How to Get Started on Instagram
I recently started to to dabble with Instagram, just putting my proverbial toe in the water to see how it works. I admit to not fully understanding yet how to add all the funky graphics, music and other animations to my posts or story but I am trying to post consistently (daily) in an effort to get started.
Within a month I received my first concrete lead, which has converted in a new contract! Not bad. It was a wee bit by fluke, I think, or a case of being in the right place at the right time. I’ll tell you how it happened a bit further down.
Behind every great Instagram account is a solid product offering and it is the substance of this offering that will be the framework up which you build your Instagram account. Instagram will sit somewhere within your marketing strategy, depending on your goals, your brand and your customers. Your Instagram account will contribute to the overall picture of your marketing plan.
There are a few basic rules to creating a great Instagram account (I’m still learning them!) and I thought I would share some of them with you here.
1 Take a Strategic Approach:
Set yourself some goals for Instagram (what is the purpose of your account- drive traffic to your site/make sales?), optimise your profile, ensure your brand messaging is strong and your visual identity is designed with creative flair and intent and know your brand’s tone of voice.
2 Create great content!
Like your blog, your YouTube or your LinkedIn account, the quality of your content will define your success on that platform. A perfectly devised strategy is pointless without the content to roll it out. The volume of high-quality content determines your reach and influence on Instagram. After all, Instagram is all about content. There are several types of content on Instagram:
Image posts
Videos
Image/Video collections
Instagram Stories
In this post I am going to write about Image posts and the captions that can accompany them. I will get to the other content-types in subsequent blogs.
Image Posts on Instagram
Let’s be clear - the better the image, the better your post will perform on Instagram. Thankfully in 2021, mobile phones make it easy for anyone to take a good photograph. However, I always recommend to my clients to get some professional photography done for their website as this gives them a library of images that they can also use on social media. A lot of Instagrammers will have a combination of both, especially given that Instagram audiences like to see candid shots as well as pro-shoot photography. It gives us a better insight into who you are and what you do. There are also a whole host of free apps available to improve your own photography. They do some of the post-production work for you and can serve to jazz up your feed. Popular examples are Snapseed, Layout and Over.
Making your images look good
There are many free resources for creating instagram templates for your visuals - although sometimes a photograph alone is more than sufficient. My advice would be to ensure you are consistent with your branding, using your visual identity or style bible as you design your posts. You should have a selection of fonts, a colour palette and perhaps a selection of logos, sub-logos or patterns that you use on all your marketing collateral. If you don’t have a visual identity for your business or if you need help creating templates, please get in touch.
Posts with more than one picture
You can post up to 10 pictures at the same time for one post. This is good if you wish to showcase a particular product under different angles or if you are showing different shots of people at the same event.
Using video
I haven’t yet tried any video on any social media platform because I know how important it is for the video to be of top quality to be effective. Most people are watching instagram with their phone on silent anyway, so it would want to be super-compelling for them to turn up their volume button or reach for their AirPods. That said, you can add text to your video to give context and explain what you are saying. You can add bullet points or subtitles if you wish. If you do decide to use video, practice talking directly to the camera, speak more slowly than you usually would, smile and try to act naturally! It’s easier said than done. I know some really good media trainers, so if you’d like to get some training on how to create really good video, let me know.
Using Captions on Instagram
When I got started on ‘insta’, I was surprised to notice that instagram posts are now accompanied by often very long paragraphs of text, called captions - almost like a mini blog post. I thought Instagram was all about images and photographs, but apparently not! The caption is the most important part of your Instagram post, even though it is not as prominent as your image. Captions are the Instagram equivalent of a tweet on Twitter, except that you cannot post a caption on Instagram without an accompanying image. You can focus on these captions as the main way to communicate with your audience. There’s a 2,200 character limit, which is about 400 words - that’s a lot!
So, what to write in these captions? All feed posts (as opposed to stories - I’ll get to that), have space for a caption. Here are some ways you can use your captions:
add content to your image
add humour
ask a question
tell a story
offer a discount
provide a call to action (CTA)
tag and mention other Instagram accounts
The caption is also the place to tie in your brand’s tome of voice, creating a deeper connection with your audience and how they understand your brand. The challenge is to work out what resonates best with your audience and what compels them to take action.
Using long captions
Great imagery is what is going to make someone scrolling on your instagram feed stop and pay attention. But it is the caption that can be the main impetus for engagement with you. That’s why instagrammers use long captions, to tell a story, to give more information, to keep people thinking about you and what you do. Long captions also give you the opportunity to add your personality to a post, to explain why the image is important to you, its relevance to you - and your audience. Here are some ideas for caption content:
tell the story behind the image
ask for feedback on the image
provide some inspiring thought to accompany the image, to provoke your audience
share a quote, poem or maybe the lyrics of a song that go with the image
give an insight into your day, your process, your life
Formatting your captions
You will have noticed that hashtags usually go at the bottom of captions in Instagram. There are some other best practices that maximise your captions:
Break up the text into paragraphs
Use emojis instead of bullet points
Tag other people and locations
Ask for comments and feedback below your post, to get engagement started
include a call to action
Having a sentence followed by several returns on your keyboard before additional information or your hashtags is a popular to create space and give the eye time to ‘breathe’
Keep the tone consistent with your brand tone, even if you are using humour
Hashtags
Hashtags are important on Instagram too. They help the algorithm to categorise content and help you be more easily found. They help you acquire new followers in your niche. You can learn more about the basics of Instagram hashtags here. Using trending hashtags are an opportunity for you to be topical and up to date ( a bit like trending hashtags on Twitter - often the same hashtags are trending on both platforms #100daysofwalking #blm etc). Search for trending hashtags and add your opinion on the same topic, engage in conversations on other people’s posts using that hashtag, as long as the topic or hashtags align with your brand. If you start engaging with hashtags that are not relevant you risk confusing your audience and diluting your brand.
Tagging other people Instagram
On Instagram you have the option of tagging other accounts and locations. Location-tagging adds information to a post about that particular geographical place so that anyone who searches for that location will more likely come across your post. Locations often display prominently on Instagram posts and is particularly important if your business is location-specific (ie you own a shop in a particular town, for example, or you are a coach in a particular city).
Tagging existing customers, your team members or other people involved in your business makes them part of your message and this can increase your credibility. If you tag someone, your image will show up on their profile under ‘tagged pictures’. They can then share your story on their own feed, thus maximising your reach.
SO HOW DOES INSTAGRAM RELATE TO YOUR WEBSITE?
Regardless of the size of your Instagram following, the true power of the platform isn't optimised until you bring at least some of those users to your website. So, how do you do that?
Include a link to your site in your profile. Your Instagram bio should always contain a link to your site or to the particular page that you want to send users to. You can link to your homepage or to a particular sales or product page. You will notice that a lot of captions include ‘see link in my bio’ as a way to get users to click on it. You cannot include a link directly within a caption. Some Instagram users use an app called Linktree to create a link in the bio to page that offers multiple links to pages on your website, rather than just one. You can create your own Linktree page on your Squarespace website by creating a page in your not-linked section, adding buttons which link to different pages and adding some custom code to hide your header and footer on that page (so it looks like a Linktree page). For more info on how to set this up, get in touch.
Use the in-built Instagram analytics. The built-in tool, Instagram Insights, enables you to easily get lots of information about your audience such as when they are online and which of your links got the most clicks
When you reach the holy grail of 10,000 followers on Instagram, you can use the ‘swipe up’ feature on Instagram stories to direct users towards your site.
So, how did I get my lead from Instagram? Someone had posted on their story (blog on Insta stories to come!) that they were looking for a female, independent web designer. I simply responded ‘me!’ The poster followed up with a DM (direct message) and she put me in touch with one of her clients who had just had an appalling 8-month experience with another web designer and she was starting all over again. We set up a consultation call and I am getting started on her new membership site in February!
Incidentally, I was reading another blog post about Instagram recently which was saying that DMs are where the magic happens on Instagram - it certainly worked for me in this instance!
If you’d like to follow me on instagram, I’d be really happy! Click on the button below and I’ll see you there!
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