Whether you’re looking to create a personal page, blog account, shop promotion, or business account, it seems as if nearly everyone is logged into Instagram these days. Instagram allows its users to share photos with their followers and receive feedback on their posts in the form of likes and comments.
Instagram has become an increasingly useful tool for promoting content for businesses and personal users who can share updates frequently and receive quick feedback. Or, for most people, it’s just a fun way to share experiences. If you’re in the market for more followers and likes, or just like the idea of having an aesthetically pleasing Insta page, here are some tips on how to get that design just right.
Focus your picture down to simple objects.
Pictures somehow tend to be easier on the eyes when there’s less going on. To do this, try limiting photos to roughly three objects. Your viewer’s attention will stay focused while also finding enough to look at. It sounds pretty ridiculous to hear, but a photo of your pretty color-coded planner and laptop will be more appealing than a photo of all your school supplies thrown out on your desk. When you keep it focused, your audience remains focused, too.
Try different angles.
This rule kind of piggy backs off the first one. When you take a photo of only a few objects – in most cases, you’ll want them on a flat surface – it sometimes helps if you take photos from closer or farther away. Cutting off the edges of the objects keeps the photo simple and shows detail. Stay away from zoom, though; using the zoom feature on most cameras (unless they’re the fancy expensive type) will create blurry or fuzzy photos, and they won’t look great on your page. If one angle of a photo isn’t cutting it, try a bird’s eye view – this almost always works better and creates very simple, visually appealing images. And if one angle does look great to you, still try it from a few different perspectives. Sometimes your own creativity with an angle can surprise you.
Lighting makes or breaks your photos.
Always try to use natural light when you can. The most important thing to remember when posting photos to Instagram is that the higher quality, the better. It can be difficult, but often times it’s a good idea to stabilize a shaky hand by resting it on something nearby while you take photos. Try tapping on different parts of your camera screen to view your shot in brighter or darker lights, and see which version gives you the best image. In most cases, the lighter the better. For those who are overly dedicated to their ‘gram games, try taking your photos when it’s still daylight out. You can post photos taken inside with no natural light coming in from outside, but they tend to show up with a yellow quality and appear fuzzy. You’d be surprise how much of a difference some good lighting can make!
Being ‘basic’ is good when it comes to image backgrounds.
Have you ever seen those blog or shop accounts that post flawless high-quality photos of products with a seamlessly white background? Sometimes you can’t even find a shadow in them. Most people don’t have a blindingly white table situated next to a perfectly white wall next to a huge window that allows natural light to shower over it. Have you wondered how it’s done? Get innovative. Often times, plain white bed sheets are good for comfy photos of books and tea and fuzzy socks and the cozy things people like to do in bed. It’ll be obvious that you’re photographing on your sheets though, so if you’re looking for a wrinkle-free white background, try investing in some white poster board. You can buy poster board for incredibly cheap at places like CVS, a local dollar store, or an office supplies store, and they’ll clear up your Insta aesthetic in no time. Mystery solved. If you’re looking for an earthier, less modern background, certain styles of hardwood flooring, fancy tiles, or textured rugs can look great when you choose a filter that complements them.
Stick to a theme. This may not always be necessary, especially with personal pages.
However, themes are helpful because your viewer will quickly understand what kind of content you post, which will allow him or her to decide to follow you. It’s important to be consistent. If you usually post bright, colorful photos, stick to that. If all your photos are black and white, keep with that. Depending on the style of account you have, you’ll probably already have a preference for color/black and white or light/dark. One other way to be consistent is with your timing. For blogs and businesses, it’s a good idea to try posting once a day or every other day if you can. Personal pages that your friends will follow tend to do better when posts are limited to once or twice a week. If you stay consistent, the images on your page and your followers’ expectations will mesh together nicely.
#NoFilter usually isn’t the best choice – but neither is overexposure. In most cases, Insta filters are a no-go.
The filters that Instagram provides are often too heavy and saturate the photo with other colors; many of them also create vignette-style frames on the images that create a round frame of color and cover the borders of the picture. Using no filter, however, also isn’t a great tactic all the time. Over time, your Instagram page will develop a continuous aesthetic of filtered photos, but non-filtered photos carry a raw visual quality that disrupts this. For a happy compromise, you can try using one of the most common photo-editing apps, VSCO cam. This app doubles as its own social networking site, but allows you to upload your own photos and preview them in grid form. You can download their free filters, and find which ones you like best.
Choose your hashtags wisely.
Hashtags get a bad rap, but can actually be super helpful when you’re building up a new Instagram page. The trick is to use only hashtags that are relevant to your photo and account, and to keep them hidden. One way to do this is to comment on your own photo so the comment appears below your caption. If you use roughly five periods (entering between each one), and then begin your hashtags on the sixth line, your hashtags stay hidden on your photo’s page with a “[…]” symbol that you can click on to view the entire comment. Believe it or not, people actually do look up those hashtags when searching for people to follow, and you can gain a substantial following that way.
Borders are a thing of the past, unless you’re really set on them.
Prior to Instagram’s update that allowed its users to begin posting photos of dimensions other than square, many people used editing apps like InstaSize, SquaReady, and Afterlight to add – usually white – borders to their photos that would allow them to fit in the space allotted. Most people have since abandoned the white border aesthetic, but it can still be helpful to have the white space on your page to keep a clean-looking aesthetic. If you choose to use borders, just make sure you keep a rhythm to them. You can use borders on all your photos, on none, or systematically. If you use them randomly, however, the photos won’t work together as well on your page and may create a sloppier design.
A picture’s already worth a thousand words, so make sure your caption isn’t as lengthy.
Captions are everything, and puns make the best captions if you can think of one relevant to your photo. It’s best to keep your captions short, however, because followers will be more likely to keep up with your posts if they’re simple. Heartfelt paragraphs about each photo you post will get tiresome to read over time. Like your backgrounds, keep it simple and quick-witted so your followers can know what a cool, witty person you are.
So no, in creating the perfect Instagram page you don’t need a fancy camera or a pre-existing fan base to do well with follow counts and likes. A cell phone camera, a few simple tricks, some creativity, and a personal touch are all it takes to create a fabulous Insta page that starts racking up the followers and likes before you know it. I’ll send you off with one last tip for the realest of the Insta professionals: be fearless and committed. If you’re walking down the street and your outfit is on point and you have a full coffee in your hand, don’t be afraid to stop in the middle of the sidewalk and snap a pic. People might stare, and your camera roll may be perpetually full of fifty photos of the same shot – but hey, you just broke 200 likes on that picture. Own it.