12 Tips to Make Your Instagram Account Really Stand Out
As you’re probably well aware, Instagram is now the top social media platform, surpassing both Facebook and Twitter. In fact, a recent review showed that with the same post by a leading fashion company, Facebook collected 8,409 likes, 105 comments and 520 shares out of 16 million fans, whereas the same post on Instagram received 60,000 likes, 549 comments from 5 million followers. Translated? The image on Instagram generated 7x more likes even though the Facebook account actually had nearly 3x the followers.
It’s time to really put your focus into your Instagram marketing—not only your individual reels and stories but also your profile itself. But how do you make your IG profile truly work for your boutique fitness studio business plan? What will set you apart from the others in your industry? Here are 12 tips to make your IG profile not just look good but reinforce your marketing strategy.
Why are you using IG? Common goals include: building community, increasing brand awareness, and of course, driving sales. Take a moment and write your goals down and monitor them. This is a great time to bring in a marketing team to help you not only craft your goals but work toward achieving them.
You have 150 characters to tell your audience who you are and set the tone. The bio is valuable real estate—it’s the only place you can have a clickable link. This link can be static and connect to your homepage or a linktr.ee, or you can change it frequently to draw clients to more current content.
You have 2,200 characters (before the content gets truncated with an ellipsis) to really capture your followers’ attention. Your captions can be anything from a short, catchy headline to a question for your audience to answer to a short story. And although we’re constantly told that no one has the attention to read anything anymore, lengthy captions (microblogs) provide you with the space and opportunity to truly express your brand and its values. In fact, longer Instagram captions generally encourage greater levels of engagement. Mix it up and see what people respond to.
Honestly, if your photos aren’t great it’s best to skip the photo and use an illustration or something else instead. Illustrations can often convey the message you’re wishing to send pretty simply. If you want to make your photographs really pop, there are tons of easy-to-use editing tools including: VSCO, Snapseed, afterlight, litely, Facetune and LensFlare.
5. If you step back and look at your posts in grid-form, you’ll see an aesthetic appear (hopefully!). You want your images to feel cohesive and to offer an experience. The images should tie together and really speak to and resonate with your brand. Pay attention to your color palette—are you using bright colors with high contrast, or do you prefer a more subdued tone? Is it consistent?
6. Having a calendar and scheduling out your posts is vital, not only to make sure you post about upcoming events, celebrations and news, but also so that you’re keeping your content engaging and fresh. Be sure your schedule includes the type of IG post, date and time, hashtags, and pre-written captions.
7. Do you have a retail component at your studio? Your IG can be shoppable. Why not take advantage of people’s tendencies to scroll and browse and give your clients the ability to act on their impulse? Shopping on Instagram (a feature from Instagram) allows you to tag items in the post for your clients to purchase directly. (This does require that you create a catalog of your products on Facebook.)
8. Having a ton of followers is great, but it won’t do anything for your overall business if the followers aren’t actively engaging with your content. You need your followers to care about what you post. But how? Ask a question. Post an inspirational quote that gives them something to think about. Take a poll. Keep in mind you also need to engage with your followers, too. Re-post them sharing their favorite yoga pose or post-class smoothie. Be creative! Adding stickers or drawings to your stories can also create more engagement for your followers, plus, they are a lot of fun to see.
9. Tell a story across multiple accounts. So for instance, you could start a video reveal with your studio, and then pass part of the story onto one of your retailers, or a local health-food shop, etc… The idea is to pass it back and forth so that the followers need to not only follow each of the accounts, but they stay engaged.
10. You can take a single image and then break it up into a grid. You’ll need to post each portion of the grid as its own post, but seen collectively your followers will be able to see one image. This could be a great way to reveal a new retreat location!
11. Elevate your story game by making your stories interactive. You could add a countdown timer before a big sale or event, take a poll of your clients or host a Q&A or chat with the “expert”. This could be a tutorial on a challenging pose for your yoga class, a short Q&A about an upcoming training, or just time to chat with your students/followers. When viewers watch the video, they can submit comments that will appear on the livestream—this is a very easy way to create instant engagement! Or, ask your followers to screenshot, edit and share their own stories (tagging your business). You provide the incentive that you’ll share the best stories and you’ve got a win-win!
12. Play around with videos, stories, reels and IGTV. It’s important to share a mix of content types on your platform since the Instagram algorithm will show people the content types they interact with most often.
BONUS! Dig into your analytics and see how your content is performing. You want to see not only increased followers but also increased engagement. What were your fitness marketing goals? Are your analytics showing you’re on your way there?
Need help with your social media and fitness studio marketing? Telomere Consulting can help businesses like yours. We can do everything from managing your social media accounts to doing a social media assessment to get you up and running.
Telomere Consulting provides business consulting and marketing services to studio owners in the boutique fitness and yoga space. The Telomere team helps you navigate business strategy from conception to implementation. We provide end-to-end marketing support and would love to hear from you. Click here to book your free intro call. We want you to treat your business the way you treat your body – making the right choices now to optimize its potential for a long and healthy life. Visit us here to learn more.
