Getting Started with Organic Instagram

Quick recap. Here’s what we covered so far:

• Context: Instagram is less about pure acquisition than it is about community building and conversion.
• Opportunity: People already interact with brands and use Instagram’s native shopping features.
• Fit: B2C ecommerce, creative service businesses, and apps are best suited for Instagram.
• Goals: Post great content that drives engagement, and focus on conversion tactics to acquire leads and customers.
• Metrics: Reach, impressions, engagement rate, and views and shares are the top 4 metrics to measure.

In this section, we’ll cover 3 key strategies that, when implemented, will ensure you get started on the right foot and have the best shot at success with your content strategy. You will:

1. Ideate content topics: Generate core topics that align with your value props and the audience’s expectations to achieve customer-content fit.
2. Study your competition: Reverse-engineer your competition’s strategy to find out what they’re doing well. Use those learnings to inform and inspire your content and post format.
3. Unpack Instagram’s algorithm: Follow best practices to get rewarded by the algo for greater reach and discoverability.

Let’s look at each step in detail:

Ideate content topics

Brands that have the most success with Organic Instagram have what we call customer-content fit.

Customer-content fit is reached when you figure out which types of content work best to communicate your value props in a way that resonates with your target audience.

The key is to strike a balance between what you think your brand is about and what people react favorably to. Resonance happens at the intersection of those two things.

Pay close attention to these reactions to content:

• Thoughtful comments and replies
• People sharing your content
• People saving your content for later

When you start seeing a steady increase in likes, comments, replies, shares, and saves over time, that's a clear sign that your content is resonating and you’re on your way to achieving customer-content fit.

Step in your customer's shoes and create 3-5 content "buckets"

Note: This exercise will save you a ton of time on content creation.

Content buckets are distinct themes, topics, or categories that represent your brand and function as a convenient framework to schedule and design content.

Like your value props, content buckets are the starting point for every piece of content you make—they give your content direction.

If you already went through our ads modules, you can look to your winning ad sets and creatives to help inform your initial content buckets. Otherwise, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself:

What might your target audience expect to see you post about on Instagram?

Brainstorm 3-5 content buckets that meet those expectations. This should feel intuitive. Some examples:

Example: Legion

Legion is an ecom fitness supplement brand that uses 6 clear content buckets. Each new post falls into a bucket. This gives their content purpose, and their strategy, direction.

The first content buckets you brainstorm will be educated guesses. And that’s fine. Use your intuition and existing knowledge of your customers and business. Turn to your value props and customer research.

Research adjacent brands and shared audiences

Creating and executing a content strategy is time-consuming—so don’t make the mistake of  launching into content creation without doing your due diligence.

Research at this early stage serves two purposes:

1. Learn what types of content drive the most organic engagement and reach in your niche.
2. Discover adjacent brands who can help you access new audiences to accelerate growth.

When you familiarize yourself with the culture and sentiment of your target audience, you can use that insider knowledge to make better strategic (and creative) decisions with your content.

The best way to learn what types of content could work well for your company is to reverse engineer the success that other creators have. Here’s how to do it:

1. Find a direct competitor’s account with Instagram’s search function:  Click the dropdown arrow in their profile header to see similar accounts and make a note of direct competitors or adjacent brands targeting your same audience.
2. Browse recent posts, scan for hashtag patterns: When you’re researching other accounts, look for frequently-used hashtags (look within captions and comments).
3. See what’s resonating: Clicking into a hashtag will take you to a feed page featuring popular and most recent posts associated with a particular hashtag. Use this method to learn which post formats and topics are resonating in your industry.
4. Assemble a list of at least 30 relevant hashtags: You’ll use relevant hashtags to help optimize your content for search and discovery when it’s time to start posting.

As you start to get a sense of what types of content performs best, pay close attention to:

• Engagement: What content topics get the most comments, shares, saves, tags?
• Post type: Which post formats are resonating the most?

Between these two elements, you should start to see some patterns. The point isn’t to copy other people’s content, but study the structure and replicate it in your strategy.

Insight: Verify authentic engagement

Authentic engagement with users has the most positive and longest-lasting impact on growth. That’s why our goal at this step is to find relevant companies that have a high-quality and real audience.

As you begin looking at relevant hashtags and the companies that use them, you'll soon notice that fake or shallow engagement is rampant.

Thankfully, fake engagement is easy to spot.

One word comments like “nice!” or “cool!” or the colorful waste bin of ❤️ 👍 🔥 emojis are dead giveaways.

Authentic engagement, conversely, is equally obvious. It looks like this:

• Only people who consumed the post could leave thoughtful comments and pointed questions.

You’ll want to be more vigilant about fake engagement if you’re scouting influencer marketing opportunities (covered in our influencer module), but in our case we just want to make sure we’re studying brands that have real followers that they earned through high quality content, not just bots or “ghost followers.”

How the Instagram algorithm works

Similar to the way Google ranks websites, Instagram’s algorithm functions as the gatekeeper between your content and the audiences you're trying to reach.

It’s been reported that the algorithm detects over 1,000 data points, but according to Instagram, there are 3 factors that matter most:

• Interest: Instagram uses past behavior to "predict" which content you'll enjoy seeing and engaging with in the future.
• Recency: Recent posts are prioritized above older posts.
• Relationship: Instagram prioritizes content from accounts you interact with frequently.

Instagram doesn’t tell us exactly how it works, but we do know that the key to getting your content seen by both followers and new audiences is straightforward: post good content. Post it consistently. And be sure to interact with others.

We recommend sticking to these best practices:

• Commit to quality: Content quality matters just as much to the algorithm as it does your audience. You need strong engagement to signal that your content is quality. But in order for people to engage with your content in the first place, you need the algorithm on your side to show it to them.
• Be consistent: Instagram uses machine learning to "learn" from past user behavior and anticipate what future content they’re likely to consume and interact with, and from which accounts.

Insight: Organic reach exists on a continuum

The better your content performs, the better it will continue to perform.

Conversely, if after a run of great posts you hit a rough patch of duds, the algo will reduce your reach as a response to your content’s dip in engagement.

Here’s an example of how a post might play out if you had 1000 followers. We've heard that the algorithm surfaces content to 10% of your organic followers at a time:

• You post. Instagram serves the content to your 100 most engaged followers.
• If engagement is strong, the post is shown to another 100 followers.
• If the trend continues, the content may appear on a relevant hashtag page or featured on the Explore page.
• Next, the post is shown to similar non-follower audiences (like a Facebook lookalike audience), higher on the Explore page, or as a suggested post in a related audience's feed to gauge response.
• If the response continues to be positive, and engagement is strong, the algorithm will continue serving the post to broader audiences on hashtag and Explore pages, lookalike audiences, and to more of your own followers.

This would be the best-case scenario, and it certainly isn’t typical. It’s unlikely that your entire audience will ever see your post, but you can see how engagement directly contributes to expanding organic reach.

TIP: Stay on top of the algorithm

Instagram is continually adjusting and refining the algorithm to provide the optimal user experience. To stay on top of the latest updates and best practices, make sure to follow the official @creators account for practical guidance that comes directly from Instagram’s development team.