I am no expert on Instagram, I find it like a steady burn, I’m never going to be one of those Instagrammers that has 60k followers in a couple of hundred pictures. That said, there is space for everyone there and even though I may have only just over 5k followers it’s increasing daily. So here are some Instagram tips and tricks that I’ve employed that appear to be working, slowly but surely! 

• Be really REALLY picky about the pictures you put up. I don’t put anything up unless it’s been taken with a proper camera and it has to be extremely clear. I edit the pictures, generally adding a filter, brightening them (especially around this time of year!), I increase the exposure if I’m using Photoshop or the contrast if I’m just using the app, I increase the saturation and the sharpness. 

• I don’t have a theme per se but I do follow some loose level of cohesion across me posts. I try to make them bright and white. Of course there are exceptions to every rule but it looks much cleaner and eye catching if all the photo’s at a glance look like they’re on the same page.
• Share pictures from Instagram on your other profiles – for me this is Twitter and Tumblr. I don’t automatically share to Facebook.
• Try and post frequently, I post about 2-3 times a day, usually in the morning or lunchtime, once in the evening and once at around 9 or 10 at night so that American users logging on will see my pictures come up under the more widely used hashtags I use like #igers or #instalike. 
• Interact – sounds simple but comment on other profiles to get your name out there.
• Pick a hashtag that is relevant to you and scroll through to find new accounts and to like other pictures. Another way of interacting really.

• Watch the order in which you post. Maybe this one is a bit overly fussy on my behalf but hear me out! I love #fromwhereistand pictures but I try to have at least 4 other images between them. I hate when two similar pictures only have 2 pictures between them and end up being on top of eachother in my feed!
• Share links to your Instagram on other platforms. You can share link to your profile on Twitter daily, I do and it certainly helps. From time to time I share my profile on Facebook, like perhaps once a month type frequency. I find it doesn’t get much tracktion regardless of when I post it, even though Facebook and Instagram are affiliated. Add an Instagram widget or slider to your website also, I’m not sure how effective this is as I can’t track the click through’s but it adds an element of more frequent posting to my website homepage that it wouldn’t have otherwise as I only post on there 2-3 times per week.
• Hashtag, hashtag, hashtag – pretty recently Instagram altered how we see our picture roll with only the first couple of lines of text appearing under a picture and a clickable ‘more’ to see the full caption. I think this is great as it means you can Hashtag away to your hearts content without distracting from your picture. Some of my favourite hashtags and that are relevant to every picture include #igers #love #instablogger and #picoftheday. Obviously then I use hashtags relevant to the picture and to me.
• Run a competition – this is actually something I haven’t done yet but I have one lined up. I see that for others they work really well so it’s a great idea too.

 

 

If anyone has any other Instagram tips and tricks or secrets do share them and sure while I’m at it I’ll take my own advice and share a link to my Instagram in this post, click the picture above!