1. Define your content
Before posting anything, set an editorial line, which will guide your content creation.
What topics to address or avoid? What tone to adopt? What type of content to offer?
The goal of this editorial line is to transcribe the tone of your brand while enjoying the tools of Instagram like ActiveIG.com. It can of course be flexible, and adapt depending on the success of your content and trends that seem appropriate.
Instagram Social Media
But what to publish?
Your content must meet 3 most important criteria: Quality, Creativity and Relevance.
Quality
Look after the quality of your content.
Your Instagram account will be a real showcase for your business, and if your photos are fuzzy or the sound of your videos saturates, your subscribers will quickly decamp.
To make good photos it is not necessary to equip a professional SLR, smartphones products nowadays are equipped with cameras of a quality quite suitable.
In addition, they have the advantage of often offering the possibility of taking pictures directly in square format, preferred format on Instagram. You will have a direct view of what will be on your photo when you take it, without having to crop it.
And the work does not stop once the picture is taken!
Your photo can be improved before being posted. Many applications exist, here is a small non-exhaustive list:
Edit your photos: these applications offer effects that Instagram does not have, framings, filters and other original effects, there is something for everyone, like the Afterlight application
Add text to your photos: PicLab and Typic
Insert emoji and stickers: Line Camera
Create collages of multiple photos: Layout and Pic Stitch
Make GIFs: Boomerang
Take pictures in long exposure (ideal for light painting pictures): Long Exposure Camera 2
With every need of photo editing, you will find an application that will help you. After all, there are many applications to insert animal heads on our photos.
Creativity
Instagram is not your catalog, do not just show your products, be creative.
Many brands use the social network to promote a lifestyle above all, and put their consumers first.
Feel free to browse photo sharing sites like Pinterest or Flickr for ideas.
Drawings, stop-motion or panoramic videos, any type of visual content has its place on Instagram and many brands benefit, so why not you?
You can express your creativity as much on the substance as on the form.
The smartphone, compact and mobile, is a camera that offers many more possibilities than you imagine, as illustrated in this video. Depictions, macros, underwater photos… It’s up to you to find your own tips!
Relevance
Your unlimited creativity must still serve the purpose of your brand. Your photo or video must remain linked to your brand universe.
This need, however, should not curb your creativity, but feed it!
Among the brands that make the most of their products to offer highly visual content, Pilot pens are a perfect example. Their Instagram account features their different pens with drawings made thanks to them.
2. Engage your community
To become known on Instagram, it is essential to build a loyal community around your brand, and gain visibility.
Most of the people buy Instagram followers to show a number of followers to impress them but this is not right way to do.
We must start by offering content that your community will appreciate. Fortunately, science is here to help us.
The very serious study of Yahoo Labs and Georgia Tech looked at the impact of Instagram filters on engagement.
As a result, photos published with a filter generate more engagement than without filters, especially those with warm hues that increase exposure and contrast. With the right filter, your visuals have a 21% chance of being seen and can generate 45% more comments.
The study concludes therefore that those to be preferred are Mayfair, Rise, Valencia, Hefe and Nashville, while Lo-Fi and X-Pro II are to be avoided.