154: Crush It On Instagram: Build an Audience, Generate Leads, and Increase Sales with Luke Bender

What this episode covers

Luke Bender from LukeBender.com shares his Instagram expertise. Instagram is a super popular social network (500 million users, second only to Facebook), where users can only post pictures as content. He shares his 30 minute per day strategy to get the most out of this high traffic social network: post between "every other day" and "once a day" research hashtags: find huge Instagram pages similar to yours and copy those tags follow people to get followers (you're limited to 60 per hour but shoot for 100 per day) Resources Typorama (generate quote pictures) Later app (for posting) Iconosquare (analytics) [showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Luke Bender is going to talk to us about Instagram. He's an Instagram marketing expert. He helps businesses and online entrepreneurs build a targeted audience, generate leads, and make sales using Instagram. Luke, what's happening with Instagram today? Luke Bender: Oh exciting things are happening. Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad to hear and I can't wait to get all the details on that. Instagram. I know next to nothing about it. I know about Facebook, Twitter, maybe a little bit of Pinterest. I know that Instagram is a place where I guess people share photos and they can like stuff and there's hashtags, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. Could you explain to us what is Instagram exactly and how does it fit in with Facebook and Twitter and all these other platforms? Luke Bender: Yeah. Instagram is a huge social media platform. It, I think, just recently reached 500 million users, so it's about second to Facebook. It's strictly photos, so you upload photos and it goes into a feed. It's a great place to just connect with your audience and build an audience and grow your business. I'm really excited about it and I think the future of Instagram still looks good. Robert Plank: Awesome. It seems to me like one of those weird sites, sort of like Snapchat or something where maybe I'm too old to understand it. Like you said, 500 million users, and I see on some of these sites where there's a lot of people using them, a lot of people just really cleaning up on it. Okay, so Instagram. You can only post photos. In the context of us, internet marketers, business owners, stuff, people who have things to sell, what do we do there? Because I can understand if you're Kanye West or Kim Kardashian or like a celebrity, but if we're a business, what kind of photos are we posting on Instagram? Luke Bender: Yeah, definitely. It is interesting because it's mostly photos. You actually can't post a link in the caption. You only get one link on Instagram and that is in the bios. When you're on the main page viewing someone's Instagram page, you get one link there. It is interesting in that aspect. I would say if anyone's creating educational content or content around a certain niche, you can take like, what I really like to do is take quotes. If you're writing blog posts, you just take original quotes that you create and you can kind of use apps, there's one I use called Typorama, so you can actually create quote pictures within this app and those do really well, especially if they have to do with your niche and you're providing value or motivation or inspiration, any type of those pieces of content. Then I like to, if anyone's building an audience around their own personal brand, I really like to encourage people to give a little bit of their personal life and actually really establish that I know I can trust with their followers because I think that's key when people start following you.

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