With over 500 million active daily users, 40 billion photos shared to date and 4.2 billion likes per day, Instagram has firmly established itself as one of the largest and fastest growing social media platforms on the market.
As so many people are now using this platform on a daily basis, your radio station could be missing out if you don’t have an Instagram profile! But it doesn’t stop there by just setting up a profile, you need to think about how you are going to engage with your station’s target audience and pull in some new listeners too.
Fortunately, we have some creative ways of doing this, ensuring you can seamlessly introduce Instagram into your existing radio station marketing plans and reach out to a whole new audience of potential listeners and followers:
Engage with the audience
One of the most important tactics to use is to actually engage with your followers, asking them questions and getting them involved in discussions. Depending on the type of radio station you operate, this could be anything from a political debate on the latest issues to uncover mass opinion through to asking how a band’s new album compares with some of the previous albums they have released.
Or you could tease the audience with a cut off or blurry image of a special guest who will be on a particular show that day. Alongside getting them to tune in to find out who the guest is and actually listen to them, you can also get the conversation going between followers as they attempt to work out who it is.
All social media users who take the time to follow a profile want to be excited and engage with the content that you are producing, so investing some creativity into what you put out there and getting the views of those all important followers is most certainly going to go down well.
Competition time
Instagram competitions are a great way to drum up interest in your profile and engage new users to grow your following.
When setting up a competition, first things first, you need to think about what your prize is going to be. As a radio station, perhaps this could be a meet and greet with a star, tickets to a gig, a behind the scenes tour or even a 2 minute slot on a show on the station. Choose a prize that is related to your station, your ethos and the people who listen; after all, nobody is going to enter if the prize is wildly different to what your station is all about.
Next up, you need to let your followers know what they need to do to enter. The great thing about Insta competitions is that you aren’t really that restricted on what you can get users to do, so spreading the word about the competition and your radio station becomes much easier.
Here are a few ideas of what you could get your followers to do:
- Comment to enter: Get your followers to comment on your competition post and tag a couple of their friends in to help spread the word organically to be in with a chance of winning the prize.
- Repost to enter: Quite simply, ask your followers to share the competition post with their own followers to enter.
- Photo entry: As a visual platform, why not get users to share a photo related to your competition or prize with a hashtag you have created to enter? You can then select a winner based on the best photo or story.
Finally, create your competition post. You need to ensure it immediately catches the eye, so use bold, bright colours, with the prize you are giving away being one of the most popular options. Think of hashtag to go with your competition and use the caption to explain how users can enter and any terms and conditions.
Show behind the scenes
The thing about radio is that you rarely get to see what the studio looks like or even what the hosts actually look like, so why not use Instagram to show a snapshot of what goes on behind the scenes and enable your listeners to put a face to the voice they hear on a daily basis?
Posting pics of the DJ’s on your channel, special guests that come in to the studio and the studio itself, or location of an outside broadcast if you’re heading out and about, can make your station more relatable and get the conversation going about whether they thought the person they were listening too every morning looked like that or not!
Get people to complete some form of action
As well as having an engaged Instagram audience, you need to take this opportunity to encourage them to do something extra; complete an action that allows you to market to them down a different avenue so you are always in their minds and email inboxes!
Some of the goals you might have as part of your radio station marketing strategy might include:
- Streaming the station
- Downloading a podcast
- Purchasing tickets to an event you have organised
You can then publish posts which encourage your already engaged and interested audience to complete the action you have in mind at that time, for instance:
- ‘Little Mix are headlining our ‘Party in the Park’ in June. Get your tickets here….
- Prime Minister Theresa May is in the studio at 6pm. Listen live….
- Miss our breakfast show this week? Download the podcast with best bits…..
As a broadcaster, it is incredibly important that you are always looking at new ways of engaging your audience, as well as pulling in new listeners too. Social media, and in particular Instagram, is a fantastic way to do this if you think creatively and get posting some interesting, insightful and engaging content.
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