Free Tips to optimise your Instagram and Brand

Smart Tagging. Tag your pictures with the people, brands, places etc that are in the photos. Tag both in the picture and in the text description of the photo. Tip: Be careful not to have very generic tags like #fashion #love etc as these tend to get shadowbanned (i.e. they’re not searchable or visible as they’re so over used) and always hashtag you profile name or your campaign tag. Tip: You can always search the quality of a tag before you use it to see what type of pictures are tagged with it and if they’re the type of pictures you want to associate with.

GeoTagging. Every photo should have a location/geo tag of your store (or other strategic location) as this will show up on maps and ultimately create many more connections to your photos and your profile. (to do this when posting just click, add location when composing)

Alt Text: Add a text description of your image that is not visible publicly but useful for Instagram to identify what is in your image and help it get seen by relevant people. To do this, click on advance settings while composing a new post and white the description of you image.

Bio: ensure you have relevant content in your bio description to make the most of any profile visitors. A link to your website, an address to your physical store etc, what you do etc. Tip: If you have multiple links you can use a service like linktree to incorporate them into one clean link in your bio. This can also be use to take payments, sales, make affiliates etc. Tip: Test out different bios to see what’s more effective for your profile

Collaborations. Try to collaborate with relevant influencers. For example you can invite a few bloggers to do some styling, review your products/services, take photos, do a small promotional video of the making of, or behind the scenes, etc. If you mutually share photos this is the best way to make big gains on your photos as both parties get traffic. Most importantly, they have to mention you on their posts. Tip Avoid big influencers based on large followers as they tend to have higher costs and instead find influencers with fewer followers and higher engagements per post.

Personal Shoppers/ interior designers / stylists. For product based brands (fashion, interiors etc) If you reach out so some of these types of influencers, there would be a mutual benefit of sharing posts as it mutually boosts each others profiles by overlapping each others audiences.

Affiliates and commissions: offer an affiliate program to influencers, personal shoppers, bloggers etc so there is a win win incentive to sell and promote your products.

Flatlays. Flatlay photos are great because you can tag many relevant profiles in one picture - a brand, a stylists, maybe a magazine or art piece, etc.

Call to actions. When writing the text for your posts, always try to include a question or call to action to prompt people to comment or share. For example “tag a friend who’d like this and we’ll give them 10% off” “Black chair or white chair, please vote” etc If you can create discussions and dialogue your ratings in peoples feeds will increase quite a bit. Tip: You can use your audience to get great feedback and data on what they like and what they dislike and use this information to influence what content, product, services etc you offer. For example you can get pre-orders before launching products.

Schedule and Automate Posts. Save time by scheduling up to 20 posts a month for free with Tailwind (use this link to get free credit) Tip: connect FB, Pinterest etc to double your impact. Dont forget to choose strategic times based on your market and audience for maximum impact.

Great pics. Your brand’s pictures have to be something people want to see and share. Statistically the 4 highest engagement subjects are 1-cute pictures ( puppies, kittens, babies etc) 2- humour, 3-DIY (how to educational and informative videos) and 4- seductive pics (beach bodies, bikinis, muscles etc) . Tip: You can use the pictures of other profiles such as an influencer, a magazine, a designer, an artists etc as long as you tag them and as long as they’re within the ethos of your profile/brand. This gets the bloggers attention and gives your profile a great picture that you can use. Just make sure the profile has a similar amount of users as you or they might not notice (i.e. re-gramming Jeremy Scotts picture is unlikely to get his attention but if you re-grammed a picture from a smaller influencer for example, you stand a higher chance of them noticing)

Great videos: videos allow you to get much more content per post and can be relayed to other social media platforms like FB, Tiktok etc. If you’re stuck for time to produce or edit great photos, outsource it to a cost effective freelancer on 5er.com

Live sessions/Stories: Live streaming Q&A sessions to directly engage and research feedback on ideas. Whether it’s designing a new service or product or based on existing ones. Tip: research in your insights when most of your followers are likely to be online and send out a post in advance notifying them.

Product drops: limited edition, exclusivity and good timing to release small batches of product. Good examples are Moncler, Genius, Supreme etc. This can also be applied to flash sales, product drops etc. Use the countdown badge to illustrate the timing.

Shop-able products direct through instagram. You will need to have a certain number of followers to be applicable for shop-able products (10K currently but this is likely to change) so if you don’t have enough, you can always purchase them via Insta-porter. Tip: Connect your FB store to enable shoppable products

Good Website: If you need a cost effective, easy to make, high quality website/estore, we can recommend Squarespace. Tip: Offset any carbon at your store’s checkout with Ecocart. Free to sigh up and able to integrate with many platforms. Tip: if you want to accept reoccuring payments (like Insta-Porter) we can recommend MoonClerk.