Written by: Tanner Sowa, Taylor Gale, Manimatana Lee, and Kenadee Hernandez
How do Instagram influencers do what they do? How do they create the following that they have? How do YOU get to where THEY are? These are questions that many people have. When we see an Influencer on our Instagram feed, we try and figure out what they have done, that we have not. Well, we have broken it down into 7 different things that Influencers do every day that make their content Influential and how you can apply it to your own account.
1. Newsfeed Posts
All About Insta
It’s all in the photos!! Instagram is a totally visual social media app. Instagram posts may of course, and typically do, include captions, but the whole point is to put photos on display. Your photos are what draw people to your account.
Know Your Photography!
First up: photos!! Influencers must educate themselves with some basic photography rules and photo composition! These teach what creates a good photo that will draw everyone’s attention. Lighting, depth and contrast are a great starter and foundation of knowledge to really boost your posts!
-Lighting is key!
Natural lighting makes your photo pop, while also still being relatable to your audience. When a photo is too overexposed it will sometimes seem fake or unauthentic to those viewing the post. Keeping it real with your followers always comes first.
-Add Depth
Depth creates more interesting and beautiful photos! Focus on having a subject in the foreground, and beautiful scenery in the background of your photos.
-Contrast, Contrast, Contrast!
Bright and vibrant colors against plain background really help your photos to POP! This can be a super effective way of driving more followers to your account!
Aesthetic
While you take your photos for your feed, it is important to keep your aesthetic in mind! Most influencers have a theme or aesthetic to their profile.
This is a wonderful example of an aesthetic! Lifeandstylebylex has a very clear and strong aesthetic! She utilizes colors like blue and orange to make her feed pop! Everything has unity and flow!
Aesthetic really draws people in! It is what makes your feed enticing and competitive with other influencers. When choosing your aesthetic, its important to be authentic and true to yourself! Choose something that you feel genuinely fits and represent you! Which leads to our last, and maybe most important pointer…
Be YOU!
Most important: be yourself!!! People are typically attracted to those whose posts feel “real”. This means that Instagram users are sometimes attracted to photos that aren’t completely polished.
Emma Nacewicz is famously known for just this on Instagram!
While many influencers will post their very best angle, Emma shows some of her most vulnerable angles to promote body positivity and inclusivity. While doing this, she continues to follow influencer standards. She follows an aesthetic and has a pretty pink and blue theme to most of her posts. In this post Emma talks about the importance of sharing your raw unfiltered self! A key point of being an influencer is relating to your audience and trying to find things that show them how they relate to you.
2. Instagram Stories
Although Instagram posts are influencers’ main source of sharing photos and content with their followers, what follows second is stories. Instagram stories are a super fun and easy way to share photos, tutorials, content, information, and so much more with your following.
After adding stories to Instagram, most have been ditching and leaving their Snapchats behind in the dust. There’s really no need to post or view stories on Snapchat when Instagram stories are so much more accessible. It’s so convenient having both posts and stories in one place. Instagram stories appear directly at the top of everyone’s feed, and sometimes throughout the feed as you scroll through posts! They instantly call your followers attention.
It’s important to first of all have a profile picture that fits the aesthetic and brand you’re going for, while also calling your followers attention. Instagram stories are so much fun to use and really allow a lot of room for interaction with your online community and also creativity.
Pros of Stories
When posting on your normal feed, although fun and exciting, sometimes it can be restricting when you are trying to match each photo to a super-specific color scheme or pattern. While using stories, you have much more freedom! The photos and videos you post will not appear directly on your feed! Stories are a wonderful opportunity to really connect to those that follow you. Polls, questions, and quizzes can be put into your stories easily and these allow your followers to respond directly to you in easy and low-risk ways.
Mimi Bascom is one of many influencers who utilizes these awesome features in her stories! In the first screenshot on the left of the screen, Mimi asks her followers if they watched a cartoon series! Below, followers have the option to respond “yes” or “what is that”. Story viewers are so much more likely to interact with posts and stories when all that’s needed is a simple click of a button! Off to the right, Mimi asks her followers for suggestions of what she should ask for for Christmas. Anyone can respond by simply clicking the box below and responding with ideas! This is another great way to connect and interact with your Instagram community!!
Vulnerability Offers Connection!!
Stories also offer the opportunity for you to be more vulnerable and show those that follow you that you’re a normal human being just like them. Stories make for an awesome opportunity to host a live stream as well. This allows you to speak openly with your audience about whatever you’d like, while the people watching can add comments and reactions. This further will build the bond between you and those you are influencing!
When you make a new post, you’re also able to post and share that to your story to draw more attention to the content you’re putting out. This can be super useful. Sometimes with Instagram’s algorithm, posts can get lost within a person’s feed. Now, with stories, when you post, you can indicate to your followers you’ve just made a new post and that they should go check it out.
Making Your Stories Match Your Feed!
While Instagram stories don’t necessarily need to fit the exact theme or color scheme of your posts, you can create highlights of your favorite stories and these will remain at the top of your account. You decide what you want the cover to be on your highlight. A pro influencer tip is to make sure all the covers of your story highlights have continuity.
Taryn Newton displays a wonderful example of just this! All of her Instagram highlights (the little bubble in the middle of the photo) have the same color, print, and general design on them. This is a wonderful example of how to keep your stories creative, while also flowing perfectly with your feed!
Here’s a template of different story highlight icons that are super aesthetically pleasing and will instantly boost the look of your account!
3. Analytics
A part of becoming an influencer means using analytics to track your progress. What exactly are analytics? Analytics are the numbers; the followers, the engagement rate, the impressions, etc. These are the pieces to another side of Instagram that people usually don’t know about or use. Every good influencer will create goals just as any business professional would. The best goals are measurable! This means you need a way to measure your progress! This is best done through analytics, or in other words, the numbers.
How do you track these numbers though? The first step you need to take is to change your Instagram account to a business or creator profile. This is super easy and simple! All you have to do is go to your settings, then click the account button, and at the very bottom of the page, it should say switch to a professional account! This gives you access to see a whole new side of Instagram and to see all the numbers. You can see your engagement levels and at what percentage they have increased or decreased! You can even see new followers and people who have unfollowed you. Click on the link here to see just how easy it is to make your account a public business profile!
Analytics Are More Than Just Increasing Your Followers
One thing we all notice about Influencers’ is their followers, but what makes an Influencer actually influential in their level of engagement on the posts. They have high likes, comments, and impressions (or people seeing the post). They don’t just have bots following them, but actual people who enjoy what they post. So yes, knowing your followers is good, but if you want to be influential, you need to know your engagement rates.
Engagement rates are how influencers know what to post on their feed, they can see what people have interacted with the most and then they change their methods to better interact with their audience. In this screen capture from an Instagram account run by our team, you can see Profile Visits and Impressions from the past week, which you can continue to track to see how your posts are performing. Impressions are important because they show you how many times your post was seen by people. The more impressions you have, the more times your post was seen and the more opportunities people have to engage with it.
As we learned all this for ourselves, we wanted to try it out on an account to see how
impactful it was. So for 1 month, we posted everyday at what times we thought would be good
for our followers, we varied it a bit to see what happened and we averaged 283 likes per post,
which was good.
Then we looked at the analytics and used the times when we saw most of our followers were on and liking our posts, and then posted at those times for a month. When comparing the two months side by side, we were shocked by the results. We saw that our followers had increased to 430 average likes, now with just a month, gaining an average of 200 likes per post is very substantial. This came from using no hashtags, or any other varied item or using anything to further promote the posts. All we changed was the times.
Through studying analytics, you can see what your audience likes, then try things that seem to work and run tests. Testing is the most important part of analytics and setting goals. Analytics help you see what you can test, and tests help you improve your content successfully. This is what can happen by knowing your audience through simple analytics.
Planning Ahead
While Instagram analytics is a great resource to have, there is also a whole world of analytic tools you can use to help you track and better know what these numbers mean for you. A great and free tool to use is Facebook Creator Studio! This is a tool that allows you to schedule your posts ahead of time and also see the basic analytics on your page. It only keeps track of the analytics for one week.
Another great tool is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a scheduling platform that allows you to create your posts in advance and schedule them to be posted later. As incredible as that is, they track your analytics as well and more in-depth than Instagram and Creator Studio do, and they hold on to more than a week’s worth of data. They also allow you to compare data over a period of time which helps you better see if your game plan is working correctly. Hootsuite has a free option but to get key results and get all they have to offer, they require you to pay a monthly subscription. Another great tool is Keyhole. This company has branded themselves as a “conversation tracker” they track the keywords, and the hashtags used, to see over time what is bringing more SEO and foot traffic to your account!
There are many tools that people have created some more including:
● Buffer
● Later
● Coschedule
● Agroapulse
● Tailwind
If there are more you think we should go into detail, leave a comment at the bottom of
the article!
4. Captions
Instagram is one of the most visual social media platforms out there. The photos first capture your attention, and then the caption brings everything together. Without a caption, you are usually left with questions or you don’t get the full story. But by successfully using captions you can improve your impressions and engagement rate rapidly. More so than if you change your pictures. Let’s break this down though!
Why Are Captions So Vital?
Captions tell a story, they show you the before, after, and why of the photo you are displaying on Instagram. Have you ever looked at a photo on Instagram and thought “why is this person posting this?” then read the caption and it all comes together? That’s what makes the captions important. It tells a story. It compels the audience to engage with the image, which makes your post more desirable. A great example of why captions are important are Giveaways! We all love a good Instagram giveaway, but you wouldn’t know it was a giveaway or how to enter without the caption underneath the photo! This is just the first part of why captions are important!
Algorithms
Captions are important because Instagram runs on an algorithm, which controls what posts you see and when you see them. Just like any algorithm, it filters through words. An algorithm can look through words to find words that someone may like based on other posts they have liked with similar tags.
This is why hashtags are so effective on social media and why people use them. If someone tags something with a few different hashtags and the Instagram algorithm sees that you have liked pictures before with the same hashtags, Instagram will assume you will like that photo as well so it brings it more towards the beginning of your feed, so you can see what you like first.
Your Brand, Your Voice
Another reason why the words are so important is to create your brand voice. People like people. It’s as simple as that. We follow those people who we like to hear from, not those who annoy us. People also like when people are genuine when they feel like you can get to know the real you and not some persona that you have created. That comes in through your words. A great example of this is Wendy’s twitter profile. Wendy’s has created a voice for themselves that is more than just advertising their products. They interact with Twitter like a normal person.
People enjoy this because they seem human, not like a robot trying to sell you a cheeseburger. Check out some of their examples of brand voice here. By creating your voice, you create how people perceive you to be in real life, so they can picture you and read the caption in a voice they think is yours as they read it. Making sure your captions match your photo in a way that matches what messages your audience wants to hear from you is how you create a strong following of people. It’s not always about the words, but how they sound in your reader’s mind. Create your voice!
5. Aesthetic
Nowadays, every Influencer is achieving an attractive look on their Instagram page to gain more followers. They provide a consistent feed that delivers an aesthetic look, known as an Instagram theme. There are so many themes that an individual can choose from, such as the line in the middle theme, row theme, tiles theme, a single color theme, and so much more. You can easily find more by searching for it on Google or Pinterest for inspiration.
Now, we want to focus primarily on a specific Instagram account that follows an aesthetic Instagram theme to show you how it is done. Meet @manimatana:
As you can see, Manimatana follows a multiple color theme, but all of the colors are quite similar to one another. Look closely at her “highlights” story. Instagram deletes everyone’s Instagram story after 24 hours, so make sure you save your important stories to the Instagram highlight reel. For those who don’t know what an Instagram “highlight” is, it is for any users to add their current Instagram story into the saved highlights located on their profile for anyone to look at it after 24 hours.
Here is an example of how to add your Instagram story to your profile Highlights:
Now, take a close look at Manimatana’s Instagram highlight, and
notice that she has a few colors selected. They are orange, brown,
beige, and yellow. Then, as you scroll down on her Instagram
content, her filters that are used on her photos are very similar to
the highlight cover colors, right? This creates aesthetic content!
Finding Your Aesthetic
When looking at Manimatana’s content, you notice that it draws attention to your eyes because of how satisfying and aesthetic it looks. You want to find an aesthetic that matches you and your personal brand. Here is an activity to help you: create a mood board filled with colors and pictures that are aesthetically pleasing to you personally, this is easily done by making a Pinterest board with photos you like! And then choose some of the colors you seem to like in those photos that are similar to one another, and use those as your base colors. When you choose your colors, make sure they go well together and look pleasing to the eye so that they can help you keep a consistent aesthetic of content on Instagram.
After you figure out your color theme, you need to think about who your target audience is. What do you want to focus on and deliver to your audience?
Let’s look at Manimatana’s Instagram content again. You notice that in her description box, she writes “BEAUTY & FASHION”. This means that in her content creation, she focuses on creating beauty and fashion content. You can see that by looking through all her photos with the outfit of the days and detailed pictures of clothing items or jewelry items.
Looking Ahead
Next, you want to plan out your Instagram feed. You must always think about what is your next move so you can gain more followers, likes, and engagements. This is when finding inspiration comes into play. If you need inspiration, there is nothing wrong with checking out other influencer’s work! It is highly suggested to do your research because this will inspire you to create new content. Don’t copy others, and always make sure you give credit to and ask permission from the original creator if you mention or highlight their work.
As mentioned earlier, for your next move you could use a program called Hootsuite. It is a program generated online to help anyone schedule their posts days, weeks, or months ahead. This tool is easy to use and you should take advantage of this tool!
6. Engaging with the Audience
The largest part of what makes one an influencer is the impact they have on influencing their community to make purchasing decisions or swaying people to a new idea. “Instagram ranks #1 for the most important and impactful channel” and “89% say ROI (return on investment) from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels” link. This is all the more reason to showcase your skills on this platform because many companies are looking for the perfect influencer to attract potential buyers, and that could be you!
You can impact your audience in many ways but below are listed steps that will help you get there and questions to ask yourself:
1. Who is your audience?
2. What content in the past, has engaged them the most? If this is your first time, what on other
bloggers’ posts has attracted their people more than other posts they do?
3. Create engaging content (based on what was mentioned above)
4. Use hashtags. This makes your post connect to more people that otherwise would never see your post in any other way because they follow certain hashtags already. It also allows the post to pop up on their search page because it is already relative to the content they follow.
5. Create stories with polls or questions so your audience feels more connected to you. This also allows you to get more information about your audience, so you know how to engage with them more about what they want to see.
6. Have a clear call to action. (i.e. “Check out my weekly vlog and subscribe to my channel on YouTube”, “Go visit the link in my bio to get 20% off”, etc.)
(Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash)
Engage With Your Followers
Once these steps are completed and you start to grow a consistent community, you will need to continue and follow these steps. However, this community that you’ve created will open another great opportunity that is retaining. You can do this by engaging with your followers such as:
· Send them direct messages replying to their
comments or replies to your stories
· Feature them in your stories wearing the product you are promoting
· Set up “meet-ups” where your local followers can come meet you and see you in real life.
All of these examples are ways to truly connect with your people which is the ultimate point. If you can remember that as the goal you will be on a great road to success in having a strong Instagram community.
7. Partnering with Others
If you are wanting to make being an influencer your actual job, you will need to attract companies to you and present yourself in a way that they see you as an asset that will help them reach the demographic you can.
For companies that have 270k followers on Instagram, they will typically expect their influencers or people they collaborate with to have a following of 40k followers with a 2-4% engagement rate. You must have a higher amount of followers that you have attracted to your page. This allows companies to have confidence that you have marketing skills and strategy in your posts. It is also important you have a good engagement rate because you need to prove you didn’t just purchase your followers or that you have now become irrelevant to your audience. You need to show that your followers are active with you and what you have to share.
Lastly, Engagement is important because it shows your skills in connecting with people and it brings them together. The ideal company is wanting you to connect with people using emotion and driving them to want to purchase the desired item or product because your community trusts you.
Photo by Georgia de Lotz
https://unsplash.com/s/photos/instagram-engagement
Contracts and Collaborations
Some companies only do collaborations and it’s typically a one-time thing where you receive the company’s product and then create an advertisement or review on that product for your followers. Collaborations are sometimes paid, or other times just paid with the product. That means, if they are sending their product to you for free, that is your payment. If a collaboration gains a positive return on investment (ROI), then companies will have a greater desire to work with you because you benefit them. You typically then will have an opportunity to enter into a contract with companies. This is when you become an influencer!
Influencers typically enter into contracts with companies where they are required to post a certain amount of posts and are paid as well, along with receiving free products. These contracts are more tricky to get into because companies want solid influencers and have complete trust you will be an asset or their brand. To gain the trust of a company won’t happen instantly. It is important that you are patient and consistently reaching out to new companies seeing if they have any collaborations available. As well as producing well thought out and quality content for brands you are already collaborating with and wanting to permanently work with.
(Photo By Kelly Sikkema)
https://unsplash.com/photos/LNlzd-Y7orw
Err on the Side of Caution
Make sure to be careful with which company you collaborate with or enter into a contract with. Some companies do not want to pay influencers what they are worth so they will promise flashy deals and opportunities. If it feels too good to be true, look into it more. Hire a lawyer to scrub through the terms and agreements of your contract with you so there are not any loopholes for the company to get out of paying you.
Make sure you are connecting with ethical companies. It would not look good for you to promote a company that has a reputation for scandals or unethical behavior. If you are unsure about a company, ask around and find out all the information you can. Don’t be afraid to reach out to their former influencers as well! You can find this by going to see who has tagged them frequently in their posts.
(Photo by Joe Roberts)
https://unsplash.com/photos/7aGbdAhEbKg
Be Genuine
Lastly, don’t try to sell your followers on something you aren’t sold on of yourself. This breaks trust with your followers when they are sacrificing their limited funds on something you say is a “cure-all” when it really turns out to be a flop. It is okay to reject companies that you simply don’t like or agree with their product. Make sure you are interacting with them as well, to produce great things to share with the community you have built.
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