The ins and outs of #Instagram
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Between new features, changing algorithms, elusive shadow-bans, and the ever changing laws of social media - it can be super exhausting trying to keep up with Gen Zs that seem to be born with this knowledge! Well, we refuse to be left behind by the iGeneration, which is why we decided to break down one of our favourite platforms - #Instagram. Also sparked by the fact that we tried our hand at reels, and found some great success with not-too-much effort - which is what we’ll share with you. Stay tuned to the end!
DIFFERENT TYPES OF #INSTA POSTS
In-feed posts: These are the posts that appear on your profile grid. You can choose to post a single image or multiple images with a single caption, as well as a video. This is a very competitive space, competing with everyone else’s content appearing on the ‘discover’ feed.
Story post: This is the post that appears at the top of your feed and stays on your profile for 24 hours before it disappears (similar to Facebook stories). Stories are an awesome way to create engagement with your audience by using all the different features that come with it, such as polls and surveys.
Highlights: To keep your stories visible on your profile for more than 24 hours, Instagram allows you to save your stores as “highlights” on your profile. You can sort your highlights into different ‘categories’ as well - making it perfect for brand pages to archive similar snippets of content together for easy viewing by their audience.
IGTV: Short for Instagram TV, these are video posts that go over a minute long, up to 15 minutes. Ideal for vlogs and long-form video content, IGTV can be found on your main profile grid, as well as under a unique IGTV tab on your Instagram profile.
Live video: Another form of video content, live videos are similar to your stories, except they’re recorded in real time. Your audience or your viewers can log on and listen/engage with you on your live video as you’re recording. Instagram also notifies your ‘top fans’ or people who frequent your page of your live video in the form of a push notification.
Reels: These are fun and quirky short videos (under 60 seconds long), similar to TikTok videos. They also appear in their own separate ‘reels’ feed on Insta. A great way show more of the personality of your business (or personal page), and break away from the standard, branded content companies usually share. On that note, Instagram is seriously pushing the algorithm in favour of reels. In a response to TikTok, Instagram is encouraging and rewarding users for creating content on reels, which is what makes them an amazing and easy way to get your brand and name out there!
HOW TO TIPS
Devices: Instagram started off just as a mobile app. All the functions that you can do are still on mobile, making it the dominant device that you need to use to do all your posting. You can still access it from your desktop to view, comment, and like things, but you cannot use a desktop to do any posting. The only exception is scheduling posts through Facebook’s Creator Studio product. Which brings us to the next tip…
Posting and scheduling: You may or may not know that Facebook actually owns Instagram. So when you're creating your Facebook content, you can flick that same content across to your Instagram. However, you can only schedule in-feed posts. This means that stories, live videos, IGTV, and reels would still need to be done on the Instagram app on your mobile device.
Repurposing content: If you choose to repurpose your content, we highly recommend tweaking your wording and posting the same content at different times across platforms. Chances are, when someone is going through their socials, they’ll be scrolling and flicking across all their social apps in one go. By posting the exact same content, at the exact same time to different platforms, you lose the chance to make an impact on your audience. They will most likely scroll past, as they’ve already seen the same piece of content minutes earlier. Scheduling the same post a few days or weeks apart is a smart way of reinforcing the message, without boring the audience, and it makes less work as you get more out of your content.
But just remember - when you repurpose your content for both Facebook Instagram, bear in mind that on Facebook, your post text appears at the top with the visual underneath. Instagram is the opposite way around with visual at the top and text at the bottom - so be careful when using phrases such as “check out this cool pic below”.
Hashtags: Hashtags on Instagram are definitely used for search and can really expand your reach. One thing that we recommend is actually having a saved list of hashtags for different types of content you may have. For example, if you recruit regularly - have a list of up to 30 hashtags handy that relates to recruiting and business. Or let’s say we’re posting about renovating kitchens, then you can copy and paste your list of up to 30 hashtags across, rather than actually writing out and thinking of a bunch of hashtags every time you post. A really good place to save your list is in your content calendar (in case you haven’t already downloaded it, check out episode 5 of Marketing + Margaritas for our free content calendar download).
BONUS TIPS ON REELS
Since we’ve just started getting into reels ourselves, we’ve found some excellent results with - honestly - not that much effort. So to close off this episode, we decided to share some of our tips so you can give it a crack yourself!
Jump on a trend: The easiest and quickest way to get your video shown to a wider audience would be to try to jump on what’s trending. How do you check what’s trending? Have a look at the reels feed to see popular songs and video themes that pop up frequently. Here’s a little hack for you - an easy way to tell what song will be popular on Instagram, is to check out TikTok. Often what happens on TikTok generally comes to Instagram a little later.
Ideal reels length: According to analytics across many accounts, the sweet spot for reels (and TikToks) is between 15 to 45 seconds.
Free apps: Canva is a really great way to create branded content. There’s a heap of different templates you can choose from - so choose a style that suits you, and incorporate that across a lot of your content. Another awesome (and free) app that you can use to edit your videos and reels is InShot. It's super quick and easy.
Watermarked content: As a final tip, the Instagram platform actually doesn't like it when you upload content that is watermarked. So, if you've uploaded something to TikTok, and you redownload it, it actually puts a TikTok watermark on it. The same thing happens on Instagram. Content that is watermarked won’t get as much exposure through another platform’s algorithm! Another reason why creating content in a third-party app without any watermarks can be a good idea.