Winning Instagram social commerce with the new and improved Tailwind

Instagram has 1 billion active users, of which 500 million visit Stories on a daily basis and 130 million click on shopping posts once a month. To add to that, 70% of shopping enthusiast turn to the platform to find products. That said, it kinda make sense for businesses and brands to be on the platform engaging with existing customers and showing potential customers what they are all about. Compared to traditional e-commerce, social commerce purchase journey is more efficient and has a higher ROI.

A number of brands have picked up on this making Instagram quite a saturated platform. There is high competition in a number of product and service categories. If you are in a niche space, this is something that shouldn’t be too much of a concern. All that said, that is not to say that you can’t make the ‘saturated space’ work for you. The key would be to set up a presence that people take notice of and to differentiate yourself. Differentiation could be Stories, authentic targeted content (imagery and video), thought-provoking captions and unique brand colours.

Having a solid strategy in place goes a long way towards realising meaningful results down the line. Getting a presence up and running and growing an audience takes a lot of work. Regardless of your goals be it increasing brand awareness, social commerce, driving traffic and so on, a lot of time and effort is required.

One of the keys to success on the network is posting regularly. On the native app, this means taking time out every day (or whatever frequency fits your strategy) to post updates. Posting manually is time-consuming and that is time that could be spent on other business-essential tasks. This is where smart automation becomes your friend to help you free up time. Tailwind is one such tool.

Scheduling to Instagram with Tailwind

Realising meaningful results takes work and automating part of the process will make social marketing efforts a little easier. There are a host of scheduling tools out there to choose from and one of them is Tailwind. Tailwind’s core features include Auto-Publishing, SmartSchedule and Hashtag Finder. Auto-publishing works to automatically post content to straight Instagram. SmartSchedule is an algorithm that works to pick optimal post times for the best engagement. Hashtag Finder works to come up with hashtag recommendations for each post.

It also hosts a range of other useful features such as publishing hashtags as the first comment rather than stuffing captions with hashtags and making them look spammy. A recent addition to their features has been Unsplash stock photos for the occasions when you don’t have the perfect image to post. It may seem a little weird posting stock photos to Instagram but here is a good explainer: Yes, You CAN Use Stock Photos on Instagram! Heres How.

The new and improved Tailwind

In addition to some of the above-mentioned features, Tailwind has had a bit of makeover and are now aptly calling the tool an Instagram Smart Assistant. The makeover has brought with it not only a new look but a bunch of new features as well. These include but aren’t limited to:

• New-and-improved UX – larger grid preview making it easier to visually create and plan out content making it easier to see what your grid will look like. The update also makes it easier for you to find and edit posts if need be. 
• Content plans – these work to help keep content consistent and in line with your goals. Tailwind helps out in generating a plan with suggestions on post types by first of all asking what your business is all about such as, online seller, content publisher and so on. Recommended post types include Promote, Educate, Inspire, Connect and Repurpose. You have the ability to further customise the order, frequency and post type recommended to you if you feel the plan needs a bit of tweak.

• Mad-lib style caption – these work hand in hand with content plans when it comes to writing out captions. Caption templates for the type of content you are creating for, makes the job a little easier if you find yourself stuck on what to write. Coming up with relevant hashtags if you are stuck isn’t too much of an issue thanks to suggestions presented to you in the editor.
• Drag and drop calendar – once you have your content set but aren’t 100% happy with the way it is laid in the grid preview you can simply drag and drop content. This includes drafts post giving you a full picture of what your 9-grid looks and making sure it is just right before posts are sent out. 

Social commerce with Tailwind

As far as winning at social commerce goes, Tailwind isn’t a silver bullet. But a good strategy and effective use of the Smart Assistant can work towards reaching desired results. Some features to pay particular attention to with regards to social selling are:

• Hashtag Finder – having the right hashtags can go a long way towards getting your posts in front of your target audience. Having more eyes on posts and stories could lead to more people buying what you have to offer. Make sure to do good hashtag research and use the tool for recommendations.
• Smart.Bio – this nifty feature lets you create a branded landing page where you can put links to content that you want to direct traffic to. This means when promoting content and/or selling products, you add relevant links to your Bio profile as a button or link in post (which will appear in your bio profile once published). An added bonus of this feature is that you don’t have to constantly change your bio link to direct users to the most relevant content.
• Caption formatting – this tool lets you add bold, italic, bold-italic, Serif and cursive fonts to captions. With it, you can make certain phrases and keywords stand out which for example, if you are promoting a product, help users quickly zero in on the main benefits.
• Analytics – Tailwind comes with analytics which lets you take a look at and analyse performance. With this information at hand, you can see what strikes a chord with users and going forward, give them more of what they want.

So there you have it, in a nutshell, Tailwind’s Smart Assistant works to make creating and scheduling engaging content effortless. An hour or two each month or even less time if broken down into weekly time slots spent on Instagram marketing with Tailwind could see you hitting your goals.

If you haven’t already done so, start a free trial (👍 no time limit, 👍 no credit card required) which will let try all the features and schedule up to 30 posts on Instagram.

Bonus tip: If you end up deciding that it is right for you, tell your friends and send them a free month of Tailwind as a gift. If they then decide its right for them and they upgrade to Plus, you get a free month too. If you refer 5 or more people, you get a $25 Amazon gift card in addition to the account credit. Just look for the pink gift box in the top right of the dashboard. Everyone wins!