7 Instagram Tools to Grow Your Online Business
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, products, and services.
Instagram has a young user base, 71% of whom are under 35, who spend an average of 53 minutes scrolling through the app every day. With its ability to attract 4 times more engagement than Facebook, Instagram is a favorite among brands and influencers targeting the younger crowd. With over half of its users following brands, Instagram is a tool for building brand awareness and a decisive and useful factor for its users in making purchasing decisions.
But organically growing your Instagram business page can be difficult, confusing, and time-consuming. That's why it's important to use the right tools to help you see the significant growth you desire.
In this article, we'll discuss the best apps and tools you might want to explore to grow your business's Instagram presence online this year:
1) Later
The first app we'll talk about is something you'll find very useful. It's a social media scheduling app that started out exclusively for Instagram. It later expanded to include support for Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, making it a great all-around social media scheduling tool for managing your business's social media.
Using an Instagram scheduler will save you a lot of time from actively posting every day, figuring out captions, and preparing edits. Schedulers like Later will automatically publish scheduled posts, so you can take a day or two to plan your posts for the 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 creating DIY content, then you'll love Canva. Canva is a multimedia graphic design tool for creating aesthetically pleasing designs that help you convert your target audience into online followers.
Use Canva to create your logo, design Instagram Stories, edit your images, and add text to your images in a seamless and visually pleasing way.
With 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 offers so many templates that people use it for all their graphic marketing.
Canva is free, with its webpage as easy to use as its mobile app.
3) VSCO
Photo editing and filters are important in social media marketing, which is why you need a third-party app outside of Instagram to edit and perfect your images. While there are countless photo editing apps you can use, VSCO is 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 stunning visuals. Using an app like VSCO to edit your Instagram photos can be very helpful for those who want to create a harmonious and purposeful feed. It's no secret that one of the goals of Instagram marketing is to create a visually pleasing feed, and VSCO is a great app to help you beautifully harmonize your grid.
4) Iconsquare
Iconsquare is a social media analytics tool that covers both Instagram and Facebook. It's a useful marketing tool that helps you maximize Instagram's performance so you can make data-driven decisions with the help of its insightful analytics.
With Iconsquare, you can track follower growth, real-time post performance, daily followers lost and gained, identify top followers, monitor competitor performance, and many other analytics.
You can also create metrics relevant to you and your business on your dashboard so you can monitor your growth over time. You can schedule and manage your posts, monitor and respond to comments, and it even helps you discover who your most influential followers are. Iconsquare is a powerful, all-around tool that can help anyone grow their Instagram page to its full potential, all in a single app you can use on your phone.
5) Photerloo
Hashtags are a powerful tool in themselves for growing your social media page, which is why every social media marketer should use them. Photerloo is an Instagram hashtag and keyword generator. Easy to use, just go to their website, drag and drop a photo, and it provides you with at least two dozen popular and relevant keywords and hashtags.
On Photerloo, you can also adjust the popularity level of the Instagram tags shown to you, with more popular tags being more likely to drive more people to see your post. This is great for those who target a specific niche and need to find and use less common keywords.
Photerloo essentially takes the guesswork out of every Instagram post you create by giving you better keywords to use in your captions and hashtags that get you more likes and views.
6) Awario
Awario is a social media monitoring and listening tool. It's designed to help brands and online businesses discover and monitor online conversations about their brand, products, and services.
If you're looking to collect 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 steer your brand in the right direction.
This social media tool is different from other social media listening platforms because they don't use third-party data providers, but use their own crawlers to scan over 13 billion sites on the web, providing their users with extensive coverage and instant updates of their brand mentions on social media and the web.
Awario can be a great tool for customer service, as you'll receive real-time notifications to follow up on any positive or negative comments about your brand online.
7) Social Insider
Social Insider is a tool that helps you discover in-depth analytics on any social media profile, including those of your competitors. So, if you're someone who likes to know how you're performing compared to your industry peers, this is a tool that will help you monitor the performance of your growth ads.
Social Insider not only monitors your business profile on Instagram, but can also monitor other popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
On their dashboard, you can add and monitor your competitors' social media channels and your Instagram business account. The analytics you'll have access to include things like customer engagement, global fan count, top posts, and what worked and didn't.
Analytics tools like Social Insider help you make important marketing decisions based on the actionable insights you need to move your business one step further in the right direction.
Conclusion
Every online business absolutely needs an Instagram business account, as it's one of the best ways to attract more attention and customers to your page and website, helping you increase brand awareness and improve your chances of success.
The tools we've mentioned above will help you improve your visual Instagram and your marketing game. Remember, Instagram is a visual platform where you can create beautiful, harmonious images with easy-to-use apps like Canva and VSCO, and you can also plan your grid and posts with fantastic Instagram planners like Later. Tools like Photerloo help you find the best hashtags, an ever-important tool for gaining new followers, while analytics tools like Social Insider, Awarion, and Iconsquare help you make analytics-driven decisions that will steer your Instagram and online business in the right direction.
