50 Instagram Followers. 2 weeks.
I purged my Instagram.
A week ago, I purged out my Instagram and moved all my pictures to a different account. No, I’m not quitting Instagram. As a matter of fact, I’m using Instagram better now. Ever since the birth of Instagram, I’ve always used it to send pictures of things that are happening now. Now that snapchat is here, I’ve moved “happening now” to snapchat and started doing more artsy photography on Instagram. This is a good and bad exercise. It’s bad because I lose all my 350 followers and 600+ pictures. Good because I have a chance to build my following even more and put up better content. Just like our twitter, my instagram became my own little playground to learn more about the platform and grow it the right way. There’s an easy way and the hard way of doing this. The easy way — follow people then unfollow them once they follow you back. Personally, I try to stay away from this because of one big reason: you won’t get as good of an engagement unlike those who follow you for your content. You won’t really know if your pictures are good enough that people actually like it. At some point, you could have 3000 followers with 0.10% engagement — that’s no good. Now I’m going to talk about the hard way, the way I’ve been doing it. If you’re a small time blogger, amateur photographer or you just want to dabble on some instagram love, read on!
Tip #1: The tools of the trade
Your tools are important because you’re going to be using it every single day. We’re not professional photographers so we don’t really use the best cameras out there. As of now, we’re using a Canon Rebel T5i to take pictures. It’s not the best of the best because there are better ones out there but this gets the job done. An even more interesting tool for me is my iPhone 6. The lenses on your iPhone is good enough to take awesome, crisp pictures of about anything. Though if you really want an upgrade on your lenses, I really recommend Moment Lens. They’re lenses that you mount on top of your iPhone camera to get a better range and quality for your pictures. I ordered mine last week and waiting for those to get shipped! We also use a Joby GorillaPod as our tripod and these things are sturdy. They can hold up a DSLR or an iPhone/iPad in all different kinds of angles. We used this for our trip and I can’t believe the amount of flexibility this tripod can handle. You can stick it on a pole and have a sideway shot if you really wanted it.
Don’t be scared and start with whatever makes you comfortable. I’m sure you probably can’t afford a new DSLR. All that matters is that you are comfortable and most of all, understand your tool as well as you can.
Tip #2: Brightness, Contrast and Sharpen are your biggest bestest friends.
You saw an awesome building with the sunset as a background. You take the picture. Now what? Post processing is important. This is where you can go wild with your creative side. I personally use three different kinds of post-processing apps on my phone: VSCO, Snapseed and Lightroom Mobile.
Mistake #1: I’ve been using VSCO for a while and have spent at least $20 on some presets. Don’t do that
All you really need is one or two good presets to keep your pictures on Instagram consistent. People like consistency and if you’re changing your filters all the time, especially with my $20 dollars worth of presets then most likely, people aren’t going to follow you. Stick with 1 or 2 good ones. I personally use the HypeBeast Presets all the time.
Mistake #2: Not using Lightroom Mobile as early as possible.
As great as VSCO can be, Lightroom Mobile is where the magic happens. If you look at the top pictures on Instagram, they all have one thing in common. They’re over exposed, super contrasted and uber sharpened. VSCO does a pretty good job with this but they have a way of downplaying the pixels that it makes it look too edited. Lightroom Mobile keeps the pictures looking sharp and realistic. On top of that, you can really play around with the saturation of each colour in your picture. Go download Lightroom Mobile, super impose the brights and the darks, add clarity and bam — you’re now instagram ready.
Tip #3: Hashtags, hashtags everywhere!
I posted my picture but no one’s liking it. WTF?! You have 0 followers — how the hell do you think people are going to find your pictures to like them? This is where the hashtags come into play. #hashtag #every #thing #because #people #find #you #through #your #hashtags. Just make sure they’re relevant! Most photographers use hashtags like: #canon, #ig_select, #vscocam ( if you’re using vsco ), #wonderfulplaces, etc. Most of our pictures are from Toronto so we use hashtags like #6ix, #6ix_walks, #toronto and #thankyoutoronto. This website http://top-hashtags.com/instagram/ will show you the top hashtags to use on instagram.
There are instagram accounts that feature other instagrammers like MoodyGrams, ReflectionGram and ArtofVisuals. If you’re lucky enough to get featured in one of these instagram accounts, you’ll get somewhere between 100–500 more instagram followers. They find photos to feature through their own instagram hashtags so make sure to use those. Christine got featured by WeAreToThe9s here and she gained at least 50 followers.
One last tip on this: instagram has a 30 hashtag quota for each photo but there is a way to bypass this. I’m going to get you guys in the secret. Comment on your instagram post with all the hashtags you’re going to use — all 30 of them. If you go over 30, you’ll get an error message letting you know that there’s too many tags in this photo. Make sure it’s only 30 hashtags! Edit your original caption and add about 20 more hashtags. Now you have 50 hashtags in total! Grooovvyyyy!
Tip #4: Timing is key
Took a pic, post processed it, #hashtagged, getting good amount of likes. How do I get more? Timing is key. There are specific times where everyone is usually on their phone the most. That’s usually when you want to post your picture to get the most engagement. Studies show that 5pm — 6pm are the most optimal times for engagement. Why? Well people are either procrastinating at work or on the trains to go home and they’re most likely on their phones. There’s also studies that 1–2 am are optimal times since there aren’t a whole lot of pictures being posted at those times.
So there you go and I hope that Mark Zuckerberg bless you with a million Instagram followers!
Edit — Just to see this in action. I posted a picture yesterday at 4:58 PM EST and this is what happened:
Hi! I’m John and thank you for stopping by! If you thought this article was awesome, click that little heart below — I promise there’s an awesome animation! If you wanna know more about me, you can find me here:
john-deguzman@hotmail.com
http://stylebyfourfifteen.com
http://instagram.com/madfresco
http://twitter.com/madfresco
