I am no expert when it comes to Instagram. My Instagram account is brand new (November 2018).
But this is a quick list of good things to do on Instagram that I have heard other people advise, and am practicing myself. This list should continue to grow as I start posting more.
- Post a tall picture: It takes up more space on someone’s feed. And if you want to pin the image to Pinterest (rather than create a new JPG), taller images work a lot better. I used the same dimensions as a post I saw from Apple – 750px by 937px
- Put your hashtag list in the comments: Versus putting them in the description/caption of the post. It just looks better, plus it adds a comment to your post.
- Have your hashtags ready before posting: All of the popular hashtags such as #travel, #blogging, will have a lot of people posting to them. Which means your post wont stay at the top very long (in the recent section). Your post shows up in the hashtag feed based on when it was published – not when you post the hashtag in the comments. So if it takes you a few minutes to write all of your hashtags out in a comment, your post will show up further down in the feed (not at the top). So I write out all of my hashtags before posting, have it copied ready, and then as soon as I publish the post – I create a comment and paste the hashtags right away.
- Use all 30 hashtags: You are allowed to use 30 hashtags to promote your post. Use them all.
- Research what hashtags to use: Go to search in Instagram and type in something that you’d like to use as a hashtag – say #travel. You can see that it is a popular hashtag with over 300 million posts. This is good as you want to use popular tags that people will be looking at. But really popular tags will be hard to get seen for a beginner Instagramer. So it is also good to target smaller hashtags that are popular. When you type in ‘travel’ you can also see that – traveler – travel blogger – travellers – travelbook – travel blogger, are popular tags too. Try and think what topics your target market are looking at, and lookup those kinds of hashtags.