Instagram marketing free gives you the chance to share your photos with the world. It may not be the most comfortable thing in the world, but here’s my take on what works well. Instagram is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world, and the potential is there for you to grow your brand by using it.
E-commerce: Have2Have.it
By introducing Shoppable Posts and “Buy” stickers in Stories, Instagram showed that it understands the importance of e-commerce on the platform. In addition to these features, you can use tools to integrate your website and Instagram profile even further.
Have2Have.it is a part of the Soldsie platform. It recreates your Instagram feed on your website where your users can click the image to be taken to product listings. It’s also used to link your Instagram pictures to content posts on your website.
This makes it a great option for regularly updated blogs. Have2Have.it is a great way to get many uses out of your one bio link.
Pricing: You can use the tool for free for under 50 clicks per month, and it also has a 30-day free trial. You can get more clicks starting from $5 per month.
8. Influencer marketing: InfluencerDB
Instagram is one of the biggest platforms for influencer marketing: 92% of marketers and 87% of influencers choose Instagram as the most important social platform for influencer marketing.
The main challenge of influencer marketing is to find the right influencers to promote your brand. And that’s when InfluencerDB comes into play.
This is an influencer discovery tool which shows you Instagram influencers in your industry based on a chosen keyword. Moreover, it shows you the analysis of their profile: follower count dynamics for the last month, what locations they tag, what hashtags and brands they talk about, who they mention and who mentions them, etc. You can even compare their profile with the profile of another Instagram influencer and see who performs better.
You can mark influencers as favourite to save them to a list, and then come back to it when you’re done with research and choose the ones that you like the most.
Pricing: The Free plan includes 20 daily searches, 3 daily influencer views, 10 favorites, and the last 7 days’ posting history for each influencer you view. You can get access to more searches and wider functionality for $129 a month.
Instagram Insights
What it does: Instagram Insights provides you with all basic statistics you need to make sure your efforts on Instagram are reaching the right audience – and producing the result you want. If you don’t have the time and resources to try out additional tools, or if you’re not sure Instagram is even the way to go in your marketing strategy, start by using Instagram Insights.
You’ll have access to free analytics once you’ve set up your Instagram business account – which you’ll absolutely need in any case. The app will show you total impressions of your posts, their reach, profile views, and website clicks, and also the basic demographics of your audience and their top locations. You can also see the times of the day most of your followers are online, which can be extremely useful.
Available options: Free once you’ve set up your Instagram Business account.
Free version: https://www.instagram.com/
2. Buffer
What it does: Buffer is a scheduling app – it lets you schedule posts to be published to all the major social networks from your dashboard, though it does work a little differently for Instagram.
For most platforms, it’s essentially a ‘set and forget’ process – you choose a time you want a post to be published, and to which network, and Buffer will take care of the rest. Instagram, however, doesn’t allow third-party tools to post direct to the app, so after you’ve scheduled your post in Buffer, the Buffer app will send you a reminder about when to post on Instagram, based on your chosen date and time. The app will then redirects you into your Instagram account, where you can review your scheduled post, apply filters, and post it. Its helpful in ensuring you post at more relevant times and in managing your content strategy across various platforms from one place.
Available options: Buffer is a freemium app – you can connect one Instagram account for free. Awesome Plan, that starts with $10/month lets you add more than one account.
Free version: https://buffer.com/
Crowdfire
Are you trying to grow your followers on Instagram? If so, this free tool for Instagram has everything you need. You can use its desktop version or the app for iOS or Android.
With Crowdfire, you can easily manage your followers and who you follow with the these options.
- Automatically unfollow users who don’t follow you.
- Copy followers from a different account.
- See a list of your “fans” (users who you don’t follow but they follow you).
- View new followers and people who unfollowed you.
2. 10Web Social Photo Feed
This tool is a WordPress plugin that lets you connect your Instagram feed to your website. It is very user friendly and doesn’t take long to set up. Once you configure everything just the way you want it, you’ll be able to display content from Instagram exactly how and where you want on your site, blog, etc.
Finding brand mentions: Awario
Monitoring brand mentions is crucial for any brand, big or small. It enables you to engage with customers, manage your reputation, identify influencers who use your products/services, and so on.
The problem is when people mention a brand on Instagram, they won’t necessarily tag them. Most of the mentions will go untagged — and unnoticed by brands. However, a monitoring tool can discover these untagged mentions and make it easy to engage with them.
Awario finds all mentions of your brand and analyzes them. It also provides you with a broad range of analytics on your brand:
- How many times it was mentioned.
- How many people saw your brand name (reach).
- The language of the mentions.
- Key topics within your mentions.
- The most influential accounts which mentioned your brand.
Additionally, your brand name is not the only word you can monitor. Awario monitors any keyword or keyword combination you can possibly think of. Some keywords that could be useful to track on Instagram are:
- Your competitors’ brand names
- Influencers’ names
- Hashtags and keywords relevant to your industry
Pricing: Awario offers a free trial for two weeks. The Starter plan, tailored for small companies, costs $29/mo (3 alerts, 30,000 mentions per month).
2. Analytics: squarelovin
While Awario analyzes other people’s social data, squarelovin keeps an eye on your own performance. The Instagram Insights dashboard shows you how successful your account is, but if you want to dive deeper into data and get answers to questions like, “When should I post to get the most engagement?”, you will need a separate analytics tool.
Squarelovin allows you to see how your metrics change overtime and which posts directly affect your growth. The tool tracks likes and followers, reviews post performance and measures overall profile engagement. It also highlights the best times to post, best filters and hashtags to use.
It also offers historical insights which date back to your first ever post on Instagram.
Pricing: completely free.
3. Image & video editing: Instasize
Instagram already allows users to edit their content before publishing; however, their filters are quite limited and sometimes look unnatural. Most brands strive for an appealing and consistent aesthetic, thus they use tools to make their images stand out.
Instasize provides users with more than 80 filters that you can use on pictures and videos, curated by professional photographers. In addition to the ready-made filters, you can customize the details of your pictures by adjusting sharpness, brightness, exposure, contrast, etc. It also enables you to put several photos together in one of the collage layouts.
To get your message across, you might want to add text to your images. Instasize gives you access to over 50 unique fonts which are easy to manipulate and edit.
The feature that makes Instasize stand out is the ability to resize your pictures to post on other social media networks. For example, you can resize a photo you published to your feed to share it to Stories, or to your Facebook page.
Pricing: Instasize is free, but you can access additional editing tools and filters for $4,99 per month.
4. Grid planning: Preview
You may not consider how all the pictures you post look together, but when consumers click on your profile, this is the first thing they see. Thus, in order to have a coherent and attractive profile, you need to engage in planning your grid layout. Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t allow you to rearrange posted pictures, so you can’t change the look of your profile once you upload the the images. That’s why most brands and influencers use tools to plan their grid in advance.
The Preview app does exactly that. You upload multiple photos and then rearrange them by dragging them to the right place, swapping two pictures, or shuffling several pictures.
Once you find the look you are satisfied with, you can add captions and hashtags to each photo and schedule Preview to remind you to post it at a certain time. To post the photo, you press the Export button, choose Instagram and paste the caption and hashtags (Preview automatically copies them for you).
A very useful feature is the ability to edit pictures while you’re organizing your layout. Let’s say, you arranged the photos, but one picture has a slightly muted colours. You can adjust it right in the app with the filters it offers.
You can see the future posts by clicking the calendar icon, which will help you navigate your posting schedule.
Pricing: Preview is free for one user. You can have wider functionality such as Hashtag Analytics and the Team feature for $14,99 a month.
Conclusion
Are you looking to use it for brand exposure or to simplify purchasing? Are you going to carry out social media campaigns on Instagram? Will you use it for market research?
After you’ve established your goals, choose a couple of tools with free trials according to your key objectives, try them out, and go from there. I would, however, suggest you give one or two tools outside of your usual list a try once in a while – after all, sometimes you don’t even realize you need a tool for something until you’ve tried it.