Instagram is one of those things that we either love or hate yet as wedding professionals and business owners we all need to be using it.
I’ve seen so many people struggle with Instagram and how to best use it for their business. Yes Instagram can be difficult to master and yes it can be a pain in the arse but hopefully, a few of my tips will help make it a little more straight forward for you.
I could write about this topic for weeks and weeks and still don’t think I’d cover everything so for this post I’ve included specific ideas for planning your Instagram feed. After working with some wonderful wedding professionals in the industry I’ve learnt a few things along the way to make Instagram planning run a lot more seamlessly. I find it helps to plan out a month at a time so that your feed is consistent and so you don’t have to keep coming up with new ideas every single week.
Here are a few key steps to get started on your Instagram Planning –
1. Work out how many images you hope to post in a month. I find 4-5 a week is a great place to start and won’t annoy your audience by inundating their feeds with images.
2. Work out what your brand message is. For example, if you’re a wedding planner and want to be offering advice and tips to potential brides you might like to consider mixing up your feed with quotes, tips, graphics etc.
3. Start with a plan for 1 week first which can then be duplicated across 4 weeks to give you enough content to carry you through for the next month. This will be your content plan. Consider the types of images you want to post e.g. Images of your weddings, sneak peeks, videos, quotes, testimonials, inspiration, giveaways, tips and tricks.
4. Use a program like Canva to create any graphics or images with text that you want to include.
5. When selecting the images you want to use make sure they all work in together. They all should have a similar colour palette (that matches your brand colours) and there should be a consistent theme/style to your images. Ideally, you want your feed to show who you are, what you do and what your business is all about.
6. Use an app like ‘Tailwind’, ‘Planoly’ or ‘Later’ to upload and schedule all your future images. From there you can move around your images to work out the best format.
7. Don’t use two similar images side by side. For example, if you are using an image of a flat lay make sure the next image has the subject shot at a distance (unless of course, your whole brand is about one particular type of image).
8. Create an Instagram routine. For example, you might find your posts get most engagement between 8-9am. Make this the 1 hour a day you spend on Instagram uploading your daily post and connecting with your audience. You shouldn’t need to be spending more than 1 hour a day on Instagram if you strategise your time effectively.
9. Research the best hashtags for your business and have them saved in your ‘notes’ ready to copy and paste in your image captions. Just make sure you mix up the hashtags slightly so they relate to the type of image you’ve posted.
10. Rather than sharing groups of images on your feed, use your Instagram stories to tell the rest of the ‘story’ behind the image you’ve posted.
Make sure you are monitoring your analytics on a regular basis and also changing your content to reflect what is getting the most engagement.
If your goal is to become an Instagram whizz then you’ll want to check out our brand new short course — Instagram 101 for Wedding Pros. This step by step course has been created by Academy CEO Kylie Carlson who has grown our Instagram to nearly 15k followers in less than a year. Find out more and enrol here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Former Creative Director and named one of Australia’s Top 25 Wedding Stylists, Lisa Macale is an integral member of our Academy Tutor team. Lisa is passionate about mentoring students as they make the transition from student to successful business owner. She now also offers wedding business coaching via www.lisamacale.com
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