Shruti’s guide to curating a beautiful Instagram feed
In this blog we’ve invited one of our Little Villagers, Shruti Shah, to run through her handy tips for planning a beautiful Instagram feed.
Shruti is a social media marketer who has worked with businesses in New York, India, Australia and New Zealand. Her specialty lies in creating aesthetically pleasing Instagram grids for food, fashion, beauty and health.
Can't decide which filter to use? Over thinking your captions? At Little Village Creative we believe that curating an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed is an art-form and today, I’ll share 7 tricks you can use to create the perfect Instagram grid for your business.
Curate your Instagram grid
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Since Instagram is an aesthetic platform, the first step in creating a beautiful Instagram feed is to start planning your visual content:
Establish the look and feel of the brand
Determine the theme / colours to use
Pick a consistent filter to overlay over your photos. You can use the inbuilt filters on Instagram or photo editing apps like VSCO and Afterlight.
Planning tools like Planoly can help you view your Instagram grid in the order that the posts are scheduled. It also allows you to shuffle and play around with the posts and nail your overall aesthetic!
Plan your content categories
The second step in planning your Instagram content is to think about the different types of content you would like to post. Here are some examples:
Behind-the-scenes
Product videos
Testimonials
Inspirational posts
Quotes
Along with the types of content, I find it helpful to determine the frequency of each. For example, posting a quote once a week. If you know that, you’ll know you need 4 a month and you can plan ahead accordingly.
Create your content
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Once you have your plan in place, you’re ready to create your content. You might consider:
Photography - creating a small studio set up with a basic light and your iPhone works well. Alternatively, natural light works really well for photos!
Graphic posts - Canva makes simple graphic design accessible to anyone with a wide variety of templates to choose from.
Illustrations - Simple illustrated content, grabs attention and gives your brand an authentic look and feel.
Be creative with your posts and think about ways you can make your content look completely different from your competitors.
Create your captions
Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing your captions:
Tell your story using a consistent tone of voice
Keep it short and simple with a call-to-action
If relevant and appropriate to your brand, you can gear your content towards trending topics (news, culture, world events etc.)
Location tags + hashtags help make your content discoverable
Tools like All Hashtag can help you create and analyse hashtags, and advanced analytics tools such as Sprout Social enable you to test and measure which hashtags engage your audience most effectively.
Schedule your content
Once your content is ready, schedule your Instagram posts for the week to ensure you’re posting regularly at optimal times and planning ahead. We recommend using tools such as SocialPilot and Later so you can schedule and manage your Instagram feed on the go.
While it’s good to be organised, don’t forget to be flexible too - you may want to shuffle your posts around if an unexpected opportunity comes up.
Engage your audience
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Engagement is key! Here are a few ways you can increase engagement organically on your posts, videos and stories.
Add call-to-actions to posts and stories. What do you want your audience to do as a result of seeing your content?
Host competitions and giveaways
Share user-generated content
Start conversations with your followers
Like and comment on posts from other accounts that may be complementary or related to yours
Play with Instagram stories
Instagram stories are fast-moving (they disappear after 24 hours) so you need to approach these a little differently to posts in your feed. A few things to keep in mind:
Stories can be more spontaneous and less planned than normal posts
Make your stories interactive - ask questions and host polls
Repost relevant content from other accounts and followers.
With Instagram, it's important to plan ahead, be consistent and most of all, creative. Building up a large engaged following through Instagram creates another opportunity for you to market and sell what it is that you do (and if others love your content, they'll share it too).
Time to spruce up your Instagram feed? If you’re in need of fresh ideas and content creation, get in touch with our team of Little Villagers here.