Instagram: What’s in it for entrepreneurs.

Instagram now has daily users in excess of 100 million. What does this mean for businesses? To answer that question, let’s look into a couple of other related figures. Compared to Facebook, the visual-sharing social media platform offers 29% more engagement and compared to Twitter, 60% more.

Isn’t that what businesses want? Engage the masses to create awareness, or generate leads, or convert leads into paying customers. A study by Forrester Research shows that brands using Instagram, gained 1+ million followers in 2015.

The platform has over 500 million users, and this number is expected to double by 2020. These figures surely appear lucrative, and evidently, calls for the presence of businesses on the platform. But, presence alone does not do the trick. Marketing on Instagram is a shrewd combination of art and science. Science shows that there are five basic ‘must-do’ things to be a success on Instagram. Art, on the other hand, lies in the implementation.

Here are the five proven tactics:

• Using the right hashtags

• Using the right filters

• Picking the right time to post

• Targeting the followers of your competitors

• Sponsoring posts and reviews

Now comes the question of implementation. Here’s where the fun begins.

1- Match and monitor your hashtags: After you’ve identified your target buyer personas, you need to match the correct hashtags associated with them and then monitor how they are doing/trending.

Monitoring hashtags will help you stay updated with the trends and competitive information, and help you get connected to new people who are interested in your business in one way or another, without any monetary cost. Needless to say, the constant increase of followers who find you in the hashtag results will also help.

How to do it? It's simple. Just do a basic keyword search through the search bar- make a list of the top hashtags from the search results- keep going back to search and monitoring the posts with those hashtags.

Monitoring the hashtags will also help you figure out how to engage with them. There are two ways of doing this: individual monitoring and using third-party apps.

Here are our top three picks for hashtag monitoring tools:

Simply Measured- This is an analytics-based social tool. It provides detailed statistics on your campaign hashtags.

Iconosquare- This app measures the engagement for hashtags you use and assesses their growth.

Keyhole- Best known for its use among journalists, this app specializes in tracking not only hashtags but also keywords.

2- Step-up your hashtag monitoring: While you’re individually monitoring hashtags, you’ll be surprised to find out how many people are talking about your business (mostly for established businesses). Engaging such users will encourage them to post more (a form of flattery) and increase engagement from their profile.

3- Managing contests: Co-holding social media contests with a more popular brand for followers of both profiles is likely to drive more following. A contest that requires a user to be following both brands will help them gain mutual followers of a shared niche.

4- Being regular with your posts: This is the most basic requirement of any social media handle. While engaging in conversations and posts that are already talking about your business, can generate serious buzz, actively posting from your handle will help you building a constant presence in the news feed.

5- Offline or off-social media promotion: It doesn’t hurt to spread the word wherever there is a possibility. Include links with social media icons on your website and emails, have signs outside your store with a peppy CTA.

6- Filtering to attract: Instagram has some mesmerizing filters which give a special effect to your images to capture attention. This is a key aspect of beautifying your posts to please the eyes of your followers. The best thing about this is that it doesn’t take a specialist or an expert to use filters.