5 Instagram Tools Every Blogger Needs in Their Life
You’ve been playing the Instagram game for a few months now. You do ya thing on the daily and are content with it. Not overjoyed, just content.
There’s something missing. You see other accounts crafting amazing posts with their Instagrams', but how? If you are feeling late to the party you aren’t alone, I too, was late.
But girl, you gotta get in on the secrets.
Hashtags
When I first started using Instagram back in high school I thought hashtags should only be used on Twitter, or as a joke. Like #yolo. It wasn’t until I started blogging that I realized the true power of hashtags.
Hashtags are great for accounts that want to grow and do not have a large following yet, think less than 10k. They are great for a business or blog Instagram. In these past few months, I have noticed a lot of traffic just from hashtags!
Of course, there has to be a strategy, and with the right strategy, hashtags can be your greatest weapon. First, make sure you are using hashtags that are in your niche. If you are a fashion blogger, don’t be using hashtags about food.
Second, make sure the hashtags you are using are not too populated. If you are a smaller account, then your posts will get swept away in hashtags with over 250K posts. The sweet spot is to use hashtags with anywhere from 5k-200k posts. I found it helpful to make a word document of different hashtags by category with how many posts each had (my preference, you don’t need to do this because it is a lot of work but it is helpful to track).
A few categories I went with were blogging, creative, Boston, and bullet journaling. It’s important to switch up your hashtags every once in awhile, and you can only use 30 per post. The more specific the hashtags to the post, the better. Here are some examples of hashtags I use in most of my posts: #colorfulcontentcreators, #bosblogger, #eastcoastcreative.
My favorite type of hashtags are community hashtags! A lot of creators have their own hashtags that you can use and they will share your account. These hashtags are essential for content creators, and you can use these to engage with other like-minded accounts.
Captions w/ Line Breaks
I’m super late to the party with this one, but I just found out how to create line breaks in my Instagram captions…without using a period or other symbols. You’re either like, girl you are late, or teach me how.
I found out through Sweaty Wisdom! Truly, she has wisdom. Check out the post here.
Line breaks are great if you have a long caption that needs to be broken up. A quick caption doesn’t need any line breaks, but a very lengthy one might. It adds more depth and breath. A big chunk of words will turn most people away.
I don’t know about you, but this is one change I can get behind.
Instagram Insights
Insights, or analytics, tell you how your profile is performing. If you are a marketing nerd like me, then you will love looking at your insights. But looking and understanding are two different things. (A more in-depth to come soon!)
Heres how to get to your insights;
Go to your profile.
Click on the 3 lines in the corner
Click on insights, easy!
Your insights can tell you how many people have viewed your posts, how they came across your post (feed, hashtags, etc), demographics of your followers, AND MORE.
This is where you can locate your overall insights from everything on your Instagram.
First, there is CONTENT. This highlights your feed posts and story posts.
Then there is ACTIVITY. This shows how many people see your content and where they find it, and also the actions they take.
Last, there is AUDIENCE. Here you can track your follower count and insights about your followers such as location and age.
There are also insights for every individual post you have. But, we will save that for another post.
Related post: 4 Reasons Why This Social Media Growth Strategy is Unattractive.
Monitoring and understanding your insights is SO important if you are trying to build a growth strategy. Just like hashtags, play with it for a little and see what works for you.
*Disclaimer: This is the OLD look of Instagram analytics.
Using a Scheduler…but not for scheduling
If you already use a scheduler, good for you! If you don’t I’m going to tell you why I don’t use one.
One day I tried to schedule out my posts for Instagram. At the time I was using Tailwind for Pinterest (love) so I tried the Tailwind Instagram scheduler. I’m not sure if I did it wrong, but it ended up posting immediately instead of when I (thought) I scheduled it out to post.
So that was that. I also have used Planoly to schedule out Instagram posts. I actually found that this worked well. You could write out the caption, set a location, and even schedule out hashtags, and it posted when it was supposed to.
Then I heard something that stopped me in my tracks. I was listening to the Goal Digger Podcast by Jenna Kutcher and it was an episode about Instagram. Jenna has thousands of followers, so obviously she knows what she’s talking about. In this episode, she explained how she only posts on Instagram when she knows she can take 20 minutes to be present. For those first 20 minutes that a post is live, she is there engaging with her followers.
That stuck with me, and I’ve tried it, and it works. I now only post when I know I can sit and relax and scroll through the gram.
BUT. I will forever and always love my Planoly account because I still use it to plan out my posts! I do want to make sure my feed is cohesive and lookin’ pretty. If you do too, then make a free account right now! Just be careful, you do have a limited amount of uploads, so choose wisely!
One Word: PicsArt
By now, you’ve heard of it. It’s taken the Instagram world by storm. We have been hit with yet another app, but make some room!
PicsArt is another way to edit your pictures, by adding cool stickers, text, etc. You can also upload your own materials and there is a cutout feature so you can paste things on other backgrounds, genius!
There are so many options and a search feature. Of course, some of the icons you have to pay to use, but I find the free version to work just fine! It’s useful if you want to add a little extra spunk to your pictures.
Check it:
Original, with a little editing
PicsArt version!
Are you feeling inspired? Are you feeling ready to rock? I hope so! If you love Instagram as much as I do then you are going to have a ball with all of these new tools.