An Instagram feed is all too often used as a sort of photo dump by many people. When you are selective and create feeds designed to attract your ideal follower, your selectiveness itself can become a powerful strategy. We’ll just touch on the basics here, with particular emphasis on tactics unique or especially important to Instagram.
Number one on the list, which I’m sure you’ve heard before, is making sure that the images you use are stunning and eye-catching. What you need to do with them is halt people in their tracks, so as they’re scanning that particular day’s Instagram posts, they want to break off scanning and take an in-depth look at yours.
For this, you need in each photograph:
- A powerful subject
- A lack of distracting or irrelevant background elements
- Clarity
- Rich color or (with B&W or sepia photographs) contrast
- An out-of-the-box, creative approach
- A clear topic
In other words, you need professional quality photographs: But it’s more than just the images themselves. Your photos and videos need a high excitement factor. They need to do one or more of the following:
- Inspire
- Trigger emotion
- Allow people to put themselves in the photo
- Incite empathy
- Please or shock
You’ll get the best and most targeted response if you use your images with popular and relevant tags and hashtags. Instagram is one of the rare social networks where you can combine attracting the right audience or pleasing a broad new audience through viral, popular content, since Instagram is far more lenient about multiple hashtags than Twitter or Facebook.
You can up the share-ability factor by using one of Instagram’s lesser-known features, geo-tagging—even if you’re in a non-urban area, since all this means is that you can set your camera to record the latitude and longitude of each location you photograph. You can then share that location via Instagram with your photograph.
Even photographs themselves don’t always have to be static, single photographs; you can use videos, or present your photos as a process or share a collage.
Don’t just target feeds to potential clients, however: Also aim for fellow experts in your field and top influencers. Do that, and you can organically attract their audience base too—especially if you use their popular hashtags, since what you really want to aim for is growing your fan base.
