Generally, the prevailing advice for insurance professionals is that if you only have time to be on one social media platform, it should be LinkedIn.
However, your prospects also have lives outside of work. In 2018, there were over 1 billion users per month on Instagram according to a TechCrunch report. That’s more than double the users on Twitter—and chances are some of those users are in your target market.
Instagram is a more visually-focused medium than other platforms—its primary focus is photos and brief videos. If you’re willing to get a little creative, you can make it work for you. Here are some tips:
Set up a business profile. You can include a profile picture, a short bio and a link to your website (this is the only place where Instagram allows a clickable link). Make sure it’s consistent with all your branding across other platforms.
Have fun with it. Insurance tends to be a fairly conservative industry, but Instagram gives you a chance to humanize yourself and connect with your audience. Images such as candid pics of your employees at the office, cool events you sponsor or attend, relevant memes or gifs, and infographics all tend to do well.
Don’t forget the video. What questions do you get from agents on a regular basis? Make a series of short videos answering those questions. This is just one idea, but it’s useful, helpful content that insurance agents will notice.
Utilize hashtags. Hashtags make your posts searchable. Use the right hashtags, and they’ll come up when people search for posts on a specific topic. These can be insurance-related, but they can also have tie-ins to less work-focused subjects.
Some general hashtags that might broaden your audience include #nofilter (for a pic of a beautiful sunset seen after work), region-specific tags like #sanfrancisco, or #tbt (stands for “Throwback Thursday”) when posting a memory of something that happened a while ago.
Set up automatic cross-posting. You can cross-post your Instagram posts on Facebook and Twitter—giving you more bang for the buck on each post without having to take the time to repost.
Instagram is a more relaxed medium than LinkedIn—it’s a great place to show your personality and connect with agents on a more relatable level. But you still get a chance to showcase your expertise by showing your work in the field, events you speak at, short videos answering common questions, and other tactics. It’s a great way to connect with agents in a more digitally savvy world.
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