Do you want to become a social media influencer? Here’s some awesome tips to increase your following and do just this.
Becoming an influencer in a niche
The first thing you need to do in your journey to become an Instagram influencer is to choose a niche and determine content pillars. Before you start to create content, you need to determine which field you are going to create content in. You can’t be popular for everything, make sure you choose one thing you are good at.
Do you want to explore different restaurants and cafes everywhere you go? Do you love DIY crafts? You can choose to be a food blogger giving out reviews and recommendations of food outlets. You can offer tutorials by putting your creations online.
There are a lot of possibilities. It is important to choose a given field and then create content consistently even if you aren’t getting paid for it. It can take some time before you start making money from your efforts.
Focusing on your captions
Becoming an influencer is more than sharing videos and photos on your feed. You need to have good captions. Captions are important because they will help you connect with the audience and a more personal level and show your personality. Don’t be those people who just leave a 4-word caption.
Try sharing a story with your audience so they have a reason to connect with you, follow your account, and engage with your posts. UseViral can help you with your engagement. Captions are also needed to provide more information about the picture or video you have shared.
Shifting to a business account
It is important to know about your audience if you want to succeed as an influencer. Analytics will help with that. There is analytics offered by Instagram that will help you learn more about your audience and their behavior. Personal accounts don’t have these insights. Make sure you convert your account to a business account because you will be provided with more data.
These insights will let you analyze the demographic of your followers and audience. You can see where your followers are from, their gender, age groups, your top times, activity times, and more. You should figure out the best time to post your content – this is the time that your audience is the most active. There are some guides online that will help with the process. Try out different times until you figure out the best times to post content.
When you have a business account, you have the chance of running ads by using engaging business hashtags. This is a good way of increasing your engagement rates and followers.
Having a consistent posting schedule and sticking to it
A couple of years ago, it was possible to post once a week and grow. This has changed. If you want your Instagram account to grow and reach more people, you have to post consistently. Decide on a schedule for posting your feed posts. You can decide whether you will be posting daily, Monday to Friday, or on alternate days. The goal is to make sure you post on Instagram at the best time. Make sure you stick to your schedule. When you do this, the audience when you are going to post content. This ensures you reach as many followers as possible.
If you find it hard to post content every day, you can use a social media scheduling tool that is going to do it for you. The tool can have a scheduler for Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and much more. You are going to schedule the posts ahead of time. This makes it easy to stick to your schedule. There are many tools out there that will help you with this. They have features like schedule posts, making content libraries, posting the right content at the right time using AI-based scheduling, creating recurring schedules, a resource of free stock images, etc. Check out the different options and choose one that works for you.
Have a great bio
You need to have an attractive bio for your Instagram profile because it is very important. It has a big impact on how people view your profile. Make sure the bio is detailed and provides more information about you. When someone visits your profile, they look at the bio first before anything else. You can capture the attention of someone and they can end up following you. The bio provides you with a good chance to share more about who you are and what they can expect to get from following you.
You can have a link that leads to your blog or site or YouTube channel. It isn’t possible to share more than one link. This is why you should consider Linktree for your bio. This lets you create a list of links and then put it on your bio. When someone clicks on the link, a page will be opened with all your links.
Can your influence popularize a hashtag?
The only way you can reach your target audience organically is through hashtags. They help a lot when you want to increase your followers and reach. Posts that have hashtags get 12.6% more engagement compared to the ones that don’t. When you include hashtags in your captions, the posts become searchable using a term.
When you are sharing content on street food and you put it as a hashtag, people can find the post when they search for a term relating to that. You can have up to 30 hashtags for a single post. If you are looking for the right hashtags, search for them in the search bar. Click on the ‘tags’ section and you can see the post frequency too.
Don’t choose those with more than a million posts. Look for those that have a frequency of between 10,000 and 1 million because they give the best results. Another tip is to check out the profiles of established influencers and see the types of hashtags they are using
Building your Instagram feed aesthetics
When you check out the feeds of successful influencers, you will notice that they have a beautiful aesthetic feed. You need to know how to take amazing photos to make your feed visually appealing. There are many tutorials online that you can use to learn. With a little effort and time, you will notice a big difference.
The posts should look amazing, but your entire feed needs to be the same when someone views it as a whole. Many influencers posting on Instagram usually use a set of filters or styles of editing that end up making the posts look uniform.
Editing platforms like VSCO and Lightroom can help with that. If you want to maintain consistency, use in-built Instagram filters. When you are editing, you need to ensure the pictures are in high resolution. Figure out the feel and look of your feed, and the color palettes you are going to use. Most established influencers stick to one or two colors to ensure their posts look consistent. Take time to research more about post ideas relating to your niche. Have a content calendar using a social media schedule, and follow it when curating your content.
Photo by Kate Torline on Unsplash