5 Tips For Growing Your Wellness Business’s Instagram

These days, it seems as if everyone you know has an Instagram profile. From your sweet old grandma, to the juice bar you get your favorite spirulina smoothie, and even to your friend’s cat (but why?), everyone on this planet is scrolling through feeds and double-tapping for hearts.

The latest stats from Facebook-owned Instagram show that there are now nearly 800 million monthly active users on the platform worldwide, with the latest projections estimating that the photo-sharing application could reach one billion in 2018!

Similarly, a recent study by Forrester found that brands receive 58x more and 120x more engagement on Instagram than on Facebook and Twitter, respectively.

Without a doubt, your future customers and clients are on Instagram.

But can you grow your business’s account and reach your prospective buyers?

Keep reading below to learn 5 tips for growing your health and wellness account’s Instagram page.

1. Develop a strategy

This may seem obvious, but the first tip is to develop a strategy! Instagram is an extension and visual representation of your business and to truly experience growth, there needs to be a plan in place.

Ask yourself these questions before you get started:

What do you want to achieve from your account?
Who do I want to attract? Or who is your target market, audience, persona?
What is the voice behind your brand?
What type of content do you want published?

Taking some time at the beginning to plan will help ensure you have a clear roadmap to move forward with.

2. Pick a posting frequency and stick with it

To continue to steadily grow your account, it’s imperative that you post with some frequency. A consistent posting schedule helps keep your brand top of mind and build anticipation with your followers.

Avoid bulk posting — as this seems unnatural and spammy — and make sure you don’t go dark for several weeks at a time.

Consider your bandwidth and decide if you will post once, twice, three times a week (or whatever frequency you land on) and stick with it!

3. Post at optimal times

Now that you have a strategy and posting frequency in place, what days or times are best to post? And how do you even figure out the answer to that question?

Instagram’s algorithm not only cares about how much engagement you receive, but how fast you receive it – so posting when your community is online is key!

If your Instagram account is a business profile, Instagram will provide you numerous helpful metrics, including the optimal days and times to post based on your following and engagement.

If you do not have an Instagram business profile or access to any metrics on your account, you generally want to stick to the below three rules:

1. Post for your timezone or your most active timezone: if you own a yoga studio based in Denver, CO, your optimal posting time zone is Mountain Standard Time. If you own a health coaching business based in Los Angeles, CA, but the majority of your clients and following come from New York, NY your ideal posting time is Eastern Standard Time
2. Post more during “off-work” hours than during the day: generally, Instagram users are on the platform more during their lunch times (11am-1pm) and in the evenings (7-9pm). But, make sure you post during off-work hours for your following’s time zone, not off-work hours for the time zone you reside in!
3. Weekday posts perform slightly better than weekend posts: research has shown that mid-week posts tend to perform slightly better than weekend posts

You can also try experiments with different posting times and recording the results to glean some insights.

4. Research and use relevant hashtags

Hashtags are what make your photos searchable and findable to your target audience within those 800 million users. A carefully curated list of hashtags helps customers or clients in search of your products or services to YOU — it’s what helps categorize your account

Conduct some research on popular hashtags to use for the health and wellness industry, in addition to your specific business sector.

Be careful to not overdue it though! A massive list of hashtags will indicate to Instagram that your account may be spam and will actually end up hurting you!

This year, Instagram also made a change to its platform to allow users to follow hashtags, in the same way that you can follow an account. In other words, this means that posts, and stories, that use the hashtag will be displayed in that user’s feed alongside the content and accounts they already follow.

However, this doesn’t mean that all posts with that hashtag will be shown; the algorithm will determine which posts to feature based on various factors such as quality, recency and engagement. This further drives home our previous tip about posting frequently and brings us to our final tip…

5. Encourage engagement

One of the most important deciding factors in Instagram’s algorithm is engagement – how much engagement your posts receive and how fast will determine will help push your posts up in the rankings to make sure they are shown to your community.

For this reason, it’s extremely important to invite and encourage engagement on your posts as much as you can.

What does this look like in practice?
In your captions include messaging that invites followers to like, comment or tag!

Examples:

“Double tap if you love starting your morning’s with a vinyasa flow!”
“What are your favorite immunity-boosting juice recipes?”
“Tag a friend who loves essential oils as much as you do!”

Even if your following is small at first, any engagement helps. Plus, it helps create a sense of dialogue with your community rather than you speaking AT them.

Don’t forget to like or reply to those who comment as well!

Need help building an effective social media strategy?
Check out AH+M Strategic Consulting’s social media capabilities.

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