We get it. No one wants to read essays on social media optimization or do research on what pictures to post to IG. You want a quick, easy to implement, step-by-step process outlining how you can improve your digital business and grow your Channel. And you've come to the right place.
Everything we teach you in this article can (and should!) be put into action in the coming days or weeks. Take advantage of social media to strengthen your brand and grow your digital community.
Instagram is like your mom. She's your biggest fan.
The world we live in today is a perfect storm for entrepreneurs. Not only do we have information readily available at our fingertips (thanks Google!) but we have a free sales and marketing tool with an uncapped audience and incredible outreach potential. Instagram is single handedly the greatest business tool for your digital health and wellness business or for any entrepreneur for that matter.
Here, we're going to show you some of Instagram's best practices and outline the steps you can take to transform your Instagram into a sales and marketing machine--one hashtag at a time.
Organize Your Instagram Profile
Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your brand in Instagram.
- Use bullets or emojis to structure your profile and make it as easy as possible to read
- Describe exactly who you are in as few words as possible. Ask yourself “What information would help a stranger get to know me? / make them want to purchase my products? / subscribe to my channel?”
- Your profession / title / certifications
- Describe your style of content / workouts / meditation / nutrition
- List your main products or website
- Use your key “phrase” or hashtag
Learn How To Format Your Posts
You should apply consistent formatting to all of your posts. You want consumers to build habits around your social media content and the best way to do that is to be habitual yourself. In other words, be consistent with what you post, when you post, how you format your posts, etc. Once you are consistent, people will start to follow you more closely and eventually, they'll start telling their friends to do the same.
Here's how you can reach consistency.
- Structure your posts into 1-2 sentence chunks (paragraphs can be painful to read)
- Use a dash to separate sentences (Important note: when you are ready to move onto the next line hit enter immediately - if you have a space after the last character in a line, your post will not format properly!)
- Aim to give value in EVERY SINGLE POST. Provide a helpful tip, say something funny, give some motivation. Your opportunities here are endless.
- Aim to engage and ask questions every week
- “Who’s sweating/meditating/cooking with me today!?”
- “Tag a friend who loves cheesecake!”
- “Muscle emoji Monday!
- Hashtags - we will go into more detail in another guide but essentially, hashtags should be included at the bottom of every post. You can also include more hashtags as the first comment!
- Aim to use 6-11 tags
- Only use tags that are relevant to the post
- Use tags that have between 50,000 and 5 million tags. If you use a hashtag with more than 5 million tags, your post will likely get lost in the millions of others and never reach your intended audience.
Use Pillars to Structure Your Posts
The Instagram pros post a minimum of 2-6x per day and maintain a consistent theme throughout their posts. This theme is carried out by scheduling your content based on a chosen series of pillars, or content categories.
For instance your content pillars might be:
- Workouts
- Motivational questions
- Nutrition
- Customers and clients
- Lifestyle
These pillars should be unique to you and your personal brand. To start with, it's best to stick with a few pillars, say 2-3. This allows your audience to build habits around your content much sooner and easier than if you had 5-6 pillars. For a better sense of what we mean, take a look at Kayla Itsines' Instagram account @Kayla_Itsines. Her pillars are: Before and After, Selfie, Quote, Travel and Food.
Consistency is Key:
Most importantly, consistency is key! If you want to grow, you'll need to help followers build habits around your posts. Consistent posting will encourage your followers to check in with your page every day and the more value you can provide in your posts, the more likely they'll stick around.
Learn How To Use Stories:
Instagram Stories is an incredible tool to document your life and build a relationship with your audience. We will go into more detail later, but here's a great list of things you should be posting on your stories to get you started.
- Screenshot and repost your customers stories, messages, comments, etc.
- Use the marker tool to color and animate your stories
- Use text to reply to a specific person by tagging them in your post
- Record yourself talking, working out, etc. Consumers love seeing your live video!
- Run a poll that is relevant to your content
- Add a funny filter like dog earsonsumers love it just as much as you do!
If you are still struggling with IG story strategies let us know! We're more than happy to help!