How to sell on Instagram
After hearing a lot about it from your friends, you too signed up on Instagram and started browsing all the beautiful photos and videos hosted by the platform. Between a selfie-and a funny movie, however, you also came across promotional posts, through which it was possible to buy products, and so you began to wonder if it was possible to sell on Instagram.
Well: the answer is yes, and today I’m here to clarify any doubts on the subject! Whether you have a personal project that you want to launch, a line of products that you are creating and that you would like to sell on the Internet, or if you are simply curious to understand the path it takes to sell and be successful on Instagram, dedicate a few minutes of your time to me. free and you will get all the answers you need.
If you are at the beginning with the world of Instagram, you have a great desire to do, but you still have some doubts about how to move within this social network, do not worry: I will show you all the steps to take and I will provide you with further information to deal with. the topic without stress. At first, it may not seem all very intuitive, but you are not a type who is discouraged by the first difficulty, right? Then, make yourself comfortable, take your cell phone, and start following the directions I am about to give you. I wish you a good read and I wish you big good luck with everything!
Preliminary information
Let’s get rid of the first doubts: in a previous article, I told you about what Instagram is, how to start using it and discover the best accounts from which, once you have become familiar with the social network, you can take inspiration. Now let’s move on to another step: have you ever heard of influencers?
As I explained to you in this other article, they are people who earn through Instagram, just what you would like to do too, by offering their community content in collaboration with the companies that contact them for advertising. This is why you may have seen, for example, a fashion blogger, presenting a specific brand and inserting #ad, which means “advertising”, among the hashtags of the post.
What I just told you about is one of the many ways to sell on Instagram gaining with your visibility, but be careful: being based on popularity, to follow this procedure you must necessarily have many followers, at least 5/10 thousand. Alternatively, with a lot of patience and dedication, if you have a site on which products are sold, you can create a series of photos of them and thus attract Instagram followers to it.
If, for example, you are a creative person and you make particular design objects, you will not need to have millions of fans to start selling on Instagram. At the same time, however, it would be wrong to think of launching the sale of products that you have so carefully designed and created and to immediately find many people willing to buy them if only your friends and some people you do not know directly follow you.
Before selling on Instagram, you need to think about how to get noticed. It is an upstream study that I advise you to do: do not copy, just take a cue from those who work in your sector and believe that they approach the philosophy of what you would like to do. Then think about how to enhance your personality, how your ideal customers are and study how you could attract their attention by placing your products within a circle of interesting and fresh content, if possible.
The fashion of Instagram has gradually grown since Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, acquired it. This has allowed people, like you, who want to develop the potential of their account, to use an application that has behind it the work of a huge team that has every intention of proposing new forms of content and an experience always. more pleasant while using it.
Now that you understand what an influencer is and how you could start getting noticed to sell, relying on your website that contains the products, hold on tight because I’m about to reveal something very interesting to you: selling on Instagram has become, at least theoretically, more accessible and faster for companies. You are curious? I’ll talk to you right away.
How to create a business account on Instagram
Business accounts are distinguished from standard ones (which are intended for personal purposes only) for various additional functions: insights, to find out more about your followers and the performance of your posts, the ability to create promotions and add ad hoc information about your business (such as your phone number, email, and location) and more.
To create a business account on Instagram, you need to open the official social network app on your smartphone or tablet, access your profile, press the button with the three dots located at the top right, scroll to the item create a business profile or under the item go to a business account (in case you want to immediately convert the profile you are using) and connect the Facebook page related to your company.
If you do not have a Facebook page, I recommend that you create it in advance: it is essential to have one because you will use it to carry out your advertising campaigns. In addition, you will need to have an active showcase on the page (it is important to fill it in because it will be from these same products that you will draw to sell them directly on Instagram).
If you open your Facebook page before the Instagram account, you can start optimizing it, populating it with video content, photos, directing and so on, in order to start creating your community.
Now let’s see what the Shopping feature looks like, first as a possible customer and then as a company to learn how to set it up and thus start selling your products directly on Instagram.
How shopping on Instagram works
As I told you a little while ago, the Shopping function of Instagram allows companies that have signed up to the social network with the right procedure that I have just described, to insert tags in their posts. This means that if followers see a particularly beautiful photo posted by the company, which depicts a product they intend to buy, they just need to tap on it to see all the information useful for the purchase appear and complete it in no time.
Don’t you find that this opens up a really interesting potential for companies? Just think about how much this function makes the possibility of buying immediate without thinking too much about it. Let’s look at the example of a clothing brand together.
By opening the photo you like, it is reported that products available for purchase appear on it: by tapping on this “notice”, the price and the name of the item or items are displayed, if the photo includes more than one. If you want more information, you can press directly on the article of your interest and a new screen will open with the Buy button, thanks to which you are redirected directly to the company website to complete the action. Easy, intuitive and fast.
This interesting tool is free for businesses and posts with the feature are accessible to all followers. When you start using it too, you will also be able to see the products that get the most taps and the tags of the most popular products. How do you say? Are you looking forward to trying the Instagram Shopping function? Perfect: in the next paragraph I will explain how to do it.
How to tag products in Instagram posts
Here we are: you have created a business account on Instagram, you understand how the impact of the products you want to sell will be once the Shopping function is activated, you really like it and want to try it. Well, now I just have to explain to you in detail how to do it for your account.
First of all, follow the whole procedure that I explained above to open the business account: start the procedure, enter your company data, connect the Instagram account to the Facebook page of the company and enter the product with which you want to start the sale in the showcase section of your Facebook page. You must then fill in the product sheet with photos, price, description and purchase methods and enter the page of your website, where the user can book the object.
Here we are! Once the procedure is finished, you will have to wait for the Instagram team to analyze your account to verify that it complies with the conditions of the seller and the sales regulations of the platform and that there is the right correspondence between the Facebook page and the business account you have created. The analysis process usually takes a few days. Once the feature is activated, you will receive a notification on your profile and you can start tagging products.
As soon as the notice Start tagging products on Instagram appears, tap on Start, press the Continue button on the screen that opens and choose where to take the products you want to tag from: that is, from the previously connected Facebook page.
OK done! Now your Instagram account has something new: the appropriate Buy section. By tapping on it, the screen will open where you can enter the products to sell.
At this point, tap the Create a post button and choose where you want to take the photo to publish from: you can look directly inside your Gallery or in the other folders on your smartphone. When you have found the right photo, tap on Next at the top right: now you have the option to insert filters on the image or edit it, we’re almost there.
Now press Next again and a screen will open where you can enter the product caption, places, tag people and products and share the post automatically on other social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
After writing the caption, press the Tag products button and you will be automatically presented with the product previously created on the Facebook page: by selecting it you will see a preview of what the product will look like with the active tag.
Finally, tap on the checkbox at the top right: congratulations, you have completed the tagging process. Finally, press on Share and that’s it! I remind you that before your Buy area populates with your products and before they become visible to everyone, you will need to create 9 posts.
