Keep reading this article to make an incredible Instagram profile with these tips.
6. Trackable Link in Your Bio (That You Change Regularly)
One of the biggest frustrations people have with Instagram — especially businesses — is that it isn’t exactly an excellent platform for driving traffic away from the app to a website, a Twitter page, or somewhere else. That’s because clickable URLs aren’t allowed anywhere except the only “website” box in your bio.
That’s why you’ll need to add a link to the “website” box in your business’ Instagram bio. This makes it easy for people to go straight from Instagram to your website, blog, or a specific campaign.
One sneaky way to get people to click the link in your bio? By referring to that link in individual photo captions. Have you ever seen captions that say something like “Link in bio”? They’re trying to direct you to their profile page so that you click on the hyperlink in their bio.
Engage users by updating that URL regularly to point to your newest blog content, YouTube video, product, or offer. For example, are you running a contest, or need to improve subscribers to your blog? You should change the link, and then post a photo that mentions the new link in its caption.
To change the link in your bio: Click “Edit Profile” on your profile page. Then, simply insert the URL of your choosing into the URL box.
You can change the URL on your profile page as often as you’d like.
Once you’ve changed the URL, simply publish a photo related to the URL with a caption that references the link in your bio.
7. Enabled Notifications
Before you call it a day, check your “Options” settings to ensure notifications are enabled so you can see when people share or comment on your photos. This’ll allow you to engage with them more quickly and easily, just like lots of companies do on Twitter.
To enable notifications: Go to “Options” and then “Push Notification Settings.”
Choose “From Everybody” for each class. (Besides maybe “Pals on Instagram,” which mechanically sends a good friend request to your Fb mates who even have Instagram, and “Instagram Direct Requests,” which accepts images despatched from particular person accounts. That might get a bit of spam.)
8. High-Quality Photos
Top-quality photos are a huge part of an optimized Instagram profile. When individuals visit your profile, chances are, the first thing they’ll do is scroll through the first ten or so images in your feed. The standard of these images will be a big factor in whether or not that individual follows you or not. Your Twitter followers might forgive many bad tweets, however, you do not want bad photos on your Instagram account.
So, always be thinking of your Instagram photos this way: If you do not have something stunning to post, do not publish anything at all.
The ingredients for a wonderful Instagram picture are threefold: an interesting and related subject, a well-framed and well-shot photo, and a solid editing job.
Ingredient #1: An Interesting & Related Subject
Once you’re choosing a subject, think about your buyer persona. What would they find interesting in a photo? Coca-Cola’s target market includes young people who value fun, friendship, and sports activities, for instance. That’s why they publish photos of young people doing fun, adventurous things — like DJing at a concert or snowboarding on a beautiful day. (With bottles of Coke in hand, of course.)
Image Credit: Coca-Cola Argentina
One other nice way to garner Likes, comments, and followers? Make people laugh. Sometimes, funny photos are the most memorable and the most shareable.
Image Credit: Baddie Winkle; Jeremy Veach
Ingredient #2: A Well Framed, Well Shot Photo
Don’t worry … you don’t need to have a background in photography to take awesome Instagram photos. All you need to do is take some time to learn the best practices, like lining up your shots, finding interesting perspectives, and benefiting from symmetry, patterns, “leading lines,” and more.
Ingredient #3: A Solid Editing Job
Instagram has some fundamental editing capabilities, however, oftentimes, they are not adequate to make a picture great. Most of your photos should go through a minimum of one or two other photo editing apps on your mobile phone before you open them on Instagram for the first time.
However don’t worry: Once you have the best apps downloaded, editing the pictures isn’t that complicated. It just takes a little bit of practice. (Trust me, it’s well worth it.)
Start by reading this blog post for a step-by-step tutorial on editing your Instagram photos. That post will teach you the way to take advantage of Instagram’s greatest editing tools, and it also lists the two or three important photo editing apps you may need to take your photos from good to great.
For a list of more advanced editing tools, read this blog post for a list of the 11 best photo and video editing apps for mobile devices. These apps will allow you to do everything from sharpening specific parts of a photograph to brightening certain hues to make your photo look fresher.
9. Consistent, Regular Posts
An optimized Instagram profile is an active one. Because photo quality is so essential, you don’t need to worry about posting to your Instagram account multiple times a day like you do for most other social media networks. Instead, concentrate on creating high-quality content — and then posting them at the right times for your specific audience.
So, what time of day is the perfect time to post to Instagram? Because Instagram is primarily an app for use on mobile devices, users tend to use the network all the time, any time — although research shows that many users interact with content more during off-work hours than through the workday.
The perfect times to post on Instagram were Mondays and Thursdays at any time except between 3:00–4:00 p.m. for the time zone of your target persona. (For a United States audience, your best bet is to combine Eastern and Central time zones, as they represent almost 80% of the U.S. population. For audiences located outside the U.S., use whichever time zones your target audience uses.)
However, you’ll need to experiment with these to see if they work with your audience.