With a community of over 300 million active monthly users, Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms with high engagements, and yet is still a very untapped territory for most businesses. But like approaching any social media platform it is important to do a bit of research and then create a strategy before jumping right in.

Make sure to check out the official Instagram Business blog for more tips and examples of how other brands are using the platform for inspiration. For example, here are some successful ideas that popular brands all have in common as they post on Instagram:

• Laid Back Posting: Unlike Facebook and especially Twitter, you do not need to post on Instagram multiple times a day and sometimes not even every day, depending on your audience. You do not want to aggravate your followers by saturating their feed with only pictures from your brand, which may cause them to unfollow you.
• Real pictures: When taking pictures, they make sure that the pictures that they share are of real things and look like they are taken by real people. For Instagram users it is more important for your picture to look real than professional.
• Adding context to their pictures: If you are trying to sell a product, take a picture of it being used in a real life situation. For example, instead of sharing a picture of a dress on a mannequin, take a picture of a girl wearing the dress while out having coffee with friends.
• Hashtag Heaven:  Instagram is all about the hashtag! Find hashtags to piggyback on that fit well with your strategy. Such as, a pizza restaurant would want to jump in on the #FanReviewFriday or #ThrowbackThursday hashtags to increase their exposure and following.

All of these ideas are of course just my own findings as I work with the social media platforms daily. Feel free to email me if you had any thoughts on how you successfully have been able to use Instagram for business. Cheers!

Peggy Hiemer is one of the content team managers at Apple Pie Design. Follow her team on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.