Create a scroll stopping Instagram Feed
What makes a great Instagram feed? If you are ever scrolling through your home feed, take a minute to really pay attention to the accounts that make your stop scrolling. What do they have in common? Chances are it’s some of the following. Great Instagram feeds don’t happen by accident. It takes careful planning and work to create an impactful and memorable feed.
- Quality Images:
Instagram is a visual platform. This is what make it great. It isn’t cluttered with ads and text. It just photographs and video. The platform is designed for photography and photo sharing. It is a platform for viewing images. If you are wanting to truly benefit from Instagram, it makes sense to carefully cultivate and create your feed. Every image you post should be of high quality. This doesn’t necessary mean that you need to only use professional photography. If you are serious about growing an audience and business on Instagram, you would benefit from hiring a professional to take some high quality images that you can use in your feed. You can also use your phone but you must be sure that you are creating and posting visually appealing images. Things to consider: composition, lighting, balance, color, clarity, etc. You want a clean clear, crisp image. Be creative. If you are taking photos with your camera phone, consider the angle, the background clutter, and lighting. If your image is less than ideal. Use a photo editing app to clean up your image. Adjust the contrast and exposure, add a filter, play around with the color schemes, clean up stray marks or blemishes. There are literally hundreds of apps that you can use to edit your images. One of my favorites is Adobe’s Lightroom. Android iPhone
Be selective with your photos. If you have a 100 photos from your recent vacation choose a few, edit them, and then use them in your feed. Quality over quantity always.
- Consistent theme and style:
Ideally, you want anyone that visits your feed to have a very clear understanding of what your brand and account is about. Since Instagram is primarily a visual platform, your audience will get their first impression from your feed and the content that you post. Let’s take a minute to really think about that. What is your primary service, product, or attribute? Your feed should reflect that quickly. What service or product are you primarily offering to your followers? If your account and business are related to high end shoes and apparel, it wouldn’t make much sense to a viewer to see random images of your pet unless you pet was showcasing your products.Instagram is a highly effective platform for many reasons. One of its greatest features is that is is visually engaging. It’s a continous stream of visual content. Your goal is to create a feed that is visually enticing to your viewer. One way to provide consistency, create a brand essence, and attract viewers to follow you is by creating uniformity in your content focus and in how your feed looks. Your feed creates your visual voice as a brand. When you have a visually appealing feed, people are more likely to like your photos and follow your account. Here are some options for creating a consistent and visually appealing feed:* Choose a theme that fits your brand’s personality: grunge, dark, moody, mysterious, bright and colorful, minimal, stylish, tropical, etc.
* Use a consistent filter and stick to it.
* Coordinate a color palette using 2-3 colors consistently.* Use a border for all of your photos.
* Use a consistent background or color.
You want to spend some time planning out your feed. One great tool to help you plan out your posts and visualize how they work together is Planoly. You can visually plan, manage, and schedule your posts in this app.
3. Tell a story: Use your posts and images to visually tell a story. Let your viewers know your past, present, and future through your posts. What do you stand for? What is your mission? What are your current projects? Is there a cause that you are currently working with? All of these things can help cultivate a visual idea of who you are as a brand. Consistency in your content reinforces your brand voice. With millions of viewers on Instagram, you have to tell people who you are and the way to do that is through creative visual storytelling. In addition to having a visual voice, consider your captions. Use your captions as an extension of the image to really draw in the viewer. Don’t just post images for the sake of posting. Think about what message you are trying to convey. What’s the purpose of your post? Is it to entertain, educate, motivate, inspire, etc?@rosaievans
Over 80 million photos are uploaded daily. Does yours make the cut? Use these tips and stand out on Instagram. A great feed doesn’t just happen. It’s created!
If you found the information in this post helpful and want to learn more be sure to sign up for a free training course that teaches you 5 FREE hashtag strategies to gain more followers on Instagram.
