I’ve heard a rumour going around that Instagram is only useful for product-based businesses. You know, like actual, physical products.

Pah!

I’m here to let you know that whether you are a freelance VA, a high street shop or even a business consultant, Instagram can work wonders for your biz, and is a great driver of brand engagement and website traffic.

But how? Stick with me, I’ve got you covered with some of my top tips below.

1. Create ‘like worthy’ images

Instagram is allll about images – no if’s, and’s or but’s about it. (Ooo, Pinterest is too!)

No need to be a professional photographer. By displaying beautified snapshots that can be snapped, cropped, polished and posted in a few minutes is an opportunity to show the world your lighter side helping people connect with you, and understand your brand. And, that is healthy for the long term growth of your business.

Try some of these ideas to help reel in the likes:

• Behind the Scenes This type of post is perhaps the most personal way to make a connection with your audience. As consumers, we tend to forget that there is a whole process behind the scenes. No doubt about it, we LOVE to know what really goes on.

Tip: Post a picture of you (and/or your team!) as you work. Show them off! Even if it’s a virtual team, take a screenshot of you meeting on Skype and give your audience a little sneak peak of who is all behind  your business.

• Products + Services Thinking outside the box with a little creativity will get you further quicker in whatever social network you use, including on Instagram. If you have a service-based business, you could post testimonial quotes, and the before, during and after of your product launches.

• Promotions + Events Are you having a promo for one of your products? Create a attention grabbing image for Instagram to encourage potential customers to buy, like the image to the right.

For these promotional type posts, remember to always add a link back to your website in the image description along with a call to action, like I’ve done in the example above.

2. Use accompanying Apps

There are all sorts of apps that bridge the gap between what’s possible on Instagram and what users want to create.

Both Instagenius and Instasize help you create collages of your images, and resize them into a square by adding borders (see the image above). Both these apps are laden with a heap of other design features too.

I recently discovered WordSwag (thanks to my friend, Rikke Hansen) and I loooove it! It lets you create funky quote images in a flash, like the one to the right.

3. Don’t forget about Facebook, too!

You’ll notice in Instagram that before sending an image to upload, you have the option of posting it on your other social networks.

Facebook and Instagram are good buddies. In fact, Facebook bought Instagram for a cool $1 billion in 2012 – so naturally, they work well together. I highly recommend that you post your pictures to Facebook as it lets you tag people and shows up as a full-sized, Facebook pretty-fied image.

Remember, it will automatically post your image to your personal profile on Facebook, and from there you can share it on your business page.

There is an option to post to Twitter as well, but it will post as a link, not the actual image embedded (boo, Twitter).

4. #Dontbeannoying

I recently saw an image on Instagram of a beautiful necklace from a favourite shop of mine. It was the perfect ‘like-worthy’ picture as it was laid out beautifully and presented in an appealing way.

That was, until I saw over 50 hashtags below the picture, including #followmeformore #likemypictureplease #like #my #picture and a multitude of other unrelated tags.

Hashtags are used to group together images on a related subject. This does mean you can widen your reach by getting in front of more Instagram users but we want to do it with some style, right?

Instead of weighing your image down with a jumble of random hashtags, pick 2 or 3 of the most relevant. That’s all you need to attract people interested in your product or service.

Being strategic and classy about it will get you much further.

Besides, adding 50 hashtags to your image is a monumental waste of time. Go spend it on something business-worthy instead.

Cool tip: Do you have a challenge or competition coming up? Create a hashtag for the launch period and encourage your peeps to use that hashtag. The result will be a sea of related pics all under one, easy to remember hashtag.

5. Post Consistently

While you don’t need to post each and every day, do be consistent rather than bombarding your followers with a slew of posts one day and nothing else for weeks.

The Instagram community is still relatively small compared to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, which means you could easily saturate your followers feeds by posting too frequently (and lose their interest).

One of the things I like most of all about Instagram is that you can keep your posting schedule flexible and spontaneous.

Think about what you have coming up in your business: launches, specials, competitions, blog posts, and consider how these can be included in your Instagram strategy. Everything else can be included in a flexible posting schedule.

6. Connect

Remember the social part of Instagram – it’s people communicating and connecting through images, so the networking aspect is important, too.

You can do this by liking and commenting on other posts, follow those you already know from your other established networks, seek out leading brands and influencers in your market and engage with them through comments and likes. Then, use your carefully selected hashtags (if you’ve established your own hashtags for Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, use them here too!)

Tell me…

I want to know – how you are using Instagram? Have you had any business success with it? Share in the comments below.