I think I would be quite embarrassed of myself if I would know the exact amount of time I spend on Instagram ( I know I can get that data but I live happier not knowing!), but it would be even worst if I would count the amount of this time I spend comparing myself/my business to others.
We are all spending a lot of time on it instagram. Most of the business owners that I know are spending their time and energies on it: selling and coming up with ideas to show their product. And I also know most of them are struggling for the same reasons that I do: keep a flawless feed and engaging content and get your ideal customer to buy from you.
One thing I also have learned and I try to apply on a daily basis is to use social media in a healthy way. It can be a great source of inspiration, however if you are feeling a bit down or vulnearable, those inspiring accounts will make you feel like real loser. What I recommend is to close the app, go outside to the real world and realised that life it is more than scrolling down the screen.
Remember, advices are other people's experiences!
So once you are in a better place in your mind, you can apply these tips and tricks I am going to share with you to make your instagram business page look like you have always dreamed!
YOUR VISUALS
The most asked question...how do I keep my feed consistent?
- Planning a content shoot: capturing the pictures you think suits best your brand and your products. I would recommend you to start collecting ideas and references on Pinterest to get a better idea of how you want your business to look like ( more to come on this topic on the next post).
After the shoot, you will have more than one picture that you would like to show to your instagram community. Don't use them all continuously, one after the other. Hold on and spread them. It will add consistency through the feed because it will be the same shoot meaning same light, same tones, same model...
- Establish a colour palette: this can be an intentional choice or something you will come up organically after your shoot. Some people use filters to keep all consistent. As a personal opinion, I am not a big fan of filters, I edit my own pictures with different apps but I try to keep them quite natural. Also, I am a bit tired of seeing all these accounts that have this brownish look, it all starts to look a bit the same and killing originality. I think the key is to find your style and colour in a more organic way and you feel comfortable with, you don't want it to be a hassle every time you plan your content.
Below you will see an example of creation of a colour palette I did for one of my clients. We had as a reference her logotype so we already had some idea of which tones will work. Then I analysed which others would work best for her having into consideration which type of account she has and which content she will be sharing ( if is a service account, a product account, etc).
So if you need a bit of help with that I am here if you need advise :)
- Alternate crumped pictures with more spacious ones: maybe the shoot pictures you created are quite busy (with lots of elements in the background) so it is good to combine them with a less busy picture. You can even use quote pictures ( use Canva to create them, it is great and have infinite choices and free!), or other pictures where the element is placed in the middle and you have room around it or for example, a landscape picture where most of the picture is sky.
- Keep the beautiful pictures on your feed, leave the funny not that beautiful ones for stories.
It is important to have strong visuals and sometimes a selfie it isn't the best one to share on it even if you look cute on it. (I am not telling you to not post selfies, just making you aware that your ideal costumer will be looking at your account and you want them to buy your product, not your face). You can use those pictures you aren't 100% sure but you want to share it on Stories and keep them on the highlights after if you really like that cute selfie of you.
- Curated your highlights on your profile: creating different covers for your highlights can help to keep the colour palette that you want.
- If you want to post a video, create a nice cover for it to keep your feed consistent. Again, you can use this one as the less crumped picture and use a background that goes with your colour palette.
Also, the apps I use to organise my images are "My Colour Story" and to create basically every visual "Canva", both free and easy to use. There are so many others but these 2 are the ones that I use and frankly I am happy just using those.
Hope this information has been useful for you! This is a learning process for me, so every advice that I think can be useful I will share it here for you :)
