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With more than 77 million users in the US, there’s no denying the fact that Instagram is now rapidly becoming a powerful arena for digital marketing. From big brands to small businesses, many are already taking advantage of the platform’s popularity to promote their brands and products. Through captivating pictures, strategic hashtags and some marketing techniques thrown-in, many were able to land in greater promotional heights due to instagram.

And so the surge of new users continues overtime, but some newbies in Instagram marketing are scratching heads, unsure if they would still be able to keep up with competitors already ahead of the visual marketing race. The dilemma is the same for small businesses who remain clueless as to how to harness the platform’s power to boost local marketing.

Building Your Followers

Like other social media marketing platform giants as Facebook and Twitter, the advertising opportunity in Instagram can be converted from wide-range advertising to local marketing. With a few hacks, you can manage to use Instagram posts to reach local clients.

Are you late to the Instagram party and dreading the thought of starting your follower list from zero? Open your Twitter account’s list of Fans in Crowdfire and start by following these same usernames on Instagram. Crowdfire is a free tool that will allow you to tap into your Twitter “followers” resource and get in touch with them in Instagram.

This CopyFollow feature also allows you to follow your competitor’s followers or followers of any specific account. If people are interested in the same product, even if they haven’t heard of you before, there is a big chance they’ll follow back. To optimize local marketing, try following back people who follow certain location-specific accounts within your area of service, this could be a government agency, a famous restaurant, or a local celebrity.

Leveraging Keywords and Hashtags

An absolute favorite of many Instagram marketers, Crowdfire has another feature that lets you identify users who are interested in specific keywords. For example, you can key in ‘San Diego’ and find people who are interested in San Diego. Location keywords are efficient in finding locals. Throw in additional keyword for a more specific search.

Another popular tool used for Instagram is Iconosquare. Among its many interesting features for Instagram marketing, its Search Tool allows you to find hashtags that are relevant and widely used by your target local market and other widely used hashtags with extensions. For example, searching “#SanDiego” will give you the following result:

You now have a list of hashtags often used aside from #SanDiego to promote your posts.

Try these amazing tactics and watch your Instagram account soar!