Instagram is good for uploading your vacation pictures, but you can do more with it. If you’re a creative fellow, perhaps a writer, Mc, artist, etc., you could use this beautiful platform to showcase your skill and build your brand. You can make videos, write content, or upload beautiful pictures showcasing your creativity. Since the number of viewers your content gets depends on the follower base. You need a significant number of followers to build an excellent personal brand on Instagram, showcase your authority, and captivate an employer’s attention.
If you’re successful with your brand, you could get hired by individuals and organizations that need your kind of service. Therefore, in this article, we’ve explained everything you should know about building a personal brand on Instagram.
9 Tips for building a personal brand on Instagram
People tend to believe the content they see on pages with many followers. Hence, if you’re able to build a good strategy that attracts more people to follow your page, you’ll earn more trust, your content will get more engagement, and soon, you’ll become an influencer. As an IG influencer, you could be hired by businesses to market their products and services and get paid to do so.
Therefore, the following tips will help you build a successful personal brand on Instagram
· Define your goals
· Create a new Instagram account
· Create a strategy
· Meet celebrities and influencers
· Interview celebrity and influencers
· Create Instagram ads
· Engage on Instagram
· Send DMs
· Use the power of a hashtag
Define your goals
When you have clearly defined goals, people already know what content to expect once they come across your name on IG.
Create a new Instagram account
No! You don’t have to delete your current IG account, but it’ll help if you register a public, professional account once you decide to build your personal brand. In the past, when you never thought of owning a personal brand, you might have uploaded some implicative content that your employers might come across and decide not to hire you.
Such content might include provocative text, video, or pictures. If you decide to continue with your current account and delete all the provocative content you’ve uploaded in the past, you might miss out on some which could stand against you in the future.
Before any firm invests in hiring you, they’ll first scrutinize your profile to see if you’re truly worth their investment. Therefore, if you register a new IG account, you’ll be careful about mistakes some persons make and the sort of content you put out there and only upload professional content that aligns with your goals.
It is better to sign up for an Instagram business account to build your personal brand. It provides you access to more tools, including analytics about your audience. It also allows you to run Instagram ads, which you can’t have with a private account. With such ads, you can promote your page to reach a larger audience and gain more Instagram followers.
Create a strategy
To quickly grow your brand on IG, you need to upload relevant content often. Therefore, to not run out of ideas or post irrelevant content, you need a strategy. Your strategy should include what to post and when to post.
One of the best things you can post is positive quotes. You necessarily don’t have to rack your brain to come up with an insightful quote; Google can do the magic for you. You can copy and paste the quote on your page, or you can save the picture and upload it as seen on Caroline Kelso Zook page, a user with 21.3k Instagram followers.
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Quotes have a way of making you appear more brilliant and reveals your personality to your followers. People are more attracted to positive people; therefore, if you upload positive motivational quotes on your page, more people will develop an interest in you and you’ll gain more followers.
Meet celebrities and influencers
An excellent strategy to build your brand is to take pictures with celebrities or influencers in your field and upload them on your page. If you do, people will begin to think highly of you and accord more respect to you. With that, you’ll gain more credibility on Instagram.
Interview celebrity and influencers
Interviewing influencers is another excellent strategy to gain credibility and rapidly grow your personal brand on Instagram. This could be a recorded interview or a live session. However, for maximum participation and optimum result, it is better to opt for the live interview. Look for essential issues people want to be addressed and discuss them with the influencer. The influencers presence on your page will attract more visitors who may end up following you.
Create Instagram ads
Instagram ads allow you to reach a new audience who might end up following your page. Thus, if you upload valuable content that gets so much organic engagement, you could do more by advertising the content. That way, Instagram will push the content to a targeted audience and it’ll get more engagement.
Instagram ads don’t cost much. You can run an ad for as little as $1 and as much as you desire, depending on your budget and how many people you want the content to reach. You don’t need a professional to run ads for you; you can do it yourself. All you need is to follow the steps below:
- Open your ads manager
- Click create
- Select an objective that allows you to run ads placement
- Click continue
- You’ll be provided with an interface to fill in the details of your ad set. Fill in the required details
- Click manual placements and click Instagram. That way, your ads will only run on Instagram
- Click on continue
Engage on Instagram
You can’t make a name for yourself on IG by adopting the “posting and forgetting” approach. Instead, you must redefine your strategy. When you post content on your page, you should stay online for the next 30 min to one hour to reply to one or two comments. When people see you respond to a person’s comment, they automatically want to air their views, perhaps to get your attention. The more people interact with your content, the better its organic reach. This can go a long way to get you more IG followers.
Besides replying to comments under your post, you should also expand your coast and comment on relevant content posted by other pages. Endeavor to engage with companies or people you like and would love to work with.
On the other hand, you should avoid the “always want to say something syndrome.” When you say too much, you might say irrelevant things, thus, ridiculing your brand.
To get an excellent result interacting with pages, you should follow the tips below:
- Be among the first people to comment on VIP posts. This includes posts by your dream companies or your favorite influencer. This will make your comment stay at the top, thus, gaining more views and interaction from other commenters
- Write meaningful and insightful comment
- Add suitable emoji to your comment
- Reply to popular comments
- Be positive
Send DMs
Don’t hesitate to send a direct message to influencers or any company you wish to work with. For influencers, you could send them a DM perhaps to help share the exciting content on your page. Be persuasive in your choice of words in their DM and add a link to the content. Since they have a fan base already, if they agree to share your content, it will gain massive organic views, and many of the viewers might eventually follow your page.
On the other hand, if you think you already have all it takes to be hired by a company, you don’t have to wait for them to discover your potential. Remember there are several Instagram influencers they can opt for; you can stand out and beat the competition by sending them a direct message. Explain why you’re a good candidate they should hire. If they find you worthy of their investment, they will likely be glad to patronize you.
Once a company hires you, perhaps to market their product on your page or for whatever kind of service you can render, several benefits await you. Besides the monetary value, such a company might also help to share your content on their page. If they already have a large fan base, many of their followers might follow your page as well.
Use the power of the hashtag
Look for whatever is trending on Instagram and add its hashtag to your content. When people search for the trending hashtag, they’ll likely see your content. This is an excellent approach you can adopt to gain more organic views for your content on Instagram, and of course, more followers.
You can also tag the companies you intend to work within your post. When you tag a company or a person, Instagram will notify them; thus, they can view your content. If you tag them often and your content is relevant, they may see value in you and work with you.
One common mistake that newbies make when tagging companies or individuals on Instagram is that they type out the names and assume they’ve done it correctly. Unfortunately, that is not how to tag. To do it rightly, you should start by typing @ before the name.
For instance, Peng man is a male model with 24.4k Instagram followers. In his post below, you can see the two significant hashtags he uses — #styleinfluencer and #vidaloca. The former has over 2.2M posts, while the latter has 424k posts. You can do the same.
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If you’re ready to make more money, perhaps it’s time to redefine the way you use Instagram. You can do more than uploading beautiful holiday pictures and videos; you can build a career there too. You can achieve this by following the easy tricks explained in this article.
