Turn your account into a ‘Business’ Account.
Changing your Non-profit’s Instagram account to a ‘business’ account will allow you to list yourself as a Non-profit and view your stats on each photo you post to your timeline. These stats include impressions, shares, likes, comments and engagement rate. This is handy for analysing which posts do better than others so that you can act accordingly.
Ensure that you utilise your Bio section by adding your Non-profit’s mission, website link, and location.
Here are some excellent example’s of Non-profit’s that have utilised their bio section:
Utilise Instagram Hashtags
Utilising the use of hashtags will help give your Non-profit’s Instagram account more exposure. If you’re not sure what hashtags to use when you post a picture to your timeline, then there are many free tools online that can help you with this, including ‘Hashtagify.me‘. Enter a term related to your criteria and let Hashtagify.me provide you with other related hashtags that you can use alongside when posting to your Instagram timeline.
You can also ‘follow’ different hashtags so that any posts that appear under that hashtag will appear in your timeline.
There are many different opinions as to how many hashtags you should use per post; some say 11, and some say 30! Our advice would be to not worry about the number of hashtags as such but to make sure that each hashtag is relevant to your post.
Utilise Instagram Stories and Highlights
Uploading Instagram Stories is a great way to keep your followers updated without the fear of ‘spamming’ everyone’s timeline. Instagram Stories can be used to update your followers regularly with content that can be personalised through the use of text and graphics. These stories will stay on your Instagram for 24 hours and will be deleted after this time.
Instagram now lets you add these stories to your ‘highlights’ that are featured on your profile. If you would like to add a story to your highlights, click the ‘+’ on your profile page and add the story and click next’.
Don’t be afraid to keep your followers updated by posting stories daily!
Use Video and Photo’s for Content
Research by Social Times showed that photo’s on Instagram gain 36% more likes than videos; however, video content gains more comments than images do. Instagram recently released Instagram ‘Reels’, which are 15 second, multi-clip videos that can have sound effects and music added to them. With Instagram allowing you to post photos, videos and now reels, our advice is to keep your content varied on this platform to get your users engaged.
Engage with Others
An important role when running your Non-profit’s Instagram account is to engage with others yourself! Searching for relevant hashtags to follow and commenting on other people’s posts will get your Non-profit’s Instagram account seen by others. Following other Instagram accounts that are relevant to yours also means that your Non-profit’s Instagram account can appear in other people’s recommended account list, great right!?
Liking and commenting on other photos and videos will get you noticed, which may prompt a visit from them.
If your Non-profit is located in a particular area, you can search for posts based on location and interact with them, helping your Non-profit gain exposure in certain areas.
