10 Tips to build your Instagram from scratch

Starting from scratch- sounds pretty daunting huh? With millions of other photos on Instagram, how do you stand out amongst the rest? Hoping to increase your reach and even start earning money from it? Want to become a successful Instagram Influencer? Here is a step-by-step guide.

1. Find your niche and create content that revolves around it

Most important step- find your passion and make it your niche. Make sure it’s a subject that you are enthusiastic to share about, where content comes naturally. As Mia Hamm once said “If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction and passion”, and the content you create will not be fulfilling.

2. Be specific

Food, beauty, travel, fitness & fashion, there are just too many things you can post to create your lifestyle Instagram. Decide on a specific style/theme you’d like your Instagram feed to adopt. Restrict yourself to 1-2 styles to prevent your feed from being over-cluttered! No one wants to see a messy feed.

3. Improve your photography skills

Aesthetic pieces are capable of attracting people as it value-adds to their Instagram feed. There are many ways and angles to help tell your story. Here are some tips to make your next picture DOPE.

Before starting your Instagram account, be sure to have approximately 10-15 ready posts to go live before attempting to increase your reach. This would increase the effectiveness of your branding strategy. However, do not post all 15 photos at once! 1-2 photos a day during different times would be optimal.

4. Photo editing applications

Unable to get that perfect shot pictured in your head? No problem! On top of the basic filters available on Instagram, there are also tons of photo editing apps available to get the effect you desire. Here are some of the most popular editing apps in 2018- our favorites are Snapseed, VSCO and Afterlight 2. Try it out for yourselves!

5. Instagram Captions

Now that you have learnt how to get that Insta-worthy picture, Instagram captions can be a powerful tool to bring your picture above the rest- literally.

Firstly, front load important information or attention grabbing information within the first 3 lines of your captions. If captions are too long, highly likely that people would just scroll past without even reading it. What a waste!

Next, hashtags can bring you additional Instagram reach when used properly. The hashtag should not too widely used such that competition becomes too steep. Also, the hashtag should not be too foreign, which implies its low search count. A good gauge would be a hashtag with approximately 10,000 uses. To get up to the top 9, ensure that the hashtag VERY relevant to the photo. For more details on hashtags, read our previous posting here.

Lastly, a smart move would be to tag the brands you are wearing in your captions (i.e. @niveasg). If the brands like your photo, your photo would appear on their followers’ explore page. Sometimes, we are talking about millions of people here!

6. Gaining more exposure

On top of point 5, liking and following people with similar styles can draw them to your profile. If they like what they see, chances are they will follow you back!

7. Set your Instagram as a Business Account

This is the step that will allow you to gauge the effectiveness of your branding strategy. As a business account, you can get insights about your followers and how they react to your posts. You can determine what kind of posts are more popular amongst your target audience and leverage on it.

8. Be consistent

It has been shown that only approximately 20% of your posts end up on a person’s feed. One way to increase your appearance is by being consistent. That means having a consistent brand tone, having a regular posting frequency and timing. This will definitely get you more of those double taps!

 

9. Follow popular lifestyle influencers as reference

Follow other influencers for inspiration for your posts. Here are some of our picks for rising lifestyle influencers with a unique style that you can follow.

If you are looking for bright & bubbly personalities:

@manda.olivia

If you are going in the grunge direction:

@szes

If you are looking for more abstract ideas:

@Beixin

References from successful influencers are great ways to generate ideas to start off.

10. Collaborate with other influencers or brands

This is a great opportunity to gain more exposure and experience in the industry. Build your notability, authenticity and credibility- those are the 3 main ingredients which allows you to stay in this industry.

Looking to be the next Instagram Influencer?

Kobe is a an award-winning Artificial Intelligence Influencer Marketing platform that connects brands and agencies with relevant celebrity, macro, micro or everyday influencers, instagrammers, bloggers or youtubers. Join us today!