So, you’re sipping your first cup of coffee in the morning, you begin perusing Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook and come across that boutique you always love seeing. Everything is bright, clean, the colors are creamy, and the feed looks well curated. There are hashtags that are easily searchable that lend themselves to connecting you to other local businesses you may want to support around the same area. It’s Friday, and you notice the owner makes it a point every other Friday to post a beautiful picture of the her/himself and gives a peek into how they got started with their business. It’s personal, well thought out, and you feel as if you know the owner and want to support them.

You joined social media for one reason, to be social.  Wouldn’t it be great if your posts were actually shared more and you got more likes and follows? Business owners, you’ve spent time on a business plan, budget, creating quality products and a quality experience for your services, shouldn’t you spend a little time on one of your most traveled places, online? In general, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the kind of feed you love seeing in your Instagram and Facebook accounts?   

Here are 5 tips for making your Instagram and Facebook feed more visually pleasing and shareable:

1. Make a plan: First and foremost, plan out your feed for the week based on any upcoming events, holidays, let people know where to find blog posts, announcements, images, videos, or GIFs that would be appropriate for your brand to share on social. The easiest way to plan is to pick a day each week, like Sunday, and look at the coming week to determine if there is anything specific you can post that will pertain to your business for that week. If the weekend gets away from you (like it often does for me) each morning simply take a few minutes to plan your post(s) for the day. This will help with the consistency of your feed…

2. Figure out how many times per day or week you can feasibly post and try and hit that mark every week. To be consistently is people’s feeds it may be a good idea to post once per day. You will stick in people’s minds if you are seen at least once per day. If you are a business owner you may want to switch your account to a business account; this will give you analytics and ways of tracking your followers, their demographics, and when they’re most active, which will give you the best times to post around with more interaction.

3. Tone themes: Does your brand have a particular tone? Does your brand use certain verbiage, grammar, do you use emojis, is it more personal or more formal? If you’re a lemonade stand, you may have lemons and limes in your feed but you can also incorporate any bright yellow or green elements to give you that visual theme. You could use words like, “refreshing”, “sweet and sour”, “get your citrus on”, “mouth watering”, etc. If you have a boutique you may use words like, “diva”, “girls night favorites”, “date night favorites”, “whimsical”, “chic”, “fashionista”, etc. The tone shouldn’t be completely different from platform to platform but depending on what you’re using each platform for should be how you approach your feed: i.e. Facebook can have more of a story behind the images while Instagram users tend to scroll a bit faster through the visual content because it has less “noise” on the feed, advertisements, etc. 

4. Use hashtags: With that I will also say, “use them wisely”. People who use at least 1 hashtag has 12.6 more engagement. Anything that has to do with your image or the message you want to portray can be used as a hashtag. a quick way to see what hashtags apply to your image is to find an element or idea for your image, type that in the hashtag search (below):

 

Once you click on one of those, even more will populate (picture on the right). You can have up to 30 hashtags but if you come across some that have over 500,000 others are using, that’s a little too competitive and yours most likely won’t be found, so try and stick to under that amount.

5. Good quality visual content: If you look at your Instagram feed, are you absolutely in love with every image and description? If you answered no, try a couple of things. I feel like I can write an entire post about this, but here are a couple of quick tips: 

• Choose good light. If the sun is very bright in your background, move your person or object so that the light isn’t directly behind them. Unless you have a professional camera that has manual settings to let more light in, your subject will be too dark.
• Choose a subject. You have approximately 2.6 seconds to capture someone’s attention before they keep scrolling. Unless you want to capture the general layout of the room or event, choose 1 subject or a few lumped together, it won’t be so hard for the viewer to hone in on what you’re trying to feature.

 

Putting a little effort into your feed will make all the difference! If you need help making your feed look consistent and beautiful I would love to help you! Hiring a professional to take images of your professional business is a great way to curate your feed and frees up your time so you can take care of your business. Contact me here and I’d love to bring the vision of your business alive.

Here are some of my favorite local San Antonio businesses’ feeds I love seeing every day!

 

 

https://www.instagram.com/grace_and_charm_designs/