According to eMarketer’s 2016 Instagram statistics, 48.8% of brands use Instagram and that’s predicted to increase to 70.7% in 2017.

So, what is Instagram and how does it benefit your funeral home and the families you serve?

It’s a free social media platform for sharing photos and videos. It helps your funeral home build trusting relationships with your client families and community and show that you’re down-to-earth.

In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the basics of using Instagram and share ideas for content to post.

Basics of Using Instagram

With Instagram, you’re able to post photos, videos, and stories. Stories are photos or short video clips that are viewable for 24 hours after posting them. You’re also able to post multiple photos in one post, add filters to photos, and include captions and hashtags with your posts.

Note, you need to upload photos or videos from an Apple iOS, Android, or Windows mobile device. You’re allowed to view your Instagram account on a computer, but you can’t post any updates from it. This makes it a handy mobile app for sharing updates during your funeral home’s events or programs.

By creating an Instagram business profile, your funeral home has access to additional features such as Insights. It lets you see your impressions (number of viewers), reach (unique viewers), and engagement (interaction with your content). This tells you who’s viewing your posts and how they’re engaging with it, whether through likes, comments, or other engagement.

You need to connect to your Facebook account in order to create a business profile and use Insights. Then, it’s easy to share content between the platforms and use the same advertising strategy for promoting posts and creating ads.

Business profiles also give you a contact button and get directions, call, and email features for your contact information. Also, write a brief one- to two-sentence description of your funeral home and include your funeral home’s website link. Your funeral home’s logo makes a great profile photo, and your profile name should be your funeral home’s name and your username something similar.

Who to Follow

Other Instagram users can follow your funeral home’s page and you can follow other accounts, as well. Some useful accounts to follow are funeral professionals, community businesses, local hospice centers and animal shelters, client families, grief quote accounts, and other thought leaders. You don’t have to follow everyone who follows your funeral home’s page. This would only clutter your Instagram feed (where posts appear) with unnecessary content.

What Content to Post

When it comes to posts, here are a few suggestions of photos and videos to share:

• Funeral flower arrangements
• Memorial gifts and keepsakes
• Photo display ideas for personalized funerals
• Your funeral home’s newly updated lobby
• Monthly employee features with brief descriptions about them
• Grief quotes or short grief poems
• Videos from community events and programs

For stories, some ideas of content to share are short videos or photos from your funeral home’s community events, educational seminars, grief programs, holiday remembrance programs, luncheons, and other occasions. There’s also the live video feature where you can live-stream an event or educational seminar so that those who can’t attend can still be a part of it. Just make sure to let your followers know in advance when you’ll be live streaming.

Depending on the topic of your post, some hashtag examples are #SympathyFlowers, #FuneralHome, #FuneralDirector, and #GriefQuotes. While capitalization doesn’t matter with hashtags, you can capitalize the first letter of each word to make them easier to read. Just be sure not to use spaces between each word.

Keep in mind that hashtags are for users to find photos or videos about topics they’re interested in, so be sure to only use hashtags that are relevant.

Follow us on Instagram to see behind the scenes at the Frazer Consultants office and learn more about what we have to offer!