Whether you're a brand wanting to gain more followers or you're simply looking to improve your Instagram game, you can get your profile up to scratch with these useful Instagram hacks.
1. Use external apps to spice up your stories
Generally, Instagram Stories templates are pre-designed layouts with different graphics, text, or animations to choose from that you can use to enhance your stories. By using templates with a common theme, you can create cohesive, on-brand stories that align with your social media image as a whole.
2. Use invisible hashtags
Get your story seen by more people than just those who follow you without compromising on the aesthetics of your IG story with invisible hashtags.
Here’s how to make invisible hashtags:
3. Think about your space and how to use it
The layout for Instagram stories is vertical. When capturing moments on your camera, consider the fact that when people watch videos on their cell phone, they're holding their device vertically. Therefore, if you post pictures that are horizontal, they will show up the wrong way around. Similarly, if you post a horizontally filmed video, you’ll be compromising on the layout - it will appear much smaller in order to fit within the vertical space. People tapping through stories won’t necessarily take the time to turn their phones the right way around just to view your video.
4. Be creative
From emojis and gifs to questions and polls there are so many exciting ways to get creative and produce content that is engaging for your followers with your content. Spend a bit of time getting familiar with the tools, playing around with them and seeing how you can use them to enhance your stories.
Watch how to pin stickers in your IG stories:
How to create rainbow text
5. Get inspiration from influencers
They’re influencers for a reason and their number of likes, comments and followers proves that. So, maybe there are a few things we can learn from them, like how to edit our photos for the grid? Fortunately, there are a tonne of videos online shared by YouTubers explaining exactly how they go about doing just that.
How to edit your IG pictures like an influencer:
6. If you have more than 10 000 followers
Hitting the 10k follower milestone opens up new doors as far as InstaStories go. In Instagram’s eyes, you’ve just reached influencer status and now have access to the “swipe up” feature. This tool allows you to embed links into your story and when your followers perform the “swipe up” motion they will be redirected to a website of your choice. Businesses and brands can send people to any page on their website for example and YouTubers and send people to their latest video.
The aim here is to get people to “swipe up”, leave the app and visit the desired webpage. Fortunately, Instagram has tonnes of cool tools that can be used to get people to do so. From simply filming a video and engaging with your followers, asking them to swipe up to using the array of gifs with the words “swipe up” and a finger doing the “swipe up motion”. Figure out what works best with your target audience and explore the Stories app to find new ways to amplify and enhance your message.
7. Schedule Instagram posts for peak times
Instagram has its own algorithm that decides who gets to see what when. However, you can still try and get your posts seen by more of your followers by posting at peak times. Google “the best time to post on Instagram” and you’ll find results for everything from the best time to the best day.
8. Check out Instagram’s analytics
Business accounts on IG have access to insights that allow users to view data from their audience. Knowing this information will allow you to tweak your content to improve engagement rates.