Now when you go to post content, here are some things you should consider. When you post, Instagram will test your content. What that means is it will show your posts to a certain number of people, and if it does well, it will show it to more people. This is something that most people know, and you can find it very regularly on the internet.
But what people don’t know is they analyze the people who are reacting to your photo. So if they find that most people who are hitting the like button on your image are women, they will promote your photo only to more women. Or if the people who are 18 they will encourage it to more 18-year-olds or all the people that are liking your photo are more interested in one particular subject.
They will promote it to that particular subject. They’re looking for people who have similarities with the kinds of people engaging your content and sharing it more expandable to similar people as similar as physically possible. So here’s how you should bridge the gap. Carousel posts are excellent because they give you multiple slides.
It’s one of those slideshow posts. Now, have you ever been scrolling through Instagram and seen one of those slideshow carousel posts on the second or third photo randomly? But it just starts there. It’s the first one you see, and you’re like: “why is this on the second or third photo?” – you think back to yourself.
Well, if you notice and you scroll through all the content, you might find that you liked that photo the most. And the reason being is because Instagram has uncovered that: “Hey, because of who you are, other people like you, like this photo more than others.” Let’s say you take a photo of nature, and then you have a second photo that’s a girl.
While you might find that all the guys like the photo of the girl and all the girls like the photo of nature, well, then each audience will see whichever image appeals to that audience more first. So a carousel post, one of those slideshow posts, is significantly better because it gives you multiple opportunities to go viral.
After all, you have more chances to post a bigger one variety of content that can appeal to more audiences and therefore push your content further. I would suggest doing more carousel posts when you go out and have somebody take a photo of you or your brand, get some variation. Have one really close, maybe one far away, maybe one that is a behind the scenes video—some mix of things you can post to tell the post’s story further.
So anybody can resonate with at least one of the slides. Also, what’s interesting is that Instagram is analyzing your content very deeply. They have really great machine learning algorithms and can identify different subject matter in the photo. One day, Instagram slipped up and has this feature on there that enables you to create alternative text for your photo or your content where essentially you can write in what’s in the photo.
So people that are hard of seeing can click on the alternative text and therefore get a quick description of what’s in the photo. Now, one time I looked at it, and Instagram has auto-filled out all of my alternative tax, and it was perfect. It was absolutely perfectly able to depict what was going on in the photo.
I remember one of them and said, girl, lying down with a book in nature, there are trees. It’s mainly green. It like knew everything that was going on in the photo. So Instagram is very accurately calculating the contents of your photo and your captions. So, for instance, you’ll get a little bit better engagement if people are commenting, congratulations on your post, because Instagram will say – oh, there must be something to be congratulated about.
Therefore, we want all their friends and family, and everybody follows them to know that you must have hit a milestone. So it’s analyzing those kinds of things, the kind of reactions you’re getting, and the kinds of things. Saying like if you say – oh, it’s my birthday today, and your caption, well, they’re going to promote you a little bit more because they want people to know that it’s your birthday.
Another interesting thing is I remember having a buddy who was showing me his Instagram feed of cars that he would post. He’d post photos of his car, and he found that there. You’re all done okay. You’ll get a couple of hundred likes per photo. But if he had his car at a very particular angle, every time, it would get three, 4,000 likes every single time.
And it happened like eight or nine times, but all of his other photos would get, you know, a couple of hundred likes. But for some reason, at that angle, every single time, it would do well. And what we uncovered is that it was just because Instagram is understanding. Hey, this is a car based on the angle, and it’s better able to articulate that and promote it to the appropriate people.
It’s analyzing what’s in your photos. So doing some testing on how close you are to people, how far away you are, all these different metrics. If Instagram can accurately depict what’s going on in your photo, it could better send that photo to the correct audiences. So this kind of goes along. The whole gazelle in the pond thing kept it simple, straight forward, and to the point. Your photos should always be subject centric.
Instagram, unfortunately, is not an art gallery. Many people like to make it seem so, but the more you can focus on one thing, the better and making that one thing look really good. A big commonality between very successful influencers is that they have separated their emotions from their account.
They take action on things that will do well without regard for the response. They don’t care so much. About anything, but getting further engagement and getting more followers. They don’t care what a million people are going to think of them. They don’t care what anybody has to say. They do what gets them the followers.
They have eliminated emotional attachment. So following this, don’t be afraid to use face tune to make yourself look better or use any other form of editing like Lightroom presets to enhance your photos and do what you can to make sure that everything looks good. Do what works. Okay. Next is – your captions.
Captions should be written like a conversation. You can shorten it by getting straight to the point. Don’t say – oh, the other day I was thinking about this. You know, whatever it is. Just start. Find the soonest point that you can start by hooking them from the very first line. It was very important. Try to make sure whatever your first line is, is a right hook, and it gains their attention, and it piques their curiosity. An excellent way to do this, start with a question. You know, have you ever wondered about this? Keeping it short, sweet, and to the point, but you should write it like a conversation like you’re really talking to somebody – that’s a crucial point. And address things that people care about, from trends to different subjects.
If your demographic, you know, is interested in very particular things, try and talk about those things frequently. Something I like to do is. If I find something that’s really inspirational, I’ll create a folder and save other people’s photos or videos into a folder like “inspirational captions” or something like that.
The next thing is after you post, hashtags are essential. They definitely are. It is a myth that hashtags in the caption do better than hashtags in the comments. It’s a myth. It was proven by somebody who works on Instagram. They told me hashtags should be used in a variety of ways.
Number one is you should have a good variety of large and small hashtags from generic ones like hashtag photography or something like that, or hashtag model all the way down to, you know, very particular hashtags that have to do with certain branches of photography or modeling or products or whatever it is.
If you have smaller hashtags have smaller engagement, you will stay closer to the top for a longer time, which will help you gain more traction so that with the bigger hashtags, you’ll slowly move on to the top of those hashtags. Now, a lot of people have a problem finding the right hashtags.
Finding the right hashtags is easy. You go to a website called DisplayPurposes. Go to that website. When you go there, there’s going to be a little search bar. And you can type in any number of hashtags. You can – do hashtag model, hashtag, you know swimwear, I don’t know, hashtag product whatever you want to do.
And what it will do is it will populate a list of 30 hashtags that are sorted by relevancy and traffic, and it will automatically select a variety of those things. And you can manipulate this field. You can choose to select and unselect things manually, or you can say – no, you know what, I only want ten hashtags. You can then go into a copy mode will, which will prepare it for you to copy and paste it into your comments. The second thing you should also know is that Instagram doesn’t want you to copy and paste your hashtags in there.
They want us to be authentic. They want the hashtags to be as relevant as possible to the photo that you’re posting. So if you’re copying and pasting him, you’re probably have habits pre-prepared because you want to get some clout. After all, you want to grow on Instagram. You want to use the hashtags to your advantage, so they know this.
So here’s what I do to get around that. I don’t know if Android has this. It probably does somewhere, but I know at best on iPhone. What you can do is you can go into your general settings. And in your general settings, you can go into your keyboard settings. And in your keyboard settings, there’s a little area called text replacement.
When you go into text replacement, there will be a little plus button at the top right corner. You click that, copy and paste the hashtags into the phrase section, and then in the shortcut section, you type a random string of letters. It’d be like five different letters, and now whenever you type that out, it will auto-correct to your hashtags.
Therefore, you can write up the string of letters in your comments below, and it’ll auto-correct your hashtags. And boom, Instagram thinks that you just wrote those out yourself, bettering your engagement, and you’ll no longer get throttled. Now, what happens with hashtags, and I found this out actually on my own, was that if you use the same hashtag too many times, it will flag your account, and you’ll get less engagement.
And for a lot of us, hashtag you’ll stop popping up on altogether. It’s called shadow banning. The reason it’s called shadow banning is cause you’re in the dark about it. You might post and see your hashtag there, and when you click on the hashtag, you will see your posts in those hashtags.
If you were to log in from an account that does not follow you and look at the hashtags, your post would not appear. So you will be in the dark in the fact that you have been banned. So, I was shadow-banned. None of my posts showed up in the hashtags when I checked it out from a different account, and I just brainstormed what I did.
I said, okay, what’s the mentality of Instagram? Why? What factor could it be that’s causing this reaction? Because I knew that no person had just flagged my account. I said this had to be something from the algorithm, some automatic computer response to something I’m doing. I said it must be the hashtag.
Cause that was my guess. And what I did is I went back, and I deleted every hashtag and all of my comments and captions ever, and all of my photos. After doing that, the very next post, I made boom, hashtags up and working once again. Whenever I post what I do right before I post, I’ll go into the previous photo posted, and I’ll delete the hashtags from the comments.
Therefore, when I post again, I can use the hashtags, and Instagram will be like, Oh, this is a fresh batch with new hashtags. It’s never been used before. And that’s my kind of little way of getting around that little snag. The time in which you’re posting is also pretty important. Now, Instagram gives you some demographics if you have a business account, but it doesn’t work too accurately.
The main thing you want to be doing is you want to be posting when people are looking but too busy to be posting themselves. Everybody posts at night, so you don’t want to post at night. The reason being is because like if everybody’s posting at night, then you’re fighting against all these different people that are trying to post and trying to get you to see their content too. So were you always want to do is you want to post when people are too busy. So I always post around noon or 11 when people are at work. Everybody’s always on their phone. Everybody’s still scrolling through Instagram and Facebook, but they often don’t have the time to post during those times.
So posts during the times when people are most busy. So that people will see it, they’ll engage it right away, and then later, your post will start growing and growing and growing, and more and more people will see it throughout the day. Okay, so here are a few points to help increase the engagement on your posts.
Here are a few subject matters to think about. Consider to maybe include to help your account grow even more and help you get some more engagement. First off, use a little splash of red. We’re psychologically trained to stop when we see the color red, like stop signs or stoplights. Next, human faces tend to do well.
Landscapes and scenery tend to do well. Food, animals behind the scenes stuff, relevant trends, and butts. Butts over boobs. Butts do pretty well on Instagram as well. Also, keep your photos more monochromatic, meaning having one dominant color throughout the picture over many dominant colors. And keep in mind that the average user is between 18 and 24. Some influencers like to target more child-friendly audiences just so the younger generation can experience growing up with you as an influencer.
Also, images with backgrounds tend to be favored over images that have blank backdrops. People tend to like pictures that they feel are real. So try not to over-edit too much hour, make it feel too staged.
Also, if there’s a little bit of texture in the image, that tends to do pretty well. People tend to like lighter photos over darker ones, and people tend to prefer more cooler or bluish tones over warmer and orange or tones. Also, natural light is better than artificial light. Outdoors does better over indoors and adding a little bit of color.
Like a little, a tiny bit of saturation can also be well. Also, keep in mind that people do like a little bit of editing, but nothing overdone. It should still feel at least relatively realistic. Keep in mind, none of these are hard and fast rules, and these are just things that typically do well.
Even if you don’t follow any of these rules, you can still do good on Facebook, but if you want to appeal to the more significant demographic, keep in mind that these are the subject matters that typically get most engaged. So be sure to keep that in consideration when you’re creating your posts.
