Instagram is not just a social network for posting your pet’s pics and sharing your lunch photos.
If you run a drop shipping business, Instagram can become a powerful promotional tool that costs you nothing!
These days, the wide use of Instagram for ecommerce is explained by some awesome features of this social network:
We have already discussed the strategy of promoting a drop shipping store through Instagram shoutouts. As you probably remember, it is a really efficient method. Using shoutouts for our own store, we increased the number of purchases 65 times in 2 months.
Still, shoutouts is not the only way of using Instagram for marketing purposes. In this article, we will briefly explain the basic aspects of working with this social network without any extra costs.
Well, that’s the basics.
Your bio is the first thing that your potential customers see. It’s the main source of the information about your store and its terms of work.
What can you do with your bio to generate more sales?
The length of your account bio should be about 140-160 characters. Don’t write less than this: newcomers should be able to understand what do you offer and how can they get in touch with you. Don’t write more than this: your account visitors will be overloaded with information and most likely, they will overlook some important details.
We already mentioned the importance of hashtags in the previous section, so let’s take a look at them in more detail.
Generally speaking, hashtags perform several highly important functions:
If you want your customers to be okay with all the hashtags, don’t include them in the text of the post. You can also put them in the first comment, or at least you can separate it from the main text using emojis, other text dividers, or just blank space.
If you run your Instagram business account with due patience and attention, it takes tons of your time.
Just imagine how long it will take you to think of a nice post idea, edit pictures and videos, create a post, answer all the comments and direct messages, etc.
Why waste your time on this when you have much more important tasks to do – improve your customer service, search for new suppliers and add new items, optimize your drop shipping store, and many more?
To plan your business activity in a more rational and thoughtful way, go for any automated service you like. Most typically, these plugins and special tools allow you to:
Personally, we would recommend you to check out the Social Rabbit plugin – we have a good experience with it, and thanks to the plugin, we managed to get 66,000+ followers on our Hokage Store Instagram account.
Technically, the Rabbit is not a free plugin. Still, it’s much cheaper than most of the similar tools. Moreover, if you just think about all the time and effort you will have to devote to Instagram posting, you will definitely say that such a small cost for an automated solution is just fine.
Generally speaking, Social Rabbit is a WordPress plugin that makes it possible to run and promote your drop shipping store social media accounts automatically. It works with 4 major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram) and potentially can cover the audience of up to 2 billion people. The Rabbit creates posts with the use of pictures and phrases that you specify, likes and comments posts, grabs and reblogs posts from selected social accounts, and in general spreads the word about your drop shipping business across the most popular social networks worldwide.
Automatic posting is awesome – it saves your time and effort and lets you manage other areas of your drop shipping business.
Still, the posts you create manually are also an important part of your marketing strategy. Such posts make your account look more ‘human’ and customer-oriented. People prefer interacting with humans, and not with some soulless bots, right?
That’s why we try to mix automatically generated posts with something unique that we create ourselves. For example, on the picture above you can see an example of a post that we made to celebrate a special thematic event. We even made a custom product offer!
By the way, don’t be afraid to interact with your drop shipping supplier and ask for something customized. As our experienced seller from AliExpress reveals, you can ask your seller to include some branded elements in your package. But, as the example above shows, you can also make a deal and pay for a limited edition of a very special product offering!
Videos run the world.
No, seriously.
In drop shipping business, videos become an increasingly popular type of informational content because they are just really cool:
Speaking of personal experience, it’s necessary to mention customer reviews! If you manage to find a review in the form of a video (unpacking the delivered item, demonstrating the item in use, etc.) – share it with your audience! It is real, it is visual, and it is really engaging.
In the beginning of 2017, Instagram presented a new fun feature – a so-called gallery. It means that you are able to put up to 10 photos or videos in a single post.
This is exceptionally useful for Instagram accounts related to ecommerce in general and drop shipping business in particular. Now you don’t have to waste your time and energy on creating collages. And you also don’t have to spam your subscribers’ feed with multiple similar posts.
How can you use galleries in drop shipping business?
Traditionally, people use Instagram to post carefully selected pictures and videos. Users share the most beautiful scenes, the most important moments, and the most meaningful events.
It is not the case at all with Instagram stories – they disappear in 24 hours, and they are only shown to a selected category of subscribers. It means that users don’t feel much stress – they freely post whatever they like, and they are really relaxed about it even if the photo quality is not too high, or their face looks funny, or whatever.
It means that stories capture ordinary everyday life, contrary to traditional ‘glamorous’ Instagram posts. What does it mean for drop shipping business?
Trust and emotions.
Basically, you can make your readers interested by creating a more personal and human-like brand image.
When you experiment with the content through adding emojis, drawings and text to the story, you turn it into some kind of a private message filled with emotions. That’s a way to build a loyal customer audience.
Also, as you can see on the picture above, you can use stories to interact with your readers. If they want to share their reviews or reblog your posts to take part in some contest etc., but they don’t want to ‘spam’ in their own feed, offer them an alternative. Ask them to use stories for this purpose, and everyone will be happy.
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