The best way to get creative with Instagram account is to imagine your profile as a gallery, a composition of photos that make sense to be together. When someone sees your profile they will be amazed at how it looks as a whole, not just one amazing photo and the rest not making much sense.
We will see the following ideas to get creative. Don’t think of doing all of these, pick two or three. Otherwise you will feel like you are going crazy.
- Branded Images (blog post covers, memes, and quotes) – As a blogger you should use branded images, not only on Instagram but on all your social media.
- Colors, Contrast, and Composition
- Effects and Enhancements
- Order
- Posting in groups of three
- Collages
- Tryptics, Banners are Giant Squares
Branded Images
The most important and best way to promote your blog on instagram is by posting branded images. These can be blog post covers, memes, or quotes; all created by you following your own brand guidelines. Posting blog post covers might not get much traffic to it but it will make sure to show that your Instagram account belongs to a blogger and gives you more credibility and with time, more readers.
You can make memes with funny thoughts or inspirational words. If you make these yourself you can brand them, or not. It’s up to you. Find quotes you like and feel you can relate to, and make your own graphics with them. Please make sure you include the author of the quote and if you use a photo that isn’t your own, credit the photographer unless its royalty free. It is best to choose quotes that have something to do with your niche.
You can make branded images on Photoshop, Canva, Picmonkey, Pixlr, or Pablo
Colors, Contrast and Composition
If you have branded your blog you might have chosen a color scheme. Even if you haven’t you might know by now what kind of look you give your blog. Is it bright, is it colorful, is it muted, is it contrasted? You can use these terms for your Instagram as well. Use these guidelines to make your Instagram profile feel unified. If you make sure all the photos you post follow those guidelines, you’re set. For example, make all your photos warm or cold, make them all with similar compositions or contrast. It might take some work and you won’t be able to post a photo instantly after you take it but it’s worth it in the end.
—————–
—————–
Effects and Enhancements
Right on Instagram you can put your photos through filters and effects that will change them to look very different to the original. It’s best to use the same three or four filters and switch them around than to use every single one. Another idea is to just use the same one on every photo but that could get boring. There are other apps with which you can retouch your photos to make them like you want them; Snapseed, Photoshop Express or Pixlr are a few worth mentioning.
Strategy and Order
Photos can surely be posted randomly or without previous thought, but if you want to up your game then you should consider a strategy on the order that your photos go up. You could create a pattern, for example; one branded graphic, one photo of a person, one photo of a thing and again a branded graphic, a person, a thing and so on. You can mix order and color, and make a pattern. One full color, one black and white, one full color, one black and white, and so on. You can also make an order so that the same kinds of photos are ending up on the same columns. If you do patterns of threes, then every three photos you post, the pattern will be in columns.
You obviously can post one photo at a time whenever you want, or you can post three at once; like the next technique.
Posting in Groups of Three
A specific kind of order is to post in groups of three. Create a strategy for every three; it could be similar color, similar subject, one branded image in the center and two accompanying images on the sides. It could be a quote in the middle, and a photo on each side that represents the quote. The possibilities here are endless, get creative!
Using Collages
You can post collages on Instagram too! The best app for doing this is Layout, Instagram takes you there automatically when you click on “collage”. There are many different layouts for collages, and you can make all sorts of artistic images this way. There is even an option to have no borders so you can make mirrored and kaleidoscopic images. Have fun with this, but don’t post all your photos as collages, only once in a while, or as part of an order pattern.
Triptychs, Diptychs, Rectangles and Giant Squares
Another creative way to post your images is by creating banners, triptychs and giant squares. This is a technique in which one image is cut into squares and posted separately and on your profile it looks like a larger image separated into a grid. The flip-side of this strategy is that once you do it, you have to keep it looking good so you have to start posting in groups so that the order is not disrupted.
There are a few apps that will do this for you, you can do it by hand, or with Photoshop or another editing program. It is difficult so you might as well use an app. Instagrids and Giant Square are the most popular but you will need to pay so that their logo doesn’t appear on your images.
I hope all these techniques have inspired you to get creative on your Instagram account while promoting your blog. Remember, talk about your blog on your Instagram, post branded graphics, and make it obvious that it’s a blogger’s account. Most important of all, have fun!
Before you leave be sure to give us some love and share on Twitter! We even made it easy for you 😉
[bctt tweet=”Can you promote your blog on Instagram? Of course! Let’s get creative! #instagram #socialmedia #blogging”]