7 Things to Know
How do Instagram profiles, influencers, and posts find success? How do you create a following? How do you get to having influential posts and a loyal audience? Here are 7 tips successful Instagrammers use when creating content every day.
1. Grab Attention
Instagram is a visual social media app. Scroll stopping and eye catching posts are what grab viewers attention and create interest in your brand’s profile. Interesting photography, graphics, or videos are a great place to start. Bright colors, contrasting colors, lighting, and depth make images beautiful.
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. When choosing your aesthetic, it’s important to be authentic and true to yourself. Choose something that you feel genuinely fits and represents you! Remember in all of your content, be you! People are typically attracted to those whose posts feel “real”. A key point of being an “Instagrammer” is relating to your audience and trying to find things that show them how they relate to you.
2. Utilize Stories & Reels
Although Instagram posts are Instagrammers main source of sharing photos and content with their followers, what follows second is stories and reels. Instagram stories and reels are a super fun and easy way to share photos, tutorials, content, information, and interact 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 much more accessible. Polls, questions, and quick videos allow for a much more interactive post. It’s so convenient having both posts and stories in one place. Instagram stories appear directly at the top of everyone’s feed.
They instantly call your followers’ attention.
Reels also are very nicely integrated into grid posts, feeds, and in the Instagram navigation. Reels are also being heavily pushed by instagram to be seen, with some gaining rapid viral, views almost immediately. This creates a perfect place to create content.
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 direct them there.
While Instagram stories don’t necessarily need to fit the exact theme or color scheme of your posts, they need to fit the brand that you are creating. A beauty blogger sharing cooking tips may not be what the audience is looking for or wanting.
3. Learn From Analytics
What exactly are analytics? Analytics are the numbers taken from a social media account: the followers, the engagement rate, the impressions, etc. Just like a business professional would create a plan, social media success comes from set goals. The best goals are measurable! This means you need a way to measure your progress! This is best done through analytics.
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!
Making this small change will allow you to have access to your Instagram analytics and be able to set different goals depending on the areas you’d like to focus effort and growth on.
While we all notice successful accounts’ followers, what makes an Influencer actually influential is 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 important, 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. Through studying analytics, you can see what your audience likes, and 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.
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. Some of these third-party tools are Facebook Creator Studio, HootSuite, Keyhole, Buffer, Later, Coschedule, and Tailwind.
4. Show Your Voice With Captions
Instagram is one of the most visual social media platforms out there, with photos that capture attention and really bring you right into the world of someone you don’t actually know.. 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. Imagine this. You are look at an amazing travel photo of someone laying on the beach in Thailand…they only post the photo. But you as the viewer want to know where they are, how they got there, where the swimsuit is from, who’s taking the photo. Adding a caption gives you the golden key to guide your viewers to ask those questions that create a community. 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!
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!
Your Brand, Your Voice
Words are important 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. We like when others 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 their audience like a normal person. Their audience enjoys this because they bring humor and realness, 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. Be Identifiable
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! Choose some of the colors you 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? Plan ahead with posts and make sure that the content goes well together, fits your brand message, and is visually pleasing. Without seeing your name, your followers should be able to identify your content and know the brand’s identity.
6. Interact 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. Have a clear call to action when you are pointing your followers to buy or act. (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.) Once you start to grow a consistent community, you will need to retain what you have.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. Expand Your Brand
If you are wanting to make Instagram your 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. 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 brand wants you to connect with people using emotion and drive them to purchase the desired item or product because your community trusts you.
Don’t try to sell your followers on something you aren’t sold on yourself. This breaks trust with your followers when they are trusting your content 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. Make sure you are building a brand that has a clear message and clear identity. Any partnership should match your brand and audience, creating a nice experience for both you, the brand, and your followers.
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