6 Tips to Using Instagram Effectively

Whether you are using Instagram for personal reasons or to represent your business, it should be clear by now the potential the social media platform has for increasing your exposure online. Having a platform solely made to share images on with filters is something many people like, especially when images can express a thousand words at time.

With this, here are some tips for users of Instagram to take note and advantage of, to help them make the most out of the social media platform.

1. Always use a filter. When you take a picture to use on Instagram, the app will automatically allow you to add a filter to the image, with a selection of many different filters to choose from. Although some of the filters are quite extreme, in general, pictures will always look better with some sort of filter. Therefore, always get in the swing of things by using a filter whenever you post on Instagram.
2. Include 1-2 hashtags per post. Just like Twitter, the hashtags on Instagram allow you to search for other content on the platform that used the same hashtag. With this it is a good idea to include 1-2 hashtags on your picture so that it is listed under that hashtag when people search for it.
3. Try and post consistently. There is nothing worse than following someone that posts once in a blue moon, and then several times in one day and then once in a blue moon again. The key to pleasing your followers and gaining exposure is to post consistently – people will also search for you more if they know you are likely to have new posts too. If you have a ton of pictures to post on Instagram, reserve them and post them incrementally over time, possibly including them as ‘throwbacks’ if they were taken quite a long time ago.
4. Comment and like a lot. Social media works best when both you and your followers interact with each other. For this reason, comment on posts you like and like other people’s posts. They will get notifications of this which will make them more inclined to view your profile as well as comment/like your posts.
5. Invest in a dual camera smartphone. This is a bit of a weird tip. However, what dual smartphones can offer (with the inclusion of the Google Pixel 2 smartphones) is the ability to blur out the background of images in ‘Portrait’ mode, making the central attraction of what is being photographed appear more important. For this reason, it is a great way to make pictures look much better, even before applying a filter through Instagram.
6. Make sure there are colours in your pictures. Colours are key to Instagram and the filters they have on offer. There is nothing worse than going onto someone’s profile and seeing, at a glance, the lack of colour they have on their profile posts. For this reason, whenever there is a chance to add more colour to your pictures when taking them, always try to incorporate it in.