Social Media | Why I Bailed on Using Instagram for Promoting My Business

Instagram is one of the hardest social media platforms to promote a business with. Although it absolutely can be done (many designers and shop owners are doing it very well), it just wasn't the right fit for me to promote this design studio. 

For starters, I tend to keep my IG very personal. Not exactly private, but as a means to share my life with friends and family as well as humanize myself to clients or potential clients.

So why don't I use Instagram as a way to generate design traffic? Read on and hear me out, it may not be what you think!

When I first created my Instagram account I filled it with pictures of life and linked it directly to my personal Facebook page so everyone could see. I had random pictures of nature, my fat cat, family & friends, you name it. Then I got really serious about blogging on the design studio and decided to clean out all of my accounts. I purged like no one has ever purged before and it gave me the idea to write the post about regularly auditing all social media platforms. Where I have definitely been doing that weekly, I also struggled with IG and how to transition it to business. 

The truth is that I hated IG for business. I hated the hoops I had to jump through to share a blog post, that there really was no way to link my direct post in an IG post and that I wasn't generating enough traffic from the platform anyway. So last week I decided to, once again, purge my IG entirely, and cut out the business angle. After all, I am already dedicating Twitter for business and I have two Facebook fan pages for each blog, I only share business posts on G+ and I really wanted a platform all my own, for oversharing and personal posts. 

Since my relaunch here on September 1st, I have had life calm down enough that I was really starting to miss free writing and personal blogging. I knew that when I rebranded here that I would also rebrand my Elle Ay Esse: Personal + Lifestyle Blog and, once everything from the relaunch calmed down here, I was ready to do it. So I took my purged Instagram and decided it was going to be the one social network I shared personal things on. 

In the end I don't regret this decision. I wasn't generating enough traffic from IG anyway to use it for business and I figure I can transition later if I want or need to. Until then, I am enjoying sharing the "behind-the-scenes" looks at my life, humanizing myself to those I do business with and otherwise having a companion to my personal blog (ps. new post out yesterday!)

The takeaway I have for all of you reading is this: It's OK to have something all your own. It's OK to not make every.single.social.network part of your business. Once you have niched yourself it will become harder and harder to let other things slip through. Other, completely irrelevant things. So it is just fine for you to not have everything you do engulfed in your business. After all, if you do not make time for you, you'll lose yourself and that is just no way to do business.

Start the Discussion:

Do you use Instagram for business?
Do you have one social network you keep entirely personal?

Happy Socializing y'all!