When we first heard about Instagram Promotions, we were confused: isn’t it good old Insta ads? Isn’t it all about paid promotion to your targeted audience?
Well, yes, but no. While it looks the same way that ads do — the “Sponsored” mark and all that, algorithms clearly distinguish these two kinds of promotion. The purpose of these two kinds of promotion is different, too, so we can clearly say that Instagram Promotions and Instagram Ads are totally not the same things.
IG promotion is basically a popular post going viral to find a new audience for your profile. Or more likes. Or more profile visits — really, it’s a matter of choice, and that’s the best thing about this kind of Insta promo. Boosting an activity for your best posts is a great strategy when you want a better engagement ratio and brand awareness. If the Instagram algorithm chose your one particular post and labeled it as “trending”, you might as well want to give it more attention since your followers liked it more than the rest of your content.
Websites promoting your brand with likes from real people and engaged followers are cool, too — this one is definitely worth checking out: https://soc-promotion.com/instagram/followers.
You can choose any business goal you want for your profile and promote a selected post far above the top — reaching out to your potential followers and getting more profile visits. You don’t even need a Facebook ads manager account to do it! All you need to run a successful Instagram Promotion campaign is some time and your phone with the Instagram app and business account on it.
The process of managing this kind of advertising is overall simple, but in this article, we want to focus on some things that will significantly boost activity on your account if done right. We’ll cover the process of creating an Instagram Promotion ad as well as some tricks to make it even more effective for you and your business.
How to create Instagram Promotion?
The process is quite easy. First of all, you’ll have to switch your Insta account to the Business in settings. Then, choose the post you’d like to promote (usually IG suggests one of your top posts promote) and tap the “Promote” button. We highly recommend you use a post-Instagram suggests you to promote — the algorithm chooses only those posts that received 80-100% more attention than others.
Your first step will be choosing your promotion goal: profile visits (that’s when users see a “visit Instagram profile” button below the post), website traffic, or direct messaging. The latter allows you to receive questions or bookings from your potential clients right from the advertised post through Instagram Direct. Messages are great when your post contains a call to action — to buy your product or book your services.
If you want more traffic for your business’ other social media, e.g. YouTube or LinkedIn, choose the website visits option and direct traffic from this ad to your other social media resources. Don’t forget to add a correct link to your profile — in the worst-case scenario people just won’t be able to get to your website or channel.
The next step is choosing your target audience. You can use an automatically generated one based on people that already follow you, or create a manual audience. Pay attention to this step — you really want your post to be seen by people who might become your followers or even brand advocates. Both options work great, but from our experience, we advise you to choose the automatic audience option only if your account has more than 1000 active followers. If that option is not for you, start with creating your manual audience based on demographics and interests: location, age, occupation, etc.
For planning a budget, remember that the more money you put into the campaign, the more effective it will be — the algorithm just works this way. With a precisely chosen audience, even $5 a day will work for you excellently. Mind that the same budget can have different efficiency depending on your location and the duration of the campaign. The Instagram algorithm for promotion tries to rationalize the budget, but in most cases, it’s not the money that brings the best results.
After the customization, a promotion is ready to go — almost ready. Before it reaches people’s feeds, it has to be approved by Instagram. If your content doesn’t contain any misleading information, explicit or violent stuff, your ad will be approved within 24 hours — usually, it takes around 4 hours to approve a publication for one account.
How much does it cost and is it worth it?
Depending on your location, duration of the campaign, and budget, the cost can vary a lot. You can get a hundred people to follow you just with $10 daily — this is possible even at lower prices if you configure your promotion wisely.
Start out with trying the recommended amount noted by Instagram and keep in mind that the results are not instant — thousands of new followers and likes won’t come overnight. Promotion algorithm spends the budget wisely, showing your content to your target audience when people are online, not bothering with showing the same content twice or thrice.
The result really depends on your business goals, but nevertheless, you can get great results just from $5 daily. Or you can spend a few grands and achieve even more — works best with a big business that needs more brand awareness or social media engagement. However, you’ll figure out the budget you really need only through experience — sometimes $10 campaigns give better results for business than $100 ones — it’s a thing that you can hardly predict until you try it a few times. Even if you set a budget too small, you’ll still see results — the Instagram algorithm rationalizes the budget the best way possible.
Instagram Promotion is the thing you should at least try — for some business goals, it’s the best solution.