How to Build your Personal Brand on Instagram

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Eight tips to better establish a more cohesive personal brand on Instagram.

Instagram is an essential tool for businesses hoping to forge connections with existing and potential customers. But apart from being just a social network for businesses, Instagram can also be a major platform for building up your personal brand.

How do you build your personal brand on Instagram? Here are eight tips to better establish a more cohesive personal brand on Instagram.

1. Craft a Succinct Profile Bio

Use short and precise information on your profile to explain what your brand is about and what you deal with. It should define who you are to all those who visit your profile. Choose a good photo or logo.  Indicate your website or blog URL.

2. Share Your Authentic Story

Whether you are promoting yourself or your business, be confident in who you are and what you are offering. Build on your strengths. Unique and authentic brands are the most successful brands on Instagram and other social media platforms.

A lot of times people post things which they think their followers will like and end up posting photos that have nothing to do with them or their brand.

If you want to make Instagram branding work for you, then you have to be unique and engaging. Be yourself and share your authentic story.

3. Build a Cohesive Visual Grid

Generally, accounts on Instagram tend to be more successful when there’s some type of theme or unifying trend that brings the account together.

The best strategy is to find something about your personal life that lends itself to photographs, and then develop a content strategy around that idea.

When you have an established theme in place for your content, you’ll start to attract more people to your account.

4. Create Your Own Content

Not every single photo you take is worth sharing. Take time to choose images that tell a story or elicit emotion.

Everything you post should have a story behind it — something that pulls the viewer into the frame and allows them to understand what’s happening.

The best Instagram posts are the ones where users can feel something was happening before and after the pictures were shot. Use apps (not filters) to enhance your photos. Try apps like FaceTune or Afterlight.

5. Follow the 80/20 Rule

Posting about yourself repeatedly on social media is like being that person at a party who talks constantly about themselves. Your audience needs to enjoy seeing your posts, and without a sales pitch!

80% of your social posts should be interesting, shareable and quality content. It can be anything like information related to your business, news, inspirational quotes, questions, interesting facts and quizzes.

Audiences always like interesting and educative content, they react to such posts and also share it with their followers.

20% of your content on Instagram should be about your brand. Include every bit of information like your products, services, assets and all that information which benefits your audience and contributes in making right decision about your brand.

Your content should be so impressive that it makes your audience love you!

6. Use Hashtags & Geo Tags

Hashtags are like SEO for your photos on Instagram. If you don’t use them, no one will find your photos.

Use hashtags in your profile, such as a location, a hashtag you created for your business, or hashtags related to the industry you’re in. It will help people find you when you match their search criteria.

Geotags are a great way to get your content shared as well as connect with members of your audience and build a stronger personal brand. Using geo-locations make people aware of your exact location on the image that you post.

This makes your images geographically ordered and also indicates that your images are exclusive and genuine. You can also maintain privacy by deactivating the feature if you don’t want to show it.

7. Reply to Your Comments

Interacting with fellow users and followers is one of the biggest factors for building up a brand. If you’re generating a reasonable number of comments (less than 50 per post) then you should respond to all comments. Minus the trolls, of course.

8. Comment on Other Profiles

The real value of sharing photos on Instagram comes through interacting with the people who view your content. If someone took the time to leave a comment on your post — post an interesting comment on theirs as well.

Comment in a way that lets them know you are not a troll and that you actually took the time to read their post. Seek out other like-minded profiles and do the same.

This is where you can turn a casual browser into a fan, and perhaps develop that fan into a real friend, business partner or collaborator.