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A Blogger’s Guide to Building Your Instagram: Part 1

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A Blogger’s Guide to Building Your Instagram: Part 1

I can’t tell you how excited I am to share today’s post. I’ll admit I’m kind of a social media nerd. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise seeing as it was my job (I’m a former community manager.) Hands down my favorite platform is Instagram, whether it’s for work a brand, for my personal account or for the blog.

I’ve been a user personally since 2011 but it wasn’t until just this year I decided to make an account for my blog. I kick myself for waiting so long. See I had always written it off as a blogger because the difficulty with click throughs and attribution (more on that and how to work around it in Part 2) but what I didn’t realize (until recently) is how fantastic a tool it is for building your brand and exposing your blog to new audiences.

Using the following strategies I was able to grow my Instagram following from around 200 followers in February to almost 3,800 today. Many of these tips also helped me grow the @drinkbai account from 1,900 to over 13,700 followers. I was originally going to keep this all to one post but once I realized I had over 2500 words and 12+ tips I knew I had to break it into two pieces. (Stay tuned next week for part 2)

Create and Share Great Content

First things first, a great Instagram is nothing without great photos. That means turning off your damn flash (especially when you’re taking food pictures… please) wiping your lens, finding good lighting and while you’re at it stop using the Instagram filters. Want to take your images from good to great?  Some of my favorite apps for editing and creating great images include:

For Awesome filters: VSCO Cam

If you’re not already using it, download ASAP – their filters and editing tools take your photos to the next level.

For Powerful Editing Tools: Snapseed & Afterlight

Both these apps have powerful editing tools that can help make your photo pop.

Go-to adjustments: Brighten, boost contrast (no more than 30%), adjust the color temperature, boost saturation (no more than 20%), add subtle fade, sharpen (very subtlety)

For Adding Text: Piction

I like this for a couple reasons, it’s simple and easy to use and it has some fantastic fonts.

For Final Touches: Pic Tap Go

This is my favorite app for adding final touches and adding a frame to all my photos before I import into Instagram.

Apps

Develop Your “Look” and “Voice”

I can easily identify some of my favorite ‘grammers’ photos without even looking at their handles. Why? They have a distinct look to their photos and voice in their captions. Maybe you’re known for your bright and vibrant food pics or maybe you have these light and airy shots that have a special morning light, maybe it’s the hilarious food puns or the inspirational quotes every morning. Whatever your thing is, find it and rock it. People will notice and come back for more.

Take Advantage of Your Bio

Your bio is often the first impression a user will get of your account. It’s a great way to let people know about what you post and who you are. You can either keep it short and sweet or take advantage of the real estate to let others know where they can contact you or how to get more content from you. Because links in Instagram aren’t clickable, aside from your Bio Link use it to your advantage. If you have a post you want others to read, use that space to promote it.

bio

Post Consistently

In addition to having great pictures, building your engagement means being active and consistent. I’m sure there will be bloggers who might disagree, but in my humble opinion, I believe that great bloggers’ Instagram accounts are much more than just sharing their newest post. People love seeing behind the scenes, pieces of your daily life and sneak peeks of what you’re working on.

Posting consistently will make a BIG difference when you’re trying to build your following and especially engagement. I went from posting twice a week to 1-2x per day and saw a big difference in my engagement rate. I went from an average of 20 likes per picture to anywhere from 300-550 likes and around 20+ comments per photo.

Be Generous With Your Likes & Comments

Hands down one of the biggest ways I grew the amount of engagement on my page was being generous with how much I engaged with others. I call it #InstaKarma. “Instagram with others the way you’d like to be Instagram’d with.” Pretty sure that’s what Confucius would have wanted.

If you’re fun, friendly, supportive and genuine with the people you follow AND even accounts you don’t follow, people will reciprocate. Instagram is just WAY more fun when you’re generous with your support.  Yup, it takes time, but it’s 100% worth it. I have a growing handful of Insta-friends whose accounts inspire me, make me laugh, think and often drool on my phone and I’m not afraid to tell them.I don’t like looking at it as a competition, to me it’s a collaborative creative environment. This is your chance to built others up. Finally when people show you love don’t forget to thank them!

Be careful though, Instagram limits users to 400 actions a day. I know that sounds like a lot but if you’re not careful you could me marked as a spammer if you go on a random liking/following binge.

Use (the right) Hashtags

I cannot emphasize enough how important using the RIGHT hashtags are for increasing your engagement. It takes a little testing, but find the hashtags that have an active community around them and get you the most engagement. Hashtags are a great way to connect users and communities to your photos even when they don’t follow you. Especially when you’re just staring out or have a smaller following, hashtags will help you get much more engagement on your posts.

Tip: to keep your photo caption clean, after you post your photo comment on your photo with all the hashtags you want use (you can use up to 30, I suggest taking advantage of that)

My favorite Foodie hashtags:

#eeeeeats #f52grams #droolclub #infatuation #nycFAT #missnewfoodie #cityfoodie #feedyoursoull #huffposttaste #getinmybelly #buzzfeedfood #foodvsco #ktchn #feedfeed #foodgawker

Vegan Hashtags:

(I’m not vegan I just love vegan food and eat a lot of it)

#vegan #whatveganseat #vegansofig #instavegan #vegetarian #veganfoodshare

Random but Awesome:

#MyMorningView #ThingsArrangedNeatly #vscocam #flatlay #abmlifeiscolorful #shotfromabove #darlingweekend

Looking for the best hashtags to use in your niche? Check out some of your favorite instagrammers and see what they’re using. There’s a good chance you’ll stumble onto something awesome.

Side note: you can now hashtag emojis. Cray right?

My Sneaky(awesome) Hashtag Secret

Did you know you can create keyboard shortcut for you iphone?

Go to settings>general>keyboard>shortcuts> then add in all the hashtags you want to use in a specific category and name them accordingly.

IMG_9694

Example: Whenever I type the word “igfooodie” it automatically completes with all of the hashtags I like using. I have probably about 10 different keywords that auto complete whether it’s fitness, food, vegan, health or photography related hashtags. This saves me so much time and hassle.

Interact with Your Favorite Hashtags

Ok, so you’ve been killin’ it with the hashtags but what to take it to the next level? Go to one of your favorite and engage with those photos and users. If you like a picture check out that user’s page. Like and comment on a couple of their photos, chances are they’ll return the favor. If not, it’s still good #instakarma.

Looking for more? You’ll love: The Blogger’s Guide to Instagram Photography

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Comments

  1. This is awesome Georgie! I have a list of new apps to download and I am definitely going to use that keyboard hashtag secret. Love it! Thanks so much for sharing all of your tips and secrets 🙂

  2. I love posts like this! It is always great to find new tools and tips to help build your brand. I find also that it is all about experimenting too…You just got to throw it all out there and see what sticks and what doesn’t. I love that part too. Instagram is fun and I am definitely working on building my account. Looking forward to Part II.

    • I love reading, learning and sharing knowledge about building your blogging brand. Your twitter is hands down one of my favs <3 And I so agree, social media moves so fast that you really have to learn through doing.

  4. You’re an Insta Queen!! No…THE insta queen 🙂 These are awesome tips!! Especially the hashtag shortcut…. using that ASAP because typically Miguel is like “are you ready to go?” and I’m like “hold on I’m hashtagging” Wish I was kidding.

  5. This is a great post Georgie! I have definitely noticed your Instagram presence boom and you should be super proud of yourself. Really helpful tips for the rest of us 🙂 totally wish I was smart enough to make a “blog/business” Instagram and a “personal” Instagram but oh well… I’m just the little honey bee for all things in my life! haha Have a great start to your week

  8. This is an amazing post! I still have so much to learn about building a following and I really want to make instagram a priority this year. These tips are suppppper helpful. Can’t wait for the next segment!

    • I personally find it the easiest platform to keep up with (because you can actually see your whole feed)
      I certainly can’t speak for every brand, but as a community manager when we’re looking for bloggers Instagram is one of the first places we look!

  11. Thanks for this post! I’m impressed and encouraged by how quickly you grew your following on IG. Your “sneaky hashtag secret” to create a shortcut is genius! Never thought of that. Thanks again for sharing!

  13. Loves these tips, girl! You definitely have an amazing Insta presence, so thanks for sharing some secrets 🙂 That keyboard shortcut one is freaking amazing, because I literally need to carry around a little post it with my hashtags so I don’t forget any of them 😆

  17. Found your post through the fitfluential food group on facebook. I’d been dragging my feet on creating a seperate instagram for my blog from my personal instagram for so long and this was definitely the motivation/tips I needed. Thank you!!!

    • The biggest perk was that before when I would occasionally post about the blog on my personal account I felt weird, but now I feel comfortable posting consistently and I never feel bad that all my photos are food 😛

  18. I’m so happy you’re doing this, Georgie! Thanks for sharing. You are a social media badass. We can all learn so much from ya! 🙂 Ps, loving Vscocam .. it’s a game changer.

  19. This is SUPER helpful! The other day I was actually just trying to figure out which hashtags you’ve been using and then you go and list them all out here… perfect! 🙂 Do you have any tips about the timing of posts on Insta?

    Also, can you please do this type of post for Facebook as well? Actually, all of the major social media channels? I have so much to learn and you’ve got it down. Great post, Georgie!

    • Thanks Alex! My favorite way to find new hashtags is just to creep on some of my favorite accounts. You can SO get lost in the Insta-rabbit hole but I consider it “productive time wasting” 😉
      For timing I’ve found before 9am, noon, 5pm and 8/9pm (basically around meal/break times) the most effective, but check out this site called iconosquare which will show you your best performing posts and you can get a little nerdy and record which times get the most engagement.

  20. Fabulous tips, Georgie! I agree that I love to see an Instagram account that has a consistent look, even if the subject matter is different. Nice work growing your account as well as the Bai account! Have a fabulous evening! 🙂

  22. Great post! I’m slowly starting to hone in more on my brand and what I want it to be. Along with that is consistency with color schemes, fonts, and all that IG jazz 🙂 thanks!

    • Thanks Jess! Taking on the branding aspect of blogging is a big exciting job. I’ve found that tackling it once piece at a time (and occasionally corse correcting) helps me actually get it done. And yes consistency is key!

  23. GIRL YES – this is the BOMB! 🙂 Looking forward to part two next Monday for sure! IG is seriously my favorite these days.

  24. Ah awesome post! Thanks for sharing your fave apps and OMG saving hashtags is going to save me so much time! Do you find it difficult to have 2 instagram accounts (1 personal, 1 blog)? I found it difficult to log out and in so I just made my personal one bloggy but don’t spam it too much with graphics.

  25. Don’t forget how crucial it is to manage well your subscribers and subscriptions. I won’t even mention their ratio, i just wanna say that you ought to consider unfollowing anybody who don’t follow you back. My way to deal with them is fast-unfollow.com, 5000 unfollowings per day that they provide is enough for almost everyone including me. Stealing your competitors followers is a cornerstone of consistent growth, and it is the task once again executable for the service. In fact, I’d say the successful management can’t be done without multiple apps for statistics, automation and scheduling.

  26. LOVE this! I too am a social media manager and constantly trying to work to grow my clients’ following. I love the tip on adding the shortcuts with the hashtags – genius! Thanks so much for sharing these wonderful tips!

  30. This is so helpful. I struggle with IG a lot. I definitely have to post more often. Thank you for the # ideas.

  32. This is awesome! I love the way you share your tips to help other build their brand 🙂 Thank you!

  34. Wow, congrats on your success! I recently decided to start taking my Instagram seriously for my blog, and in the last 3 weeks or so I’ve gone from just 88 followers to 800. Pretty tiny numbers compared to you and many others, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Many of the strategies you’ve mentioned here I’ve use, but there are lots of new ones too I look forward to trying out. Thanks for all the info!

  35. I see you mention having several accounts for work, the blog, personal, etc… What are your thoughts on having just 1 account and using it for both, engaging those in my niche *and* following personal interests? I don’t seem to have time to manage multiple accounts so I condensed 4 brands into 1 account (but that account is specific to one of my blogs, so my content is isolated to that and not a mish-mash of all 4 niches).

    • The good (and bad) part of social media is there are no right answers. If you’re seeing success and growth from having 1 account for 4 brands and it’s working for you then don’t fix what ain’t broken. Personally I found it hard to share and engage as much as I needed when I had a personal and blog account in one, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only solution.

  36. Thank you so much for this insightful guide – I definitely agree with the be generous part now that I am trying to grow my account!
    And it’s ridiculously hard to get people to click through :S I get more clicks from twitter which I set on autopilot…

  37. Great tips!! Totally agree re the importance of Instagram. We’ve upped our following so much doing some of these things, and Bit.ly has been great to keep track of everything.

    Keep up the awesome work (and tips :P)

    Sarah and Laura xx

  38. I felt like my instagram was just kind of creeping along, then I took a real look at it. Would I follow me? Sadly, no! I deleted a ton of posts and worked really hard and creating a whole new feel of my account! Now those hashtag tips are going to save my life! Thanks girl!

  40. Hi Georgie! Thanks for the article. Will you please get out of my mind so I can work?) Anyway,you don’t need to have a hard time promoting account in such way. Undoubtedly, it’s a great foundation for promotion, but it lacks some apps, e.g. zengram.net and iconosquare.com. They really have an edge over others.

  42. Just starting out in the blogging world and your website has been instantly helpful! Even just the tip about the keyboard hashtag saver will be worth a million bucks. It’s amazing what you’ve been able to do with your blog, and in such a genuine way. Funnily enough, your instagram actually led me to your blog!

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