You’re a photographer, you have all the beautiful pictures you could need at your fingertips - growing your Instagram account should be easy, right? If only!
Although beautiful pictures can help you out a ton, alone they are not enough to help your account grow.
If you feel stuck in a rut or you’ve plateaued and you just can’t seem to grow your Instagram account, here are my top 5 tips to help you grow. You need a combination of:
- Great Content
- Discoverability
- Engagement
and each of these are covered in my top five tips!
1. Use Your Bio
Your bio comes under the content category. Once you have traffic to your account if that audience isn’t following you in sufficient number, that could be down to your bio. Make sure you include your actual first name and also what you do. Remember to focus on the benefits you offer, not your services, and always add a call to action. Here’s mine as an example
And an example of what yours could say:
Helen | Portrait Photographer (this section is limited to 30 characters)
💜Helping parents create keepsake portraits
💜Relaxed, editorial style images you’ll adore
💜Teesside based
💜Download my free brochure 👇
2. Use Video
We know that Instagram is biased towards video content so make full use of this on your account. Reels are super easy to use and as a photographer, you have a ton of material you could use. Even if you don’t want to appear in videos yourself, you can make slideshows of images, film your sets and props, create reels of before and afters when editing, the list is endless.
3. Use Hashtags
Hashtags can never correct poor content but they can help good content be more discoverable. There has recently been much discussion amongst social media professionals around how many hashtags to use on each post. Personally, I think the general rule of thumb should be that your hashtags are simply relevant. Each account is different, just as audience profiles are. So what works well for your account, might not apply to my account. Instagram itself is a great place to do a bit of hashtag research - try to use a mix of hashtags that vary from popular to niche - but always make sure they are relevant. Using #love will not make you more discoverable - unless you maybe have a dating app?
4. Be Social
I say this a lot but it’s called social media because it primarily relies on you being social. But you need to be social in the right way. The more time you spend looking at other photographers accounts, commenting on your photography friends images and generally hanging out on Instagram with photographers - the more Instagram will think you want to meet other photographers. This is perfect if your clients are other photographers, but if your ideal client is a mum aged 25-35, living in Manchester, with 2 children and a pet cockapoo, working shifts as a nurse - then you need to switch it up!! Seek out clients and ideal clients and follow them. Comment on their images in a genuine manner using more than three words and look at the hashtags they use on their posts. Find more accounts just like theirs and interact genuinely with those too. You’ll soon find your following growing with the correct type of audience.
5. Post Great Content
This one is perhaps the holy grail. It’s very tempting as a photographer to post your beautiful images and hope they’ll do the hard work for you. But you need so much more than beautiful still images to grow your account. What makes your ideal client stop scrolling? What makes them smile, what resonates with them, what content do they identify with enough to share or save? The answers to these questions will point you in the right direction of great content. Make sure you regularly check your insights and make note of your top 6 posts in terms of engagement (these may be skewed if you have a lot of followers who aren’t your ideal clients). Those top 6 are what you want to create more of!
If creating great content is a struggle for you, try our done for you content. Think of it as a set of monthly caption templates. You take them, tweak them, personalise them and you very quickly have a full month of interesting and engaging content that helps to grow your account with the right audience. I even give you the Canva templates to compliment your captions! Get your first 30 days of content here
Finally, don’t get hung up on the numbers. Concentrate instead on the results - what does your account bring you in terms of DM’s, enquiries, and ultimately bookings? There are accounts with over 10k followers who are far less effective at generating clients than competitors with just a couple of thousand. Quality wins over quantity every time!