By Princess Jones
Instagram is hot for businesses these days. It has more natural reach than its big sister Facebook. It’s a visual medium that does with well with today’s customers. It’s a faster platform than many others.
If you’re already on Instagram as a business, you’re in the right place. But did you know that Instagram has some features that really benefit businesses? Check out these hidden features you probably didn’t know about.
In late 2017, Instagram updated its features to allow you to follow hashtags the same way you would follow a user. It saves you having to manually search for them each time and now the results will just show up in your feed automatically. This is especially useful if you have certain hashtags that relate to your business or industry that you’d like to keep up with.
Next time you see a hashtag in a comment, bio, or caption, tap it. You’ll see a page with the hashtag at the top and a blue Follow button below it. Tap that and you’ll see all of the tagged photos in your feed.
Browse Posts By Location
If your business has a brick and mortar location, you should consider browsing Instagram posts by location. Customers sometimes take photos of your product, staff, or space without tagging necessarily tagging your business. Whether you’re looking for community content or just want to see what’s being said about you, location searches can be useful.
To do it, tap the search icon and then tap “Places” on the far right side of the next screen. (You’ll be prompted to turn on location if you haven’t already.) Tap “Near Current Location.” You’ll see of list of places — some very large like the city you’re in or very specific like a business location. Tap the one you’re interested in to see a grid of results.
Hide Photos You’ve Been Tagged In
Having your business tagged in an Instagram video is a good sign. It means that your customers are talking about you. Ideally, you’ll get tagged in great great photos of your products, staff, and services, and it will act as social proof of your popularity. At the same time, you don’t want your tagged photos taking over your carefully curated profile, especially if you’ve paid a lot of money for a professional photo shoot. In that case, consider hiding the photos you’ve been tagged in.
When you get the notification that you’ve been tagged, tap the photo. Then tap your username. Choose “Hide from My Profile” and tap “Done.”
Approve Tagged Photos
And speaking of tagged photos, you might want to approve tags before they appear on your profile. This prevents someone from tagging your business for spam or other nefarious purposes. Let’s say that you have an unhappy customer that is going to express their complaint through a tagged Instagram post. That photo and caption will be shown to users who follow your account until you get to it to remove it, possibly damaging your brand along the way.
To manually approve tagged photos, go to your profile and tap the settings wheel. Tap “Photos of You.” Tap “Add Manually.”
If you haven’t yet created a business account for Instagram and want to convert your existing personal account instead, head on over to read more about upgrading from personal Instagram to business.
