Instagram is for contractors and construction companies too.

Instagram is a great little marketing tool you can use to quickly and easily build brand awareness for your construction business. When it comes to marketing your business, the type of content that often gets the most engagement are posts with images and video. Instagram allows you to do both.

If you didn’t know by now, Instagram is for contractors and construction professionals. We’re on Instagram, and frankly, we only see it growing in popularity for trades workers and contractors to showcase their work, and reach a wider audience.

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5 Ways Instagram Helps You Build Brand Awareness

1. Exhibit your quality of work. Instagram is a great way to showcase your work. Take pictures and video of current projects and share them.

2. Show what you’re up to. Show your audience what you’re doing today. Heading to an expo? Grading a new residential lot? Post a picture or a video to let your followers know what you’re up to that moment.

3. Reach a wider audience. Instagram is a highly popular app that many people spend a lot of their downtime on. You’re probably already on Facebook and Twitter. Every person has a preferred platform. Instagram is that for many people. Be sure you’re reaching everyone and cover all your bases. You can quickly and easily reach a wider audience through the use of images and hashtags, which brings us to our next point.

4. Hashtags boost discovery. The use of hashtags on Instagram really pays off. Think of the keywords for which you’d like to be discovered. Include hashtags for keywords like #construction, or the name of the city where you do most of your business, the type of equipment you’re using, etc. The possibilities are endless. Remember anyone else posting about the same thing or searching for that hashtag will potentially discover you. It’s a quick way to get more followers.

5. Save time. Instagram posts are relatively quick and easy and you can connect them with other business accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. so you only have to post once.

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Important Tips to Remember:

• Instagram is a mobile app. To save time, write out any text you may want in a text file first and then copy and paste directly into Instagram. This is particularly useful if you’ve got a lot of information to share, and will allow you to include all the hashtags you want.

• Keep a text file on your phone or mobile device of commonly used hashtags (keywords you want to be known for) to copy and paste into your Instagram posts to save time from writing them out each time.

• If you are sharing to additional platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, here are some things to remember:
> When sharing to Twitter, remember only the first 140 characters (minus your Instagram link) will show up on Twitter, so be sure to put the most important wording and hashtags up front.
> You don’t want to include too many hashtags on Facebook. So after you post an Instagram image and have shared it to Facebook, be sure to log in to your Facebook page from your computer and edit the image leaving only the top few hashtags.

• Follow some of top Instagram accounts for ideas on how it’s done.

• While you cannot post to Instagram from a computer, you can log in to your account from one. This is particularly useful when you’re on a website and click on the Instagram link in their footer, for example, you can simply log in from your computer to follow others rather than searching on your phone or mobile device.

• Utilize apps like Squareready and Square Video to to make your rectangular pictures and videos square without cropping them.

Have a question or comment? Leave it in the comments below, or the comments section where we’ve shared this post on social media (including Instagram).

Additional reading: Inc.com recently published this article about how Instagram can help you increase sales.

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