, right?
Later is a professional Instagram platform which enables brands to schedule Instagram updates and stories. Trust me, we’ve tried a tonne of different platforms but this is still one of our favourites. Sit down with a cuppa, lock yourself away for a few hours and plan and schedule the next month of content, you can thank us later (pun intended).
Later offers a few really cool options allowing you to:
- Use the storyboard tool to visually plan your stories
- Add links and/or captions to your scheduled stories
- Track up to three months’ worth of data and get detailed analytics on completion rate, engagement, impressions, and clicks
It’s worth noting that you still have to manually approve each story when it’s time for it to go live (as Instagram API doesn’t allow automatic publishing) but it’s a one-click process and relatively easy.
2. Linktr.ee: Create Your Instagram Landing Page
If you’ve ever been to one of our training sessions you would have heard us talking about LinkTree. The only place that you can add a clickable link on your Instagram profile is in your bio, which is often not enough for brands looking to build their business presence, and drive traffic back to their owned sites.
That’s where Linktr.ee comes in. Linktr.ee enables you to create a handy landing page on which you can list all of your CTAs (call to actions) and links, in order to help guide your Instagram followers to your other channels and relevant web pages.
3. Unfold: Use Modern Templates for Your Stories
Instagram stories are highly engaging, and can help to keep your brand front of mind with your followers, which is crucially important. If you have over 10,000 followers, you can also add external links into your Instagram Stories, which can be a major traffic and conversion driver.
But with every other brand now publishing their own stories, it’s getting more difficult to stand out.
Unfold offers an array of modern and memorable Instagram story templates that can help you brand and diversify your stories content.
The other great thing with Unfold – there is a FREE and paid option.
4. Canva: Create Stand Out Graphics for Your Feed
We hope that you’ve all heard of Canva by now. With it’s easy to use templates, the ability to use your brand colours and fonts you no longer need to be a designer to create awesome graphics. Piece of advice though, sometimes there is a case of too much is too much, so keep it simple.
First up, you need to use Canva to create your Instagram Highlights – but please, make sure you use the right colours for your brand! There’s nothing worse than having a disjointed social media profile.
Using the Pro version of Canva, is absolutely worth the money. With the ability to create text animations now and create GIF’s the platform is still evolving every month and the features are always based on user behaviours.
5. All Hashtag: The Hashtag Generator Tool to Help You Increase Your Reach
Hashtags are one of the most important aspects of Instagram to increase the amount of people to potentially see your content. Hashtags make you discoverable.
With Instagram, we have a limit of 30 hashtags, not saying you have to use all of them… but if you can, why not.
This is a great website where you put in one word, let’s say ‘marketing’ and it generates this:
#marketing #marketingdigital #marketingtips #marketingonline #marketingstrategy #marketing101 #marketingagency #marketingplan #marketingsocial #marketingmultinivel #marketingtools #marketingteam #marketinglife #marketingguru #marketingderede #MarketingIdeas #marketingcoach #marketingconsultant #MarketingStrategies #marketingtip #marketingadvice #marketingblog #marketingmanagement #marketingautomation #marketing10 #marketingexpert #marketingquotes
Not everything is a great fix for us, but it’s definitely a great starting point for us to cull from and grow our list. Let this platform give you the ideas and see if they are relevant for your business and content.
Hopefully, these 5 tools will help boost your Instagram presence and continue to inspire you with new and fresh ways to keep your audience engaged.
