The Do's and Don'ts of Instagram (1)
It's no big secret, I am all kinds of obsessed with Instagram, and have been since 2012, ever since I downloaded it onto my old iPod touch while living in Logroño, Spain. Those were the days!
But once I moved back home and tried to get my life into ship shape by working for a year and building my blog to the point that it could be my full-time job, I realized I need to get serious about social media.
While I toy around with Facebook and Twitter because they were, well, obligatory, I wholeheartedly gave up on Google + in favor of Instagram. Instagram is awesome. It's simple. It's pretty pictures. Google +, well, I'm not even big enough of a geek to hop on that bandwagon. 3.5 years ago I threw a good portion of my effort into building my profile and audience on Instagram, and I'm sure glad I did. Not only is Instagram one of the fastest growing social networks (source), it's also one of the biggest. If you're going to focus on building a following on one network, consider Instagram. December 2014 was massive for Instagram. First they announced on their blog that there are now more than 300 million active monthly users. Holy cow, is that big! It's actually bigger than Twitter so if you were looking for a sign to tell you to get cracking on sharing photos, now's it. Personally, I also got extremely lucky and Forbes mentioned me this week as a travel Instagrammer to watch in 2015. What what! So now I have a legitimate reason to spend more time on my favorite app and less tweeting. Phew!
Then shit hit the fan this morning.
#InstagramRapture
Over the years I've managed to somehow end up with over 100,000 followers! I remember when I had 34,000 and lost 2,000 of them overnight. Crap.
In the same announcement sharing that Instagram reached the 300 million milestone and they would roll out verified accounts, they also casually let us know they would be eliminating bot and fake accounts that violated their T's and C's. Fair enough.
As everyone waited with bated breath for the hammer stroke to fall, virtually excited to see who had been buying followers all these years, I think many of us were in for a rude awakening when we woke up to see that almost everyone lost followers!
No!!!!!!! Though I've never bought followers I figure my loss was related to the fact that I've been featured a lot on big profiles and in articles online, so not everyone following me was legit. Then I saw people like Kim K, Justin Bieber and even the official Instagram itself lost millions in the purge, so I started to feel better.
Anywho, where was I?
Now more than ever Instagram has become more and more relevant, whether you are a blogger, a business or just someone who likes sharing pictures.
Sometimes my current followers haven't felt like a lot because I know people and follow accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, or even in the millions. But I do often get asked how I've managed to get so many followers, so I thought I would share some ideas. I have also been very observant with Instagram trends over the past three years and have paid attention and taken an active role in building my following. It didn't just happen, I made it happen. I've also been part of several Instagram campaigns with brands and business around the world and have learned a lot through those experiences. I've shared my experiences in talks and webinars, and also in Travel Blog Success. Of course, this is what's worked for me and what matches my values and ethics. Other people feel differently, as is to be expected.
I've asked my friend Melissa Findley, a talented photographer and Instagrammer from Australia to chime in with some tips and ideas as well. She's done lots of Instagram projects, has great experience and has worked with some of the best in the business, not to mention her Instagram feed will make you want to hop on a plane somewhere beautiful immediately. Everyone has different things that have worked for them and what haven't. I'm just sharing my experience here. So here are my best do's and don'ts for Instagram. 1. Don't – post crappy photos I'll just start off bright and bold. Nobody wants to see your crappy photos. Not even Martha Stewart can get away with it. One of the best (and probably the worst) things about the internet is that people can AND will say what they think with little regard to your self-esteem. Listen.
Does that mean you have to be a top photographer? Definitely not. I don't consider myself to be a professional photographer by any means even though I sell my photos sometimes. That being said what I do do, and what you can do it is work on improving and taking better pictures all the time, which I enjoy.
Now every time I go out and shoot, I ask myself, how can I make this even better?
Does that mean you have to use a “proper” camera for Instagram? Nope, definitely not.
There are some very successful iPhone-only accounts out there that fits with their profile's style and theme. That's what matters. You have to figure out what works best for you. But if you want to boost your follower count, you need to post your best shots, I mean your BEST shots. That also means editing and fixing your pictures before posting.
Seriously, quality over quantity really matters on Instagram.
Straighten your horizon. Play with the brightness. Don't put those annoying white borders up. And for the love of god, don't use Instagram's filters. Or watermarks.
My go-to apps are Snapseed, Pro HDR and Mextures. They rock. Melissa also uses Snapseed andVSCOcam.
2. Do – focus on engagement not follower numbers
Though I was bummed to see my follower number drop a bit during the Instagram purge, especially because I was hoping to reach 40K by the new year, the reality is that I actually don't really care that much. I've spent the past year working on improving the number of likes and comments I get on my photos and bringing the average level of engagement up and up. Seriously, I was stuck on 800 likes a photo for over 6 months. It was frustrating as hell. This is actually the hardest thing you can do on Instagram. It's really difficult to keep your engagement level the same over a long period of time, let alone increase it. You see this a lot with people who become featured Instagram users. They'll gain like 10,000 followers in a week, their engagement will shoot through the roof, and then it will drop again back to where it was a month later. I think this is where many of the bots come in, and while I wasn't a featured user, Instagram did share one of my photos on their profile and blog two years ago bringing me a 5 thousand new followers in 24 hours. This means you have to get people talking, get them to care. Ask a question, post a funny joke as the caption.
Post an image that makes people think or question something.
3. Don't – be spammy Be real. Be authentic. Be you. And do not ask people to follow you back, for the love of god.
You have to be genuine on Instagram to be successful. Go look and interact with people who have similar interests as you and if they are interested in you, they will follow you back organically. This also means you can't have too much “activity” in too short a period of time or Instagram will think you're a bot (a fake profile that is automatically liking people's stuff) and you risk getting banned. Instagram seriously cracks down on this type of behavior.
Nobody likes spammers, and remember, people want to be amused, not solicited.
4. Do – be consistent
Melissa agreed with me on this one too, it's really important to be consistent on Instagram. Don't go long periods of time without posting anything and then post 10 photos in a row. Actually, now that I mention it, never posts photos in a row, space them out at least 3 hours in between if you can. I try to post 3 photos a day, and I rarely go a day with out posting if I can help it.
I've used scheduling services before when I was offline in Mongolia but in general, I don't think they are worth the money or the risk. This also means posting at optimal times. Don't share your best shot when your followers are all asleep. You can use Iconosquare to see your optimal posting times.
If you are trying to take your Instagram to the next level in terms of work and building a brand, then it's also really important to have consistency in the types and style of your images. Your style can and will likely change and evolve over the years, but it's important to not be too random or erratic, otherwise you will have a very divided following. Your feed itself should look consistent and beautiful, with colors and style. When people click on your profile when deciding whether or not to follow you back, they will look at your feed as a whole first before clicking on individual images, they need to look good. You have about 2 seconds to convert them into followers – make it count!
And of course that means not selling out and posting really random ads in your feed that don't fit your brand because you were paid to. 5. Don't – play games People love to “game” social media and it really, really bothers me. Why put all that time and energy in tricking the numbers when you could be creating really good content that will stand on its own and do well? Priorities people!
Don't do the follow/unfollow game – it's so obvious when people do it because they follow thousands and thousands of people then periodically go through and unfollow whoever doesn't follow them back. What a waste of time!
Though I follow way too many people at the moment, most of them are cat profiles. Cat profiles are the best.
The same people will go through and like 50 of my photos and not follow me. Um, thanks? That's not how it works guys. Another popular way people trick the system on Instagram is by buying a bot that will auto-like heaps of photos for you on specific hashtags. That is one really good way to get your account banned, and again it's very obvious when a high profile person who doesn't follow me starts to like everything that I use a certain hashtag on. Doing that will get you followers but they are people who are not going to stick around and engage with you in the long run or they are fake profiles.
Of course the biggest game of them all is buying followers but look how that turned out. Just be real guys and put that time and money into building a really awesome profile.
6. Do – be an authority
I've talked about this with blogging before too. I firmly believe that to be really successful at Instagram or travel blogging, you need to be an authority on something. And travel is way way way too vague. Everyone and their mother is an authority on travel. Be more specific. Have a niche.
One of my niches is New Zealand travel. I've been here over a year and I post a hell of a lot of New Zealand photos. While I don't have a NZ specific account, I've spent a year building my profile to be an authority on New Zealand, and I've made sure that if people are interested in coming here, they find me.
