Mastering Instagram Marketing: Strategies for Success

Hello and welcome to Social Media Marketing for Instagram, where we'll learn how to develop and optimize paid and organic marketing strategies for the social media platform Instagram. But first, a little bit about myself. I'm J.K. Coleman.

I've been involved with digital marketing from its inception. Upon graduating from NYU Stern School of Business, I joined the marketing world in the mid-1990s, where I witnessed a transition from traditional marketing methods such as direct mail, telemarketing, print ads, to the new digital marketing channels, which were beginning to emerge such as email, Google AdWords, Facebook, and the other social media platforms that would come. After spending a number of years developing marketing strategies and executing marketing campaigns for big brands such as American Express, AT&T, and the New York Times, I eventually founded my own digital marketing agency, where I helped smaller brands grow online via an array of digital marketing approaches such as Instagram, which we'll be covering in this course.

So let's first introduce some of the core features and interactions on Instagram and discuss hashtags and how to develop a hashtag strategy, which is an important approach to gaining visibility for your content organically on this platform. Instagram was, at its inception, a social media platform that focused on visual content. It emphasized photo and video sharing via a mobile app.

You can take, edit, and publish visual content for both followers and non-followers. Users can interact with your content via likes, comments, shares, and saves. So Instagram was founded in 2010.

That is an important consideration because Instagram could only exist after smartphones came to be. It can only exist after the introduction of the iPhone, where people were now able to write on their device to take quality photographs, videos, and now they had a platform to share them. And from its inception, it really featured, it really focused on visual features.

You can remember if you were among those who were, you know, part of those early days of Instagram, how exciting it was to be able to use filters on your photographs and things that, you know, just weren't, you know, a possibility up until then. So that and other visual features distinguished Instagram and caused it to be quite popular, you know, from the moment it launched. The first prototype of Instagram was a web app called Bourbon, which was inspired by the founder's sister's love of fine whiskeys and bourbons.

So again, from the beginning, the focus of the app was to feature photographs, especially those taken on mobile devices. And over its first few years, Instagram saw exponential growth, and even until recently, it has continued to grow from the one million users from year one to over one billion by the year 2022. All right, so here's just a short timeline of Instagram.

It was launched in 2010 and racked up 2,500 users on its first day. And in 2012, just prior to Instagram's initial public offering, it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in cash and stock. At the time, that was seen as a very significant price to pay for a platform that may have had growth in users, but had not yet generated revenue, right? There were no advertisements yet on Instagram.

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But Facebook saw Instagram as a threat with its visual features and advantages. So they adopted the philosophy, if you can't beat them, buy them, right? And even though many saw that as a high price, they knew what they were getting. What were they getting? They were purchasing a community of like share interests, all cataloged digitally, that they would eventually be able to package with their own community on Facebook of shared interests and offer a compelling proposition to advertisers, right? So they were actually purchasing data.

And was that one billion purchase of Instagram worth the price tag? I think so, because its annual revenue for the last full year of 2024 was $70.9 billion. And even that was a significant increase from 2023, when it was over $50 billion. So, to this, it has certainly returned on its investment for Facebook many times over since the purchase and continues to grow today.

All right, so if you haven't created an Instagram account, it's quite simple to do so. You just need to have a phone number or connect it to an existing Facebook account. Okay, so just to be clear, Facebook and Instagram are, of course, both part of Meta, and there is a connection between the two in that if you post content on one or advertise on one, you do have the option to advertise on the other platform at the same time.

So once you connect via your phone number, you'll get a verification text, and you can then begin to set yourself up on the platform or talk about the core features of the platform and begin to follow people on the platform, right? So follow accounts. When you first create an account, Instagram will suggest contacts from your phone that you will be able to find on Instagram and connect with. In the same way as Facebook and other social media platforms, we reach out and, yeah, in response to the invitation, Instagram will also have people you may know because of people who are connected to people you're connected to.

And in no time, you'll be able to build out a community of friends on the platform. All right, so Instagram is most known for its mobile app, but there's also a website or desktop website version of it, right? And they are, you know, primarily the same except they might have slightly different features and interfaces. And we'll look in a little bit at the desktop version of the app, but the core features of Instagram include your profile page, right? And this is an individual account, and later in the course, we'll be talking about a brand page and the profile pages for the brand, which is where you are able to present your brand to the world and showcase your content, and we'll get into that.

But first, on the personal side of things, this is where you have your personal bio. This is also where you have highlights, any stories, and we'll talk more about what a story is. But you can have, you know, stories pinned to your page.

So anytime a new visitor comes to your page or a visitor comes to your page, you'll be able to see, they'll be able to see content that is most relevant to your brand, right? Or to your personal account, right? Because it's highlighting that. And then you have a post grid where all of the posts you have done are visible, and anyone can click on any individual post from that grid. There is also a section for video and real content, and we'll explain specifically all these different types of content a little bit.

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And then tagged. Tagging is when other users tag you in a post or reel, and that indicates that you are also connected to that post. So there's a portion of your profile page where you can also see tagged content or content you have been tagged in.

So let's look at your Instagram page or an Instagram page. So right across the left here on my page, you can see the main menu where, you know, you can do searches for content and accounts. You can explore content from here.

You can also find real content and your messages anytime there have been any notifications. Here is where you can also create. There are some limitations to creating from the desktop as opposed to creating content from your phone.

On your phone, you can actually take photos and videos. At that point on the desktop, you would have to upload a previously saved photo or video, right? Dashboard that is relevant to your professional account, which we'll talk about a little bit later, right? But let's click on the profile. This is where you find your profile, as we were discussing, right? So here you can have your bio highlights, right? So highlights, any content that anytime anyone comes to your page, they will see that content first.

That's my mother and me many years ago. That's my nephew, who's a police officer, and me, as you can see, right? So any content you want, but the rest of your content is laid out in your grade, right? And any content you save, you can click there. Any content that you've been tagged in, you can click there and see that content.

Okay, so let's go back to the home feed. Outside of the menu, across the top of your page, you have stories. It will explain what stories are.

And right down the middle is your feed. This is where content from people you are following, content that is suggested or that has been boosted for you to be able to see by brands as part of paid content campaigns, as well as advertisements, is all in your feed, right? And then there are suggested friends for you that will also appear on your homepage. All right, so we'll be going back to some of those features in a little bit, but let us proceed.

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