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It is no secret that Instagram is the main social media tool for businesses and brands to grow over the next couple years. Instagram gets opened more than 24 times a day and used 32 minutes on average daily, according to an independent study by HootSuite. Here are the top 5 tools you need to succeed on Instagram.
1. WhenToPost App
This app analyzes your profile, your followers and finds the highest engagement times. I know several of my friends and I have tested this many different ways and it truly does give you the best times to post. Following this has increased engagement for me by over 250%. I typically find the photo and write the captions long before actually posting and set a reminder in my calendar to remind me to post. I do not use automatic post schedulers because it hurts engagement, but that is something you can test on your own profile.
2. Follow Track App
This app looks at your total comments, likes per posts, views per video, new followers per day and unfollows. It is a great tool to get lots of data. Think of it as Google Analytics for Instagram.
3. CutStory App
CutStory allows you to “cut” videos that are longer (16 seconds or longer) into Instagram Story sized clips (15 second intervals). For example, if you have a 45 second video you would like to share, simply upload the video to CutStory and it will cut them into 3 separate videos that allow you to upload them to your story without getting your videos cutoff.
4. Instagram Calculator
Influencer marketing is growing daily and you may want to mimic what other profiles are doing or work with them on a joint venture or even do shoutouts on specific pages. This tool looks at a profile and determines the engagement rate. Typically, influencers get about 1.5 to 3% engagement. The larger the profiles, the less engaged they typically are. Great example of us, I was going to buy a shoutout and was debating if a page with 225k followers would work better than a page with 2.5 million followers (same niche). I used this calculator and learned that the one with millons of followers gets a .01% engagement rate while the page with 250k followers gets 8.5%….you can probably guess which one I ended up going with.
5. Line Breaker
Apps4life doesn’t have the most user friendly or fun UI but it does work well. Have you ever made an Instagram post within Instagram and added line breaks and then posted it to only realize that Instagram took all your line breaks out and now your post is one long cluster of text? It is the worst! Well, Apps4life solved that issue. Simply write your caption in the box and hit convert and paste that text into Instagram and it will keep the line breaks. My process is typically writing in a notepad and then copying it into this box and clicking convert, but your process can be different. I just spend several days developing my copy and a notepad makes it easy to add and edit.
These are 5 must have Instagram tools. In the comments, please let me know if you have questions or comments and be sure to follow me on Instagram (haris_reis) as I document my journey from going from 500 to 50k followers in 365 days!
P.S. – I share many tools and tips for business!
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