Another popular place you can find photos of your business, products and services is Instagram. Instagram is the most well-known photo sharing network online right now. Moreover, one of their most popular things that its users share is food.
To find the posts that were about your business, there are a couple of places you can look.
Instagram is known as a social network but also has a very mature search system. Their search mechanisms are broken down in 3 main types of searches:
- Users
- Tags
- Locations
There’s also one more method of search where you can search by keyword (it’s my little secret) and I will show you how to do that too.
The first type of search and probably the search that will show you the most amount of posts about your business is your business location. Sometimes, your business can’t be found on Instagram so I will first explain why your business can’t be found on Instagram.
Instagram locations are based off of Facebook’s data. If you have a Facebook page with an address attached to it, you will most likely be able to find your Instagram location as well. If you don’t have a Facebook page with an address attached to it, you might have trouble finding your Instagram location as it doesn’t exist in Facebook’s data yet.
The only reason why you might be able to find your location even if you don’t have a Facebook page with your address attached to it is because one of your customers or visitors could have created your Instagram location for you.
We live in a world where the web is in its 2nd version. The main difference between web 1.0 and web 2.0 is that in web 2.0, anyone can submit their content to the web. You basically don’t have to be a verified publisher like Rolling Stone or New York Times in order to publish content.
With that, anyone can submit an Instagram location to Instagram or Facebook and Facebook/Isntagram will take it seriously because the user is basically saying that they have visited your location and they have a picture to prove it.
In order to find your Instagram location, go to Instagram and type your business name + city into the search bar.
As you type your business name and city into the search bar, search results will start popping up in a dropdown just under the search bar. If you can find your location (usually it will have your address
If you found your locaiton, go ahead and click on it. You will be taken to your location page with photos that your customers have posted about your business.
If you didn’t end up finding your location, you probably need to create your Facebook Page and attach a location to it.
Tags
The next type of search you can do is to search by tag. Originally tags were called hashtags because you use the # symbol in your post caption to categorize it and add it as a part of the group of hashtags.
The hashtag that has the highest chance of having your content is your business name or your business name and city. For example, Taqueria Las Vegas should search #taquerialasvegas or #taquerialasvegasmilpitas in order to find content that their customers have posted about them.
When searching for #taquerialasveags, this is what I find:
It looks like they have a hashtag for their brand and hashtag for each of their 2 locations. If you find multiple hashtags that you want to check out and verify that they are about your business, you can right click on each one (assuming you are on a desktop) and open each link in a new tab.
After reviewing the first hashtag which is #taquerialasvegas, I found that not every piece of content is content about the business Taqueria Las Vegas. Some of the photos were about another business:
Make sure you check your hashtag pages and look through to see if there is content about your business.
When checking the other hashtags which had the city name attached to them (#taquerialasvegasmilpitas and #taquerialasvegasfremont), I found that all of the content on both of these Tag pages were about each respective business. Notice how when the hashtags get more specific, you have a higher chance of being relevant to that specific topic.
The last type of search you can use is searching for users. This type of search won’t nearly help you as much as the other types of searches because it would be rare for a specific user to post content only about your business. Usually, people would post about your business at most once per visit. However, they also add a location and a tag so you would have already found it in the previous 2 types of searches.
