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When creators are ready to get serious about their Instagram account, they need to start by looking at their bio and feed strategies.  Take a look below to see how you can take your Instagram bio and feed strategy up a notch. 

Creating a Great First Impression

Profile Photo:  Make sure the profile photo is very clearly a representation of the brand.  Don’t make it busy.  Keep it clear, clean and simple.  If the logo that’s wide, stack it up to create a clear visual mark for people to start building a “relationship” with. 

Good vs not as good profile photo options.

Bio Length: Within 150 characters Instagram users need to describe who they are, what they do, and write out a call to action leading people to click on the link under the bio.

Emojis: Consider using emojis in the bio to say more with less characters, to express emotion, and to draw the eye with colorful visuals.  Emojis can also be used to point down to the link to increase click through rates.

Hashtags: Consider adding a hashtag into a bio to express commitment to a specific, trending movement or clearly identify a topic the brand focuses on.

Tags: Contribute to other accounts?  After a certain number of posts and followers reached, creators can add tags to other accounts in their bio which creates an internal link.

Here’s a great bio example from https://www.instagram.com/kelsholtzphoto/

Links: Instagram allows only one main link.  Creators can choose to change that link when they have new content to share.  Alternatively, creators can develop a landing page using a service like linktr.ee to provide many link options for people to choose from. 

Great linktr.ee example from https://www.instagram.com/ubuntu_travel/

Strategy Upon Strategy

Grid Patterns: Want to develop more trust with potential community members?  Create a visually-recognizable pattern from post to post so when someone sees your profile they can discern the visual strategy being implemented on top of the content strategy.  This visual representation of strategy proves legitimacy with potential community members quickly as it shows a higher level of intentionality in content creation.

https://www.instagram.com/gorgehrgeeks/

Formatting: Why are there periods in weird places on some Instagram posts?  Because drafts in Instagram don’t hold line breaks properly when they publish.  Some people get around this by adding extra line breaks with a period on each line break to keep the breaks during publishing.  Others use scheduling tools to keep their formatting in place when the content publishes.  What about hashtags?  Some people add a block of hashtags into the bottom of the post content below a few line breaks with periods to hold the breaks in place.  The second option for adding hashtags is to put them in the comments.  At Spry, we haven’t noticed an advantage to doing it either way. Length wise, creators can post longer captions on Instagram as long as they break the content up into easily digestible nuggets.

Notice the formatting with line breaks between paragraphs and space between the content and the hashtags.

Optimization: This is a fancy way to say, “get more people to see your content.” Creators can get more traffic to their content with locations tags, alt tags, tagging other accounts or by using hashtags.

Want to listen to this content instead? Check out our podcast!

Want to talk more with us? Consider joining SprySpace, the Facebook group where we troubleshoot, brainstorm, and support each other as we manage social media accounts.