Instagram for Business – Our Results

With all of Google's algorithm updates, we're exploring various avenues to understand how best a company can create an online brand and benefit from the favouritism that Google offers brands. The most obvious items are things such as search engine optimisation, having a Facebook Page and Twitter account as well as trying to appear in many other areas online - basically aiming for a well rounded online presence. The "trick" in our opinion is not to just create the accounts and put some static information up, but to rather create the accounts and keep them maintained. In other words, there's little point to creating a Google+ Page for your company unless you're going to take the time to update it. Facebook bought Instagram and because social signals are being taken more seriously by Google, we decided to experiment with Instagram to see what we could achieve. So for a couple of months we had a professional photographer take photographs for us and we published them to the iMod Digital Instagram account. Here are some of the photographs amongst some less professional ones:

We managed to get some great feedback and accumulated 28 followers. It's nothing to really write home about, but we've established ourselves and we've tracked back quite a few visitors to our website. The numbers aren't big, but they're certainly there. More importantly, it's a form of very unique content that we all know Google appreciates.

What we can report on is that our search engines rankings have either remained stable or have grown over the past two months, this may not have anything to do with Instagram, but we've focused on this channel and haven't made many changes to our other profiles, nor have we acquired many new links or written any high traffic blog posts. So although the evidence isn't conclusive, we certainly haven't experienced anything negative from the experiment.

Do we feel that it's an important channel for a business to make use of at this point? Probably not, the cost to have it done was not bad at all, but we appreciate that our industry isn't the perfect fit for an experiment like this. For a company that does something far more visual, it may be a worthwhile venture, we do question Pinterest's benefits over that of Instagram though. We also appreciate that our photographs were not specifically targeted at the services we offer despite having a direct relation to what we do - if you look at our Instagram account, you will see a neat write up for each photograph tying it back to our company.

Have you experimented with Instagram for your business? We would love to hear about your opinion in the comments below.