My top Instagram tips

Sharing my tips on how to slay the algorithm and stop wasting your time and energy and use this social media channel with ease.

Good vibes only

Always be positive. I don’t say you have to pretend that everything is perfect in your life, but don’t be too negative. People always looking for more happiness, share with them your most beautiful moments this platform is perfect for that. If you really want to impress people, be funny. If you can make them laugh, you won!

Be short

Sorry, but nobody wants to read your super long caption even if its crazy fascinating. People don’t like wasting their time nowadays. There are just too many things going on in their head. They want the information super quickly and move on the next thing.

Be unique

Ok, this is a very hard one. It took me a year or two to come up with my photography and editing style, but this is the key to everything. If you are not a Kardashian, you need to come up with your own brand. The shortcut to this is if you find somebody on IG who has been doing well, and try to copy them. Yes, I’ve just said that. I don’t say that you have to steal their content, try to create something similar and make it 100% yours. Learn from the people you admire and become them. This is how I becamea photographer.

Be consistent

If you decided to build a successful Instagram page, you need to be 100% dedicated and you have to put a lot of energy into this. It will make your life hell, believe me. But if you do it regularly, it becomes a habit and you won’t feel too overwhelmed after a year or two. To get the first 2000 followers is the hardest. But how you do it? You need 3 high-quality content every week and share them on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, at the same time. This is how I do. You can choose other days if you want, but the weekends are quiet on IG. If you share more, people will get bored with your content quickly. If you share only 1 a week, you will disappear from their feed until they find you again.

Have a theme

The most successful pages are the ones that have a consistent aesthetic theme. Be very focused and selective with the images you share. For example, I share images about travel. The colourful streets of London. Architecture, vintage cars. I don’t share what I had for breakfast, my drunk face from the last night’s party or my neighbour’s cat. First of all, nobody cares, also they don’t fit into my feed. I have a mission. I want to give happiness to people through my beautiful photos. Also, I love discovering new and colourful places, so I feel absolutely aligned with my content. What’s your mission and purpose? Who do you want to become? What business do you want to create? What kind of products you want to advertise? Just a few questions you need to ask from yourself before you start taking Instagram more seriously.

Engagement, engagement, engagement

The only thing that kills this great online platform is that you have to do a lot of research on how to become more visible. There is a lovely algorithm that will never let you sit back and enjoy the rapidly gained fame. You need to be tricky and super creative if you want to stand out from the crowd. Or you pay for post adverts. I’m sure you will choose the free version. Here are some tips on how I engage more people.

Ask questions. The more comments you get in the first hour, the more followers you will reach. This is how the new algorithm works. Likes are less important. Try to get as many comments as you can. They must be 4 words long otherwise it doesn’t count! Without comments only the 20% of your followers can see your post!

Cross comment. If you get a comment, answer with 4 words, go to the page of the person who commented on your post, like and comment back if the content there is less than 1-2 days old. Magic will happen!!!

Call to action in your captions. Use action words like swipe, double tap, comment, follow, like, share…

Always try to use up the maximum amount of space on the screen, so share images with 4:5 aspect ratio!

Be funny. As I said earlier.

Find the right # in the forest

Simply got to the latest post of the most successful instagrammers who have similar content to yours and copy the hashtags.

Also, tag minimum 4 pages that you want to be featured on e.g. @acolorstory

Stories are super powerful

Stories are actually more important than the photos on your feed so start creating engaging content there too! I know it takes more time, but you will see quick results as soon as you will do it regularly.

Be very selective and focused in your stories too. Try to make it look consistent and share interesting, funny, empowering things that your followers enjoy watching/reading. To create consistency in my stories, I use only the Typewriter letters with upper cases. And I share similar pics to the photos I have on my feed. But obviously, I take those pics on my phone, not on my camera.

Call to action in your stories! Use the Ask me a question, Poll, Slider… options.

Keep it simple. You don’t want to fill the whole screen with gifs, right? Simplicity is the key to success in every area of your life, also on IG.

Use hashtags and location. – But there is only one hashtag option in the stories! No, not really. You can type more if you want just like you do on your feed. BUT! Make sure you hide these, because you don’t want to fill the whole screen with them. Simply tap on them and swipe them out from the screen, until you can’t see them. It still works. Same with the location. I got a client from NYC by using the #londonphotographer tag in my story.

Share quality content

I know that not all of you have a DSLR camera and an eye of a photographer, but it’s very important to have visually striking images on your feed all the time. If you don’t want to learn how to use a camera or Photoshop, still there are phones with amazing cameras like my Huawei Mate 10 Pro. There are great apps that you can use for editing your photos. If you do so, try to use the same filters all the time. It gives you consistency on your feed. The best filters are the ones that make the colours pop or completely change the colours in your images but keep the contrast on the same level. Avoid too dark images, always keep the brightness high. Avoid over editing, adding too much saturation and HDR toning. Composition is everything, use the Rule of Third and other composition techniques.

Hire a photographer

If you want to save time and energy and your goal is to be in your photos and not behind the camera all the time, you can hire a very experienced photographer who knows everything about Instagram and how to create super engaging images that will bring amazing opportunities for you. Plus can shoot you with the products you want to advertise on your social media channels, so you just need to focus on doing more collabs with big brands and talking to your audience. Sounds good? Contact me and we can start building your dream influencer career.

My fav apps

Planoly – perfect for planning your feed, write captions and share. I don’t like it, because with the free version you can’t upload unlimited photos but still a great app.

A Color Story – perfect for editing. It has the best and most fashionable filters. Easy to use. You have to pay for the filters, but I am sure you will enjoy using this app. It has a post planner part too, but the Android version of the app is full of bugs so it’s useless.

Social Hashtags – for collecting tags and copy pasting into your caption. The recently updated app is full of annoying ads. But you must use an app for tags to make your life easier.

Snapseed – Best photo editing app! Works perfectly.

Lightroom – More advanced photo editing app, I use it to compress my large images to a smaller size without losing the colours and fine details.

Unfold – Excellent for creating stories. Super simple to use it!

Canva – Create more personalized stories, with lots of pretty backgrounds, templates and colour options.