I've tried instagram for a week to observe how this tool could help grow my craft business. And I found out:
1) It's not necessary to be too "business-like" or "professional-looking".
You want to come off like a normal human being not a businessman. Just connect with people via comments or likes. Make neat comments to posts if you have something nice to say. You know, whenever you like a post, people see your name in their notifications, as long as they're not popular to a point that they get 100 likes in an hour.. Especially for folks who don't get as many as a hundred likes on their posts, when you liked their posts they might take a look at you.
2) Give other people comments.
When you comment on a post, other viewers could see your instagram username + profile picture - which could be your business name or logo. Free advertising! Of course don't come off as "Please visit my etsy site on blahblahblah."
3) If you want to reach your specific audience, you could do some homework investigating on tags.
Some people search posts of similar sort by clicking on tags. For example, somebody saw a very beautiful washi egg - and they want to see more eggs of this type. They would click on the tag that says #washieggs. For my crafts - I look up a list of egg related, or handmade craft related, or asian craft related tags. Especially if they're popular tags - there's more chance of being found.
For example, what I could do is, go and "like" the posts of asian crafts or egg crafts. Of course you might want to make good use of your profile picture as this is gonna help draw attention.
Here are some links that summarize popular tags:
http://www.tagsforlikes.com/
http://instagramtags.com/
http://top-hashtags.com/instagram/
Updates on Aug 4th - I experimented with the popular tags - added a long list of tags and see if it really works. What I found is - it DOES NOT help when you add like 20 hash tags. Some people think that it indicates you're desperate for likes. So - less is more!!!
4) In general, Instagram users like to see beautiful things.
So, on a daily basis, keep taking pics of beautiful things or special things that attract you. Apart from reaching out to your specific audience, you need some publicity - more followers. Instagram has a very instant nature - posts sink after a short while. IF you want your posts to reach more people, you need to keep the traffic coming and have people "like" your posts.
Updates on 4th August:
Just found a huffletonpost articles about drawing audience, which is pretty helpful:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/02/instagram-followers_n_5537524.html
Another article which suggests a pretty "extreme" method of attracting followers:
http://www.wikihow.com/Get-1k-Followers-on-Instagram
