How to Make Sales on Instagram in 3 Easy Steps (Full-Strategy Infographic!)

Aug 17, 2015 2 min readTips / How To
Photo of Courtney Seiter
Courtney Seiter

Former Director of People @ Buffer

Social media is constantly evolving. As soon as you feel like you’ve got Facebook and Twitter figured out, suddenly there’s Vine and Snapchat and a whole bunch of exciting new stuff to learn.

It keeps things interesting, and keeps social media managers on our toes.

Lately it seems like more and more social media managers are enthusiastic about Instagram and the opportunities there to engage with fans and share great photos and videos.

And the opportunities are big! With more than 300 million active users, Instagram is giving brands some great results. A Forrester study found that top brands’ Instagram posts generated a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21%—58 times more engagement than Facebook and 120 times more than Twitter!

instagram engagement

We’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with Buffer’s own Instagram account and were excited to learn more. So we reached out to our friends at Made Freshly, whose Instagram game is pretty much undeniable.

They made us an awesome infographic that covers everything you need to know to make Instagram work for you and your brand: tips and stats on growing your followers, creating a marketing flow and making sales directly from Instagram.

3 elements of Instagram

Check it out (details and citations for all the stats listed are directly underneath) and if you want to dive even deeper into Instagram check out their Instagram Marketing Master Guide ebook here. Happy ‘gramming!

Plus 20 phenomenal Instagram stats

On growing your Instagram followers

What to post?

Instagram timing

Instagram hashtags

Instagram image qualities that can drive more likes

  • High lightness generates 24 percent more likes
  • Lots of background space generates 29 percent more likes
  • A single dominant color generates 17 percent more likes than multicolored images
  • 67% of consumers say detailed images strongly influences their purchase decision
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