How to Create the Quintessential #Instagram Feed (infographic)

‘If life is a picture, then Instagram is its canvas’.

Nothing can be better than Instagram or IG in today’s fastest growing social networking. If you want to arrange your life in pictures, detail every moment, capture every emotion in a frame, then chances are, you will love the concept of this fresh photo-sharing and video-sharing platform. Just like for the the children of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, this social platform can be a perfect delight when preserving life’s joys and sorrows in virtual frames.

It is also a brilliant platform to engage your audience through likes, comments and striking visual frames. Users or marketers with websites, blogs or pages on Twitter and Facebook can share pictures on other networking platforms through this media sharing app. To create the quintessential Instagram feed that has seamless, gorgeous images falling into a cohesive pattern, take these few tips:


Infographic via: elleandcompanydesign

Tip #1: Develop a well-designed and creative profile

Your profile should generally consist of the following features: a display picture in the form of a circle, a username written in bold, white letters on the top of your profile and real name below your display picture with a description to go with it. On your right hand side, you will find the ‘follow’ option shown in green, and the count of the number of posts, the number of people following you and the number of people you are following.

Here are a few tips on how to tweak your profile:

1. Use a well-edited and beautiful profile picture. A brand can use its logo or the image of its latest product for marketing and advertising. If you fall in the latter category, then be sure to use the same image across all profiles on social media for recognizability and consistency.
2. With over 300 million users monthly, IG can be a marketer’s delight. You should make use of this feature by posting links to your websites in the region of the profile description. Moreover, descriptions should be catchy, informative and content-heavy.
3. Try explaining what your personal brand or company is all about. If it is personal, then add tidbits about yourself that you think defines you as a person. Personal profiles are often accompanied by emotional quotes or passionate one-liners that tell a viewer about the user’s likes and dislikes.

Tip #2: Edit your pictures well according to its needs

A bad edit can tamper the essence and the ethos of a good picture, so mind your editing! A much loved and well trusted app for this purpose would be VSCO Cam. A trending hashtag on IG, VSCO Cam is the yin to Instagram’s yang. Although IG comes with a range of editing options, they are hardly as aesthetic as that of the aforementioned app.

Not only does VSCO Cam help you take good pictures, but also the app’s cool and enhancing features help you filter the images to develop them aesthetically. So, what are the ways in which you can make full use of what the app has to offer? Here is a brief walkthrough:

1. Pictures taken using the VSCO Cam app are slightly clearer and better focused compared to the device’s camera.
2. Leaving aside Instagram’s editing features, VSCO Cam has a new range of gorgeous options to select from. Use them well!
3. The filters on VSCO Cam are customizable on a scale of 1 to 12 to test their strength. The lowest rating allows its effect to be at its least, whereas the highest rating imparts a full-blown effect to the image.
4. Adjust the brightness and play with the temperature to highlight the warmer or the cooler shades as required.
5. Use tinted shades – “The tint tool functions similarly to temperature but brings out green and purple hues instead. A small adjustment (1 to 2 notches) will be subtle, but a larger one can push you back into cartoon territory.” ( - from Purewow website)

Once you are done editing, share the picture on your feed for your audience to see. The changes and the differences that VSCO Cam adds to a picture as opposed to the simple IG editing are awe-inducing. The number of likes will tell you that!

Tip #3: Schedule well your post of images

This is a reminder that is common to all social networking platforms. You have to realize that your audience is not always checking out the IG app. People do it only when they have the time to do so. However, in contrast to the other social big-wigs, IG has a slower ‘feed speed’. Hence, it is probable that your post is visible for a longer time after you have posted it on your IG account. It truly doesn’t show any steady statistical variations as to when would be the optimum time to put up a picture. You have to look out for when people are most likely to see it; hence, post accordingly.

Tip #4: The curious case of the Hashtag – manage it properly!

Just as hashtags are a necessary add-on to every tweet on Twitter, they also need to accompany every picture on IG. Indeed, hashtags matter. It’s because IG supports a search feature that uses hashtags to search for posts. Hence, if the searched hashtag matches with the one in your picture, it will instantly drive in more traffic.

Nevertheless, don’t go overboard with this tool. Too much of anything appears tacky. The same is true for hashtags. These should be coherent, relevant and overshadowing the caption of your post. After all, the caption is supposed to capture the actual essence of a picture.

Tip #5: Handle your account by using Web-based tool Statigr.am

Rechristened as Iconosquare, Statigr.am lets you comprehend the key analytics and metric of your IG thread. Along with giving you a detailed insight on your feed, it comes aided with these additional features:

1. Viewer – Manage your followers through this feature. The ‘Viewer’ option allows you to go through your feed and the people you are connected with through your account. You can scroll through the likes, comments and pictures, and also clean your list of followers.
2. Snapshot – A collection of statistics that you can share with your audience.
3. Photo or video contest – A multimedia campaign can enhance awareness of your brand and also get you more followers through photo contests. When you set up a competition, also choose the hashtags, the location, and the necessary terms/ conditions. The tool also allows you to get ideas from a list of other contests running on the social media platform. Once you create a contest yourself, it automatically gets included into the list of contests.
4. Promote – It allows people who don’t have access to IG or do not want to have access to IG to look at all your pictures through their Facebook accounts.

This Iconosquare app proves to be a pretty useful tool to handle your IG account. It gives you the necessities, saves you time and expands your web of followers.

Tip #6: Bring in variations in your posts and post regularly

A healthy balance between all kinds of posts can come handy. While some posts can be personal, which is borrowing from moments in your daily life, others can be informative or even promotional. All your posts must be relevant to the audience that you are targeting and must take into consideration their likes and dislikes. Some can be videos and behind the scenes footage of promotional campaigns. You can also generate suspense through a lot of your posts by leaving them incomplete. You complete them on some other day through other posts. These posts can be humorous, witty, news-heavy, frivolous, passionate or emotional. It’s just the perfect balance that matters.

However, never derail the consistency with which you post every day. It should engage an audience with a certain post, which may engage a greater audience through another post. Moreover, if there is a prolonged sense of delay between two posts, it may result in erosion in the number of followers that the posts could have generated on the whole.

Tip #7: Utilize the comments’ section in creating a conversation with your customers

Often, a conversational style in the comments’ section can become the only method of generating feedback on IG. Followers can be engaged through the ‘@username’ option or through responses to a certain question. The more you reply, the more engaging the conversation becomes. After all, this is the only way to have a direct person-to-person chat on IG.

A teeny-weeny amount of effort never becomes useless on a social networking site. Instagram might not be as gigantic as Facebook or Twitter, but it is a one-of-a-kind platform. It has the potential to reach greater audience, only you need to give extra effort in your IG account. Therefore, a quintessential IG feed, if developed well, can add a beautiful charm to your social marketing strategy.

About author:

Eve Haugen has been a freelance writer for a long while. Her passion in writing is her main drive in crafting articles that are engaging, informative, and meaningful. Her partnership with QuickSEOResults has given her a whole new opportunity to take writing to a whole new level.