With businesses finding it harder and harder to reach their audience on Facebook due to recent algorithm changes that favour paid advertising, Instagram is becoming the preferred place for many businesses to connect with their fans and followers.
While Facebook remains the preferred platform for people to connect with their friends and social groups, Instagram is where people are more likely to be engaging with the brands and businesses that they love.
So, here are a few of our brilliant tips for getting people lovin’ your Insta feed and building your following on Instagram…
- Beautify Your Grid:
People will spend just a few short seconds on your profile to determine whether or not they want to follow you. This is usually based on the visual appeal of the first twelve pictures in your grid. This means that it’s not only important what each individual image looks like in isolation, but what your grid looks like as a whole gallery.
Top tips:
- Ensure that you are using a colour palette that is consistent with your brand.
- Try alternating the main colours used within the images on your grid by planning your layout before you post. (Apps like Planoloy and Later are great for curating your Insta gallery.
- You might also like to get some photos taken with a professional photographer to ensure that the images are of high quality. Make sure you give your photographer details of the type of images and colour scheme you are going for, and ensure your wardrobe reflects your brand!
- Engagement Trumps Followers: Spend less time being concerned with how many followers you have and more time focusing on engagement. These days in a world where people can pay for followers, try not to compare or set goals around how many followers it takes to have a successful Instagram account. It’s much more important to build relationships through the interactions that you have with your followers.
Top tips:
- Focus on per post engagement, rather than follower count.
- Use captivating captions to encourage engagement (see below)
- Get into a dialogue with your followers by taking the time to respond comments on your posts. It’s all about building relationships!
- Captivating Captions: It’s not as easy as posting a picture and hoping that people will comment and engage with your post based on the image alone. Give your content substance with captions that add value to your audience.
Top tips: Use a personal tone that speaks to your audience. Use “I” (or “we” in the case of brands) in your captions where possible. Be real and relatable. Remember it’s social media, not your Annual Report. Keep it a little casual and let it be sociable.
- Vary Your Content: It can be easy to get stuck in the mindset of sell, sell, sell, or perhaps do the opposite and forget to even promote the products or services you offer. We suggest using a mix of posts that fall into the following content categories:
- Entertaining or Inspiring – to generate engagement, so long that what you are posting aligns with your brand.
- Educational – To demonstrate that you are the leader in your field, to build trust and add value.
- Behind the Scenes – to show the real people and stories behind the business. People love stories! (Just keep it relevant – not everyone cares about the smashed avo you had for breakfast!)
- Sell – you can over-do it with selling, but don’t forget that your followers are obviously interested in what you have to offer, otherwise they wouldn’t be following you. Aim to remind them of how your products or services can be of service to them every four or five posts.
- Hashtag Funnels: Instagram has just launched the ability to follow hashtags, so it’s even more important to get this right. This concept is about picking a mix of hashtags that work together to increase your post appearing as one of the top posts within various hashtag searches you are targeting.
Top tip:
- Use a mix of hashtags with high and lower density (number of posts to them). The low-density hashtags should be specific to your niche and easy to generate likes. The high-density hashtags (with 1 million+ posts) will be the ones that are broader, but get you into the category you want to appear in (for example: #health). The likes coming from the lower density hashtags will help to boost your ranking in the high-density hashtags and will be valuable for reaching a broader target audience.
- Quality Over Quantity: There’s no need to post multiple times a day, or even daily for that matter. It’s much better to wait until you have content worthy of being shared than posting just for the sake of posting.
Top tip:
- We generally recommend posting about 3 – 5 times per week to keep consistency, but there are no hard and fast rules around this. Sometimes less is more if it means your audience can expect that when you do eventually post, they will want to hear what you have to say.
For a consultation or quote on how Brilliant Logic can assist with your social media strategy, please call us on 02 4324 6962 or email ksmall@brilliantlogic.com.au.