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Whether your goal is to use Instagram as an outlet for your creativity or as platform to sell your photography, promote your business, or just interact with other people all over the world, there are some tried and true strategies to improve your stats and some common sense areas to work on.
Not happy with where your Instagram account is? Whether you’re shooting with a cell phone or a full frame pro camera like the Sony a7R III or Nikon D850, here are seven reasons why your photography may not be getting the attention it deserves along with tips on how to improve engagement and get more views and likes!
1. You’re Not Using Hashtags, Locations, Or Tagging Other Accounts
Yeah, hashtags sound and look pretty ridiculous, but the fact that they draw real eyes to your content can’t be denied. You may think that your photos shouldn’t need hashtags for people to flock to them, and maybe that’s true in a perfect world that wasn’t saturated with 80 million+ new Instagram photos — Every. Single. Day.
Would you eat at a restaurant that didn’t have a menu or a sign out front? If that restaurant didn’t advertise its existence how would anyone even know it was there? Hashtags are the signs in the window that tell people what’s cooking. You’ll want to do some research to see which tags are the most popular for the type of content you’re posting. Using established tags like #weddingphotography, #liveauthentic, or #lifeofadventure is a better bet for getting eyes on your images than using obscure, sentence-like hashtags like #itookthisnicepictureofaturtle.
Be well rounded in your hashtag usage — if you’re posting a photo you took of a flower at sunset in Oregon during the spring, you’ve got so many hashtag options that you can use to bring some visibility to your shot. You can search by location on Instagram too, so if you’re not worried about giving away your super secret photo location, be sure to tag the location as well for additional viewers, especially if the photo was taken at a popular destination or iconic spot.
To gain even more visibility, consider researching and tagging relevant popular Instagram accounts, especially those that feature the work of other photographers. For instance, you’ll find countless Instagram feature accounts that showcase niche content like photos of flowers, sunsets, Oregon, and even the springtime. Getting featured by one of these very popular accounts is a great way to increase your own following and get additional visibility for your work.
2. You’re Posting At The Wrong Time
You might be a night owl or one of those unusually-happy morning people, but if you’re posting all of your content on Instagram at 3AM when most people are sleeping or 7AM when most people are just contemplating making some coffee or hitting snooze for another half hour, you may not get as many eyes on your photography as you would if you post during the peak hours when people tend to be browsing Instagram. What these hours are depends a lot on who your target audience is and where they live, but generally the average person seems to be most active on Instagram right after typical work hours end around 5PM.
With 80% of the US population living in the Eastern and Central Time Zones, you may want to pay extra attention to what time it is there, even if you live somewhere else like the Pacific coast, where only around 15% of the US population lives.
3. You Think People Should Seek You Out
You’re going to need to tuck away the artistic ego and spread the love if you want to get the ball rolling on Instagram. Unless you’re already a big time celebrity, you’ll need to actually put in a little effort. Start by following some other users, liking some other photos, and commenting on some other people’s content. Fortunately, with more than 400 million monthly users, there are more than a few amazing accounts to follow and it’s pretty easy to find other people on Instagram who care about the same things you do, however obscure they might be.
4. You’re Acting Like A Robot
Is your strategy to build an Instagram following to just follow hundreds of accounts at random, hoping they’ll follow you back so that you can unfollow them a week later and improve your follower/following ratio? Do you copy and paste generic, meaningless compliments to dozens of photos, saying things like “nice pic” or “cool” — or, my personal favorite of the bad bunch, “not bad”? Savvy Instagrammers can spot these shortsighted tactics from a mile away! Engagement and authenticity is the real key to building a social media following that continues to grow organically.
You’ll find long term success on Instagram by interacting with a few accounts every day in a meaningful way, rather than by blanketing the web with spammy one word comments. Better to leave 10 heartfelt comments on photos you really like or identify with than 100 generic and forgettable comments. If you’re building a brand as a photographer, blogger, or virtually any other profession out there, will you stick out more in people’s minds by leaving genuine comments that forge a real connection and are unforgettable? I sure think so!
5. Your Content Is All Over The Place
Look at the most popular accounts of photographers on social media, and one thing you’ll find that virtually all of them have in common is that they post in a relatively homogenous style. Consistency really is key on social media, especially on a visual platform like Instagram, and although in addition to your serious photography work, you might also like taking photos of your dog, what you had for lunch, and how awesome you look in that new hat, you’re better off keeping your publicly shared photos on target.
Some Instagram photographers go as far as limiting the photos they post to a specific color palette of only pastel pink or light blue, but if you find this kind of specificity to be too limiting, just try to at least have a basic theme that you generally stick to. Think like the visual artist that you are, and be aware of what photo you posted previously — will it look nice next to the one you’re posting now?
6. You Don’t Post Often Enough
It’s no secret that people on the internet have pretty short attention spans. If your followers don’t hear from you for a while, you will see your follower count begin to drop. Keep your audience engaged by posting great photos on a consistent basis. A post or two each day is a good amount, but don’t let it go more than a few days without posting anything. If you don’t water that Instagram garden, it’s not going to grow!
7. You Post Way TOO Often
The flip side of not posting on Instagram enough is posting way too many photos, overwhelming the feeds of your followers. Yes, that first photo of a flower was gorgeous. That second one was pretty nice too. But that 10th one of the same flower from a slightly different angle? Let’s not get carried away.
Don’t flood the market with your genius! You might have an archive of thousands of amazing photos, but you’ll want to keep the flow nice and even and learn to curate your own work down to the very best shots — you might like all 15 photos that you took of one subject, but you’ll want to pick just a few to share, maybe even just one.