Instagram is known for its amazing visual content so it is no surprise to find countless freelance graphic designers, career centers for graphic design, and several graphic design companies on the Instagram landscape. Instagram provides a great opportunity to budding design professionals to look for constant inspiration here. This proves to be a fantastic platform for many promising young graphic designers to build a target audience and advance their careers. If done correctly and seamlessly, a robust Instagram could place a graphic design professional on the map. Furthermore, this is a great way of garnering clients. When some of the top professionals and regular Instagram users were interviewed, it became quite evident that everybody was looking for originality and authenticity while going through the content on Instagram or for that matter, other social media platforms. Graphic designers could thrive in their profession if they are intrinsically creative and come up with incredibly innovative ideas, just like any top UX design firm that can get you many followers!
You could have access to interesting statistics and facts about Instagram at https://sproutsocial.com that emphasizes the need to boost your graphic design business on this robust platform. “An estimated 71% of businesses use Instagram. Perhaps one of the most interesting Instagram statistics has to do with how fast the network is growing. With regards to business growth, the aforementioned Instagram stat is almost double the number of businesses (48.8%) that used Instagram in 2016! As of March 2017, over 120 million Instagram users visited a website, got directions, called a business, emailed or direct messaged a business.”
Here are some of the chief reasons why professional graphic designers consider Instagram as a promising platform to boost their business and enhance their overall brand presence.
Instagram Is Surely the #1 in Terms of the Speed of Growth
Instagram has been recording phenomenal growth ever since its inception in the year 2010. It is growing at an astounding pace. Instagram is using fabulous quotes, selfies, filters, etc. and forging ahead of the rest of the social media platforms. According to https://techcrunch.com, “Instagram’s meteoric rise continues, dwarfing the stagnant growth rates of Snapchat and Facebook. Instagram has recently announced that it has reached 1 billion monthly active users, after passing 800 million in September 2017 with 500 million daily users. That massive audience could be a powerful draw for IGTV, the longer-form video hub it’s launching for creators today. While IGTV monetization options are expected in the future, content makers may flock to it early just to get exposure and build their fan base.” The IGTV is another major attraction for Graphic design career centers and professionals to promote their business.
Instagram Boasts of the Right Demographics
Millennials are the pioneering Instagram user demographic. Over 70 percent of the total 1 billion MAUs are comprised of people less than 35 years of age. The worldwide most active Instagram users are supposed to be in the age group of 18 years to 29 years. As per the Pew Research report, there are more women as compared to men who use Instagram.
Now that you understand the chief reasons why your career center for Graphic Designing must build an effective Instagram strategy, let us explore a few ideas for getting started in the right direction.
Feature Successful Students
Another thing you can do from time to time is to showcase students who are standing out. This could be in the form of a monthly best student post or a series of posts on alumni who passed with flying colors and are now making it big in the real world. These add a humanizing touch to your online presence and give people the confidence to join hands with you. Ensure you get explicit consent from the people whose pictures you are posting before you post them.
Get a Grip on Hashtags
Instagram by nature doesn’t make it very easy to link to various sites, which is why you should think of other resorts to drive traffic. Clickable hashtags have long been a much-loved feature on the platform because they let people see similar posts and connect with other users who have similar tastes. Hashtags serve several purposes ranging from categorization and content curation to discovery and branding. Try coming up with new hashtags that people can associate with you and then asking them to use it with relevant content.
Go Behind the Scenes
A great marketing tool for training centers, schools, and workplaces is the behind the scenes insight. People are used to seeing promotional content that fancies up any place and gives it an artificial shimmer- resplendent with smiling faces, bright lights, and confetti. Take the alternative route, photograph the day to day activities, and give them a look at the infrastructure and workflow of the place instead. This will drive engagement, give them a genuine look at how the place is, and also reinforce a spirit of pride that all your students and alumni could participate in.
Host Contests
Some of the earliest brands on the Instagram bandwagon were able to realize engagement can be driven quite easily through contests and giveaways. You can ask people to submit photos with your hashtag, tag other users on posts, or simply drop a like/comment if they find a photo on your feed with a hidden clue. Either way, it translates to a win for you by boosting your visibility and putting your name on the map.
Post Regularly
Starting out on Instagram is hard; you tend to be inconsistent in terms of quality and schedule, and this would show in your statistics. But if you are able to get some discipline and post regularly at around the same time, you will find people looking forward to your posts, waiting to engage and hopefully keep coming back for more.
Conclusion
If you are having an Instagram account for promoting your career center or any other graphic design business, for that matter, Instagram gurus recommend converting your personal account into a Business account on Instagram that would be enabling you to incorporate your contact information and location. You may use some inspiration images occasionally but they must be used as an exception and clearly not as the norm. Be creative and authentic in your approach.
Author bio-
Daniel Mattei is a Professional writer. He has written many articles on Social Media. He is quite experienced in the field of web marketing as well as website designing. In this article, he mentioned about an effective Instagram strategy.
