You could be forgiven for thinking Instagram is just for celebrity selfies and sharing pictures of what you ate for lunch. And while that’s exactly what Instagram is, it’s also so much more. For a start, it’s a network of totally engaged online creatures – exactly the kind of people who love to read blogs, and probably would love yours too, if you let them know you have one.

So many of us are visual creatures, and we love pretty pictures. In the last few years, Instagram has been the place to be for that – many of my blogging friends now call it their favourite form of social media. It is invaluable for interacting with readers (especially ones who don’t have a blog), and for finding new ones that aren’t coming to you through the usual channels.

It takes two seconds to upload a snippet of your day and check in with what’s happening. Instagram routinely gets plenty of interaction and engagement from fellow users, and while a tweet can sit in the ether feeling sorry for itself, an image is far more evocative. It also doesn’t take much for your followers to “like” your image, and you’re always in their feed as it’s not based on algorithms only Einstein could understand.

Instagram doesn’t take much brainpower to engage with – it’s not a tweet to be read, it’s not a Facebook status to understand – so people check in on it much more than they do other forms of social media. You can flick through while waiting in the doctor’s office, in the car at school pick-up, before a meeting, or even while waiting at the checkout. So the more you pop up in people’s feeds, the more your name and brand begin to get familiar. And because it takes one tap to engage – people are more likely to.

Folks love to share, and are often found snapping a picture of their freshly-made bed, a beautiful blue sky, or even their kids who painted their face instead of their paper. And they don’t just share and run, often they scroll through for a bit as well to see what everyone else is up to. Then they check back to see if anyone has chatted to them, which results in more scrolling. It would be silly not to capitalize on this, and be where the people are.

If you’re looking for 150 million monthly active users globally, you can’t go past Instagram. The 65 million photos uploaded by users every day result in a billion likes – and some of those could be on your content. Instagram says users spend three times as long on Instagram as they do on Pinterest and twice as long as on Twitter.

You don’t have to be funny or clever, you can just snap a picture of something intriguing and share that. There is always the lure of the “behind the scenes” images, so if you’re a business, upload some shots of what you all get up to in a day’s work. You might think it’s just for the young, but you’ll be surprised how useful it is to find new readers of any age, and how easy it is do do.

Less effort for more readers? You’d be crazy not to do it.

Stacey Roberts is the content ninja at ProBlogger.net, and the blogger behind Veggie Mama. Can be found making play-dough, reading The Cat in the Hat for the eleventh time, and avoiding the laundry. See evidence on Instagram here, on Facebook here, and twitter @veggie_mama.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

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