Learning Instagram From Scratch
Social media is something that bloggers, influencers, athletes, etc. use to promote their brand and expand their audience. By right, it is something that should be helpful for a food blogger like myself! So I thought that I would just share a few things that I’m learning along the way.
Learning to Gram
I’m personally not too invested into Instagram. My personal account totals a paltry 100 followers, so you can tell that I’m not really the biggest player in the Instagram game. With Instagram, your content gets lost inside the maze that is Instagram REALLY quickly, so it is important to grab and keep an audience quickly.
What I feel from my explorations of Instagram is that the tags are really important if you’re starting from scratch. When I started Bibz Eats, I felt that I wasn’t exactly fully comfortable with personally publicizing my food blog, just for privacy and personal reasons. So I’ve had to build an audience the slightly less organic way.
First lesson I’ve learnt is that you can never have enough tags…. until you reach the limit. The only way to get your content out there to a mass audience to catch them would be through Instagram hashtags. I would add things like #foodporn, #malaysianfoodie among other tags. At the end of the day, these tags are so important to get likes and converting to followers. I personally feel this might not be the fastest way, because popular tags see your post going down really quickly and less popular ones are not explored too often.
Instagram actually implements a 30 tag limit on your post, and I actually learnt this with a post that if you put more than 30 tags (and trust me, it doesn’t seem like much but it can be used quickly), Instagram will just post the photo without the description completely, rendering it completely useless.
Another I’ve learnt is that it is better to find all the more popular tags that you want to use regularly first (so you don’t just use random tags with no traction). I personally do something that is a little bit lazy. What I do is have 20 hashtags that I use regularly, things that I WILL use regularly (mine stay relatively consistent because I cover food from the same area in general), typed up on my notes app on my phone. So for every post, I will just copy and paste, and add 10 more specific to my post.
The most effective way that I have personally used to try and gain an audience that cares about my content would be one of two ways:
1. Spamming Tags with Likes
What normally happens if you get a like and you don’t have too many followers? You have the tendency to take a look at accounts that like your content! By liking posts within categories which you are affiliated with, a lot of people will naturally take a look at your content. If they like it, they will stay, and perhaps even give you a follow!
2. Care about Other People’s Content!
Kind of similar with the last one, as you’ll be focusing on tags which are similar to your content. This way is more time consuming, but you’re actually connecting with people in a similar space. I try and say things that don’t say spammy, things like “OMG your … looks so amazing. Was it cheap?”.
With that I feel it achieves a few things. It feels personal to the content creator - it is not your generic “Nice Shot! Look at my content”, and it also makes the content creator feel like their content is important to you. So, in general I feel like I gain followers who actually enjoy my content on Instagram through this method.
Follow Me!
As you guys know, I’m trying to promote my content a bit more, so I really hope you guys can just give me a follow on Instagram if you enjoy my content. I appreciate all you readers out there, and hope to see more reader-writer interaction with you guys!
Give a follow if you enjoy food content!