7 Instagram Features Every Tech Company Should Use for Organic Growth

From a photo-sharing app to a powerful business platform, Instagram has billions of monthly active users. If you are a tech company looking to organically grow your brand and connect with your current and potential customers, you must leverage key Instagram features.

Leveraging Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories have become one of the most popular Instagram features, with more than 500 million daily active users. Tech companies should take advantage of Stories’ engaging and ephemeral content capabilities in the following ways:

Humanizing Your Brand

Stories will allow brands to show company culture and give a glimpse of products and services. By 2024, 69% of Gen Z consumers expect brands to use Instagram Stories to humanize themselves. Posting candid videos, photos, and Boomerangs of team events, office spaces, or product development lets tech audiences feel like they know the people behind your company.

Teasing New Product Releases

You can use the weeks leading up to a product launch to build excitement with cryptic photos, videos and captions on Stories. Pre-release, time-limited quizzes and polls are great for generating buzz.

Driving Traffic with Swipe-Up Links

You can add links in Stories that followers can swipe up to visit. This can be a traffic driver for blogs, product pages, app downloads and so on for tech companies.

Leveraging Instagram Posts

Stories disappear after 24 hours, but Instagram posts are forever. If tech businesses want to shape their image over time, they can craft high-quality, branded posts. Combining this effort with strategies to achieve organic Instagram growth with Path Social can significantly expand reach.

Product Specific Hashtags

When you use unique hashtags for each product, service, or brand campaign, it’s a lot easier for interested users to find your content. Leading tech brand Dell uses unique hashtags like #DellAtCES and #DoGreatThings to organize posts for different events, products and initiatives. This helps segment audiences and inspires users to follow hashtags that are relevant to them.

Showcase Customer Success Stories

User-generated content in the form of customer reviews, testimonials and success stories makes excellent Instagram post material. 48% of consumers say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions because it provides authentic peer perspectives. Tech brands can repost customer content or work with brand ambassadors to develop inspiring success stories.

Behind-the-Scenes Product Videos

Short-form video performs exceptionally well on Instagram feeds. Tech brands can leverage this by developing 15-60 second first look, time-lapse or tutorial videos to showcase new products before launch. 

Instagram Live to Connect with Customers

The live video broadcasting feature of Instagram Live allows brands to connect with audiences in real-time. Tech companies can use live streams to:

Demo New Products

Live product demos give tech brands a platform to showcase offerings in action and field real-time questions from audiences. 82% of consumers said livestreams with product demos increased their perception of a brand’s authenticity and transparency.

Host Q&As

Live Q&As let followers ask product development teams, engineers, founders or influencers questions to humanize your brand and build trust. Offering live troubleshooting for customers to resolve issues makes for excellent brand goodwill.

Capture User-Generated Content

You can download live videos to reuse as content on other channels. Create giveaways, challenges or activities for audiences to participate in live, then compile user submissions into compilation videos to publish later. This is a cost-effective tactic that uses your audience to create content and social proof for your brand.

Instagram Shop to Drive Ecommerce Sales

Instagram Shop lets businesses tag products for sale on posts and Stories for a truly streamlined shopping experience. Key features tech brands can leverage include:

Product Showcases

The shopping experience is more seamless for audiences when you use real Instagram content to showcase what you sell. Often, tech products need detailed visuals and demos to be evaluated. With Instagram Shop, you can now turn existing posts into living catalogs that are optimized for sales conversions.

Shoppable Stories

With shoppable Instagram Stories, followers can now purchase products featured in your disappearing content. Simply tag a product, add a price sticker and checkout link. It’s an easy way to capitalize on the spontaneity of Stories. 

Drops Feature

Instagram’s Drops feature allows brands to create limited-time shopping events with exclusive early access for select followers. This builds demand for new product launches within existing brand communities. On average, Drops result in a 20% increase in purchases of promoted products for tech companies.

Instagram Reels to Compete with TikTok

Instagram Reels enables you to create fun 15-30-second multi-clip videos enhanced with audio, effects and creative editing. It’s the ideal channel for tech brands to:

Demo Products Playfully

Reels allow you to get creative with quick-cut transitions and music to make product demos more engaging..

Engage With Trending Audio

Using trending sounds and music helps your Reels stand out better on the browse page, allowing you to capitalize on viral moments. Tech smart home company Anker gained over 100,000 views on a Reel featuring the viral ‘Woman’ audio clip. Timely references like this help you stay culturally relevant.

Recycle Top Content

Repurposing existing high-performing content into Reels can give it new life. Re-editing it as quick cuts for Reels can double view counts for tech brands, whether it’s a popular YouTube review or social media testimonial. It can also reduce production costs and show UGC.

Instagram Analytics for Optimization

Get data and insights around the content performance of a post on Instagram with Instagram Analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t. Tech companies can leverage analytics to:

Identify Best Performing Content

In fact, image posts are 180% more engaging for tech brands on Instagram than video posts. Analytics can help companies figure out the ideal frequency, length and format of content that they should be posting to keep growing.

Benchmark Against Competitors

Review competitor hashtags and follower growth rates to motivate and inform your content strategy. Seeing which formats and topics work well in your industry helps tech brands iterate quickly to outperform rivals.

Measure ROI on Efforts

Track website clicks, email signups and sales through links in your bio and shoppable posts to monitor your Instagram ROI. These critical conversion metrics justify time and budget investments to leadership. With measurable growth and sales impact, companies invest 23% more in Instagram marketing annually.

Key Takeaways

Instagram is the ideal channel for tech brands to engage consumers, nurture communities and drive growth. By leveraging features like Reels and Shop, tech companies can showcase products, promote launches and sell directly to over 2 billion active users. By humanizing company culture through Stories and repurposing top content, brands can forge authentic relationships with current and future customers through tactics like that. It’s essential to create captivating visual content, but it’s equally important to measure your analytics and performance. The brands that are seeing the most Instagram success spend 28% more time tracking ROI and iteratively improving their content strategies based on data insights.