Instagram is a great tool you can use to connect to your audience. You can post videos and images, find new people with hashtags, and more.
The Creative Penn shares 10 helpful tips on how to use Instagram as an author and grow your following. It also walks you through how to set up your own account, if you don’t already have one. Some ideas of what authors can post include poems, displayed as a image, cover reveals, images of what inspire you, Grammar memes, quotes, and events. To grow your following, the post recommends choosing a regular posting schedule, cross promoting, creating themes, sharing other people’s posts, and including faces in some of your images.
Instagram is also known for having influencers, and micro-influencers. Buffer has a go-to guide for microinfluencers, people with 1,000 to 10,000 followers. The guide recommends working with these type of influencers because they have a high engagement rate, and they are cost effective. They may not have as much of a reach as bigger influencers, but they do well in their niche. When looking to work with a micro-influencer, make sure that they post quality content, and that they engage. The best types of micro-influencers are people who are your fans, and maybe even local businesses. You can work with them by promoting events, discounts, and more.
On the other side of that, if you have a strong following, even under 10,000 followers, you can actually make money with your Instagram account. Alex Tooby shares a list of accounts with under 10,000 followers who are doing well. They post beautiful images and videos, and are very engaged with their audience.
You can also sell products from Instagram. One way to do that is to use a platform called Planoly, which helps you schedule posts (another scheduling tool is PLANN). Both Planoly and PLANN allow you to create your caption, with hashtags, ahead of time, and then easily transfer your image or video with that caption to your Instagram post. You can schedule when you want to post to Instagram, and the tools will send you a notification. Planoly also has a new tool called Shoppable, which lets people shop for your products via your posts or your bio.
Instagram has a number of tools that you can use. You can now archive your posts to hide them, use location and hashtags to see what’s happening around you, and share relevant, personal stories. Jaimie Myers has a guide on using Instagram Stories, which recommends showing your face, showing a complete story, and tagging people to have conversations.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2017.
