53 followers. It’s not humiliating.
But it’s not Beyoncé.
When you’re a small marketing and web development firm, certain self-promotion takes a back seat. In our case, our Instagram account is in the way back.
The worst part is, we know what we’re doing wrong.
We don’t want you to end up like us, so here are some tips to make sure your Instagram account performs better than ours.
How can I improve my Instagram performance?
Be consistent.
The grid view in Instagram allows your visitors to see a snapshot of all of your recent posts. Because they’re all viewed at once, it’s important to be consistent. For me, a day that I don’t have to open Photoshop is a good day, but photo composition is important in this platform, so it’s worth a little extra behind-the-scenes work to crop photos as necessary. Consistency with colors, filters, and fonts not only helps, but really makes a difference.
Elevate Yoga & Wellness does a great job of being consistent through color tone, photo composition, and font choice:
Up your content game.
Post quotes and videos every once in a while to mix up your content and help convey your brand’s personality. Quotes stand out from other types of photos and videos can really grab a visitor’s attention; use a video to tell a story about your company by taking the viewer behind the scenes at your office or a conference.
For consistency, use text and background colors (or images) that coincide with your photos. Most importantly, make sure the quotes and videos appeal to your audience. Weight Watchers probably isn’t posting any Jim Gaffigan quotes, like “Even the frying of bacon sounds like applause,” but a respectable diner might.
Spring for targeted ads.
As with any free social media platform, it seems strange to spend money on a post. But a paid Instagram Ad can draw in at least some of the 500 million daily users. The ads are so precise, you can target your posts directly at people who might relate to your brand and find their way to the “Follow” button. Coco and Eve use their ads to drop in an offer code, which makes the image (and, thus, the account) much more interesting:
Tag others who are more popular than you.
Generate traffic to your account by tagging your posts with other brand names or people’s names. The tagged account will receive a notification, which will drive them to your account. Tagging others also increases the chance that their followers will see your profile. The more influential the account, the better. Beyoncé is probably a safe place to start.
Here are some specific reasons why our account’s not doing so hot:
Our bio is blah.
“Inbound Marketing, Design/Development, and Brand Identity in Syracuse, NY.” Bor-Ring. Sure, you know what we do, but do you get any sense of how funny we are? No. And that’s not good for any of us because we’re really funny.
There isn’t much space to work with, but your bio basically acts as your homepage, so it should have more to it. Include a CTA right in your bio—something to entice your followers to click or engage with you or your brand.
Even our friends don’t like us.
A handful of our collective friends follow our Face First Creative account and view our posts often, but they’re not hitting “like.” As if it’s so hard. I mean, what’s not to like about this, HANNAH?
We don’t do giveaways.
We’re all for charitable contributions, but we’re not in the business of just giving away websites. But maybe we’d design a logo for a good cause. Or give away a t-shirt. Well, not for free, but for your best “Face First Friday” contribution.
In fact, yes, let’s do that. Browse our #FaceFirstFriday posts to get the gist and tag Face First Creative in a post using the same hashtag. The theme is Father’s Day and the deadline is Friday, June 15th. We’ll pick our favorite and hook you up with a t-shirt.
We’d go with Mother’s Day, but you should use what little time you have left to get shopping. We’re going to use that time to work on our bio.
