“While reviewing a customer’s social media accounts, we discovered a cool way to utilize Instagram without having to create and manage an account.”
Recently, a customer noticed that they were getting steady referral website traffic from Instagram. They had never knowingly created an Instagram account, so they assumed we were the ones that created it since we handle much of their other social media.
But that wasn’t the case, either.
As we reviewed their social media accounts and analyzed the Instagram page, we discovered an interesting and underutilized feature of Instagram called custom places.
Types of Pages on Instagram
Like Facebook, Instagram has several different types of pages – mainly people, places, and tags.
When someone creates an Instagram account and downloads the app to their phone, they get a “people” account. This allows them to post photos, follow other Instagrammers in their market (such as local real estate agents), and use the account just as one might expect.
Tags (also known as hashtags) are like public pages. They help your Instagram posts get discovered by people who search for specific keywords. When posting to an account, you can add hashtags to make your post more findable by other users.
For example, the tag “#titleinsurance” currently has over 11,000 posts. Clicking it will reveal all of the posts that have been tagged with “title insurance.”
The type of page that was most interesting to us was the places feature. This feature can be used like a tag or a page. In any post, you can add a location.
How it Works
For example, Joe visits his favorite Mexican restaurant, takes a photo of his food, and posts it to Instagram. He uses the hashtag “#quesadilla” and tags the restaurant’s location in the post.
Now, when anyone visits the Instagram page for that restaurant, Joe’s post will be there.
When someone near Joe (perhaps in the same town) searches Instagram for “quesadilla,” the post – along with the restaurant – will come up.
The best part of the places feature is that it’s auto-generated from Facebook. In other words, if you have one or more Facebook locations, you probably have one or more Instagram places.
To find out if you have a place, just search Instagram for your business name or address.
Once you find your place(s), start using them in your marketing like you would your Facebook page.
Also ask customers and Realtors to tag your location in the post. We cover this in our Best Darn Facebook Post for Title Insurance article.
This is exactly how our customer was getting traffic from Instagram. They had a few power Instagram users that happened to be real estate agents. Those agents would tag our customer’s location page after every closing.
This is how you use Instagram without ever creating an account. For more help with your marketing schedule a consultation today with TitleTap.