Hi there!
One of my main goals for 2018 is to put a decent chunk of time into fine tuning my Instagram and also into improving my photography! I’m not too worried about gaming Insta’s algorithm since it changes every other day, but I am focusing on cleaning up my feed and basically making it prettier to look at 🙂
I’ve drawn together a couple pointers that I’ve found useful; I hope they can help you out as well!
- Color Theme
A visually pleasing arrangement will draw way more followers than a jumbled mess will. Even if the pictures look great individually, if they don’t mesh together your feed will look messy and forgettable.
If you’re finding it hard to pick a theme or have trouble staying within a single color scheme, you can always play with the undertones of your photos to easily tie them together. Most photo editing apps and Instagram itself have great tools to tweak the tint of the shadows and highlights of your photo.
Changing up the tint of your photos is an easy and fast way to create a theme out of otherwise unrelated photos. I’ve been going with pastel pink and blue tones lately, as you can see in my recent posts.
- Clean Up Your Captions
Making a break between any hashtags and your caption will encourage followers to actually want read through the post, because no one wants to read through a bunch of confusing hashtags to pick a few words. You can also use a few relevant emojis between your caption and hashtags to break things up; this is the route I usually take.
- Unique Hashtags
Try to use a unique hashtag instead of the very first one that pops into your head. If your picture is unique and stands out, even just a bit, this will work so much better for you than some common as dirt tag that’s going to be buried in seconds in a flood of newer photos. For example, if you’re posting some rose gold nail art, #rosegold is going to be buried in seconds but #rosegoldnails or #rosegoldnailart has a better chance of more people seeing it. Also if you’re specific with your tags you’re more likely to be stumbled upon by people in your niche that might also turn into longtime followers.
- Collaborate
You can reach out to accounts similar to your theme or brand and arrange collaborations to showcase each other’s work. If you have similar images their audience will likely want to follow you too! I personally like this route better than an ad, because you know exactly who is going to see your shared post because you know exactly when and where it’s going to be.
- Hand The Reins To The Pros
If you want to go a bit more hardcore, there are tons of social media optimization services that can help do the heavy lifting and give you specialized pitches on how to promote your pages. I would recommend this for full-time bloggers or maybe business owners that want to spend more time focusing on their products and delegate social media work to someone else. LSEO does some great work in this area, they reached out to me to help bring this post to life and after digging around their site they seem to really know their stuff!
Do you have any tips you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear them~