For those of us that enjoy taking pictures on our phones, Instagram is a godsend. The photo-centric social media app allows users to easily share photos taken with their phone’s camera through a user-friendly interface. Anyone with a camera can take photos and post them for the world to see. To have the best chance at success on Instagram, you need to create a strong feed. It’s not enough to just have great photos that you plan on posting in the future. To succeed you must create an optimized and structured feed that will give your posts the best chance of getting noticed by your audience and being viewed by other users. This article will provide you with 3 step process that will help you create a strong photo-inspired Instagram feed

Step 1: Create A Clear Goal For Your Instagram Feed

Before you begin creating your Instagram feed, you must first know where you want to end up. What are you hoping to accomplish with your feed? What are the specific goals that you are hoping to achieve with your Instagram posts? By knowing where you want to end up with your Instagram feed, you will be able to create a feed that is tailored toward achieving that specific goal.

If you want to increase your follower count, what are you hoping to post? What are a few specific hashtags that you are hoping to use on your feed? What photos are you hoping to include in your feed? Keep in mind that Instagram is a visual social media platform. As such, your feed will primarily be judged by the photos that you include in it. This means that you need to ensure that your Instagram feed is filled with images that will allow your followers to get a glimpse of your life and learn more about you.

Step 2: Research Your Audience

One of the best ways to create a strong Instagram feed is to conduct thorough research on your desired audience. This will allow you to create a feed that is specifically tailored toward those that are interested in the content that you are wanting to post. It can be very difficult to know what types of posts to create for your audience. After all, you are the one that knows your lifestyle and specific interests. However, it can be extremely helpful to conduct some research on your desired audience and their views and habits when it comes to liking and viewing posts. If you are seeking to gain more followers, what types of posts do you think would be most appealing to your audience? What types of photos are they most likely to like and repost? What hashtags do you think would be the most appealing for your followers? Through this research, you will be able to create a feed that is specifically designed for your audience.

Step 3: Craft The Perfect Post For Your Audience

With your goals and research now at the forefront of your feed creation, you can now turn your attention to creating the perfect post for your audience. You will want to craft each and every post to be as appealing as possible. Your post will need to have a strong image, a captivating caption, and relevant hashtags.

A strong image can mean a lot of things but ultimately, you want your image to be something that is visually appealing, tells a story, and makes people want to learn more about it, especially as a photographer. It is also helpful to keep a similar style, color balance, format, and voice with your photos so your audience can start to recognize your posts before they even see who it’s from.

By posting a short and descriptive caption on every photo you take, you can improve your engagement on the platform. In addition to helping your followers understand the story behind your photos, captions also generate click-throughs.

The best way to write captions on Instagram is to be descriptive and include keywords in your post. To be effective, your keyword research should include a couple of different angles. First, you need to look at the content that is most popular on Instagram. Second, you should look at what people search for the most on Google.

There’s a lot of information and advice out there when it comes to choosing the right hashtags for your social media posts. While there’s no “one size fits all” solution, there are some key things to keep in mind to avoid any negative consequences. I typically recommend 5-10 hashtags and, within this, mix up highly used hashtags that have millions of uses as well as some more niche, long-tail hashtags in the tens of thousands. This way you stay relevant but also have a chance at dominating a keyword.

Bottom line

When creating your Instagram feed, you will want to ensure that you are creating a feed that is specifically tailored for your desired audience. Practice makes perfect though. Experiment with your posts and view the analytics. Start to jot down which posts do best for your feed both visually and analytically.