DMs
Your DMs are your messages within the Instagram app. This can get annoying and build up but they are a good place to build a community and speak to your followers or potential followers. Use them to reach out and build an audience. Thank new followers, send them a DM of a message, voice message, or video. Make it personal and intentional. The aim is to build actual relationships.
Switch To A Business Account
Once you switch, you get access to your analytics, pay attention to these as they will help you know your audience and what they are looking for.
Reach
Your reach is the new way to measure how well you are doing, your reach is your audience (total number of people who have seen your content) but not just your following.
Instagram Stories
Use this feature to show your latest post, ask people to go click on it and it will take them to your feed where they can like and interact. Post to your stories every time you post to your feed, this helps with distribution and drives your audience (and potentially new eyes through location and hashtags) to your post and feed.
Shadowban
Shadowban is when your account is not favored in the algorithm or is flagged up because you are doing something dodgy and against the system; i.e using the same hashtags on every post, using bots, using comment pods, etc. If you get a shadowban then you can be banned on Instagram, without necessarily knowing what has happened. If you get a shadowban, leave your Instagram account alone for a few days. Don’t post, and don’t be active. Check over the hashtags you use and make sure they’re still active and relevant - better still, use fresh ones.
Avoid Comment Pods
Comment pods are when a group of people posts to a group chat with a link to their post in the hope that all members of the pod will go like and interact with their post, in exchange for doing the same for the members’ posts. This is seen as spam and playing the system and is not worth risking a shadowban. The algorithm is intelligent and will suss you out. It’s not worth it.
Plan Your Feed
Planning ahead will help you develop an aesthetic, stay consistent with it, and in posting to a schedule (posting often). Planning out the appearance of your feed is a personal preference. Have a look around and see what style of feed you like.
I use the app PLANN which allows you to plan out days, and weeks ahead of time. I sit down once a week or fortnight and plan out my content. This means I know what is going live, and when, and have the caption written ahead of time with hashtags ready to go. This is great beautiful it saves me time in the long run and, on the days when I am just not feeling it, I don’t have to find something to post and write about it because it’s already in my planned feed. PLANN lets you upload pictures, add captions, and hashtags, and save lists of hashtags to easily copy and post when needed. You can also move posts around to plan the layout and look of your feed so you never post similar pictures beside each other or similar colours together.
READ: 5 Tips To Grow Your Instagram