How to Market Your Early Years Setting on Instagram
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While Instagram has considerably fewer users than Facebook and Twitter, at just 24,400,000 in the UK, it is still a significant presence in most people’s lives. Additionally, with its focus on images and video, as well as the Stories option, Instagram is the ideal way to promote your Early Years setting.
Similar to Facebook (which makes sense as Facebook owns Instagram) the first thing to do is to start a business account. If you already have an Instagram account for your setting you can easily change this to business, for free, through your account settings. This allows you to add more information about what type of organisation you are, an address and a contact button on your profile – much more than a ‘personal’ account. As well as being more immediately informative, this also adds legitimacy to your profile as it will be obvious from the start that you are a business.
Like Facebook, Instagram business accounts provide audience insights, post performance information and follower activity. You can easily connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account as well, to get the most out of Instagram’s business tools. This allows you to post to both Instagram and Facebook simultaneously, set up ads to run across both platforms and maintain consistency with the contact information displayed on each.
To connect your Instagram account and Facebook page:
Instagram is primarily used for inspiration and for people to discover things they care about, which includes content from brands and businesses. In fact, a third of the most viewed stories on Instagram are from businesses.
Instagram offers real-time metrics on how your content is performing through the day, as well as giving insights into how followers are interacting with your posts and stories.
While Instagram ads, if not being posted on both Facebook and Instagram, can only be made on mobile (one of the drawbacks of Instagram, if we’re honest), it’s still easy to make a great advert for your setting. You can choose from posts or videos you’ve already put up in your feed, or promote yourself using stories.
The ad creation process (from a feed post) is based around different settings, including:
These ads will appear in people’s news feed, the same way as posts from people they regularly follow.
If you want to run an ad via Instagram Stories, it’s a slightly different method. While the set-up and targeting is mostly the same, the ad will only appear in people’s Stories, and will expire after 24 hours.
Once submitted and approved, you can use the Promotions button to view insights on your ad.
Unlike Facebook, Instagram doesn’t let you set daily spend limits; just a total budget for the duration of your ad. You can either pay for Instagram ads through the app itself, or through your linked Facebook account in the ad centre. For more information, check out Instagram’s business guide.
The beauty of Instagram is that the images are the main focus. This makes it perfect for showing off your colourful classrooms, children’s artwork and the craziness of messy play – giving current and prospective families a great insight into their little ones’ daily lives at your Early Years setting!
