The Optimal Posting Strategy (Steps 2 - 6)

Step 2: Optimize your profile for SEO and follows

In step 1 we covered each of Instagram’s main posting features and types of posts that are best for engagement and virality.

In steps 2 through 6 we'll move on to growth strategies that will help get your content in front of new audiences and convert them into followers.

Outside of paid methods, there are only a handful of ways to do this:

1. Optimizing your profile for SEO and followers
2. Interacting with other accounts
3. Pursuing organic partnerships and collaborations

When your content reaches new audiences, you want them to click through to your profile and tap “follow.”

People who visit your profile page are more inclined to follow you when:

• They understand your value props without having to think too much.
• They’re able to self-identify with a distinct theme that’s relevant to their interests.
• They intuit that your account is real, active, and focused on the audience rather than itself.

Elements of a high-converting profile:

• Username: Include your company name at the front of your username for SEO.
• Name and description: Include relevant industry keywords in the name field for searchability.
• Add a CTA: Include a CTA that brings followers into your sales funnel or sends them to a product page (could be a link or DM invitation).
• Highlights: Showcase your best stories (results, valuable tips, PR).
• Home feed: For evergreen content that accurately portrays your brand and specific value you provide. Posts should complement each other to create a cohesive grid and aesthetic

Here are a few solid examples of profile bios that are optimized for search and clearly articulate what value they have to offer:

Consideration: Be mindful of your grid aesthetic, but don't overthink it

After someone stops scrolling to view your post and click through to your profile, they’re going to make a decision to follow you or not. A strong profile can make a strong first impression and entice someone to follow. The look and feel of your home feed grid is one of the elements visitors will look at first.

This is not something to focus on if you’re just getting started. Once you have several weeks of posts, begin to consider the aesthetic of your most recent 12 feed posts:

• What’s the theme? Is there one?
• Is it entertaining? Informative? Beautiful?
• What’s your value proposition?
• How will you convey your story, your why?

It’s common for large established brands to invest heavily into a well-manicured grid layout:

Or be sure to include product shots in every single post. Like Magic Spoon, who we referenced earlier:

Your audience will appreciate a visually-attractive feed, but don’t spend a ton of time on this unless visuals are the overwhelming driver of intrigue for your products or spreading brand awareness is your goal.

Ultimately, when you stick to answering the question, “what’s in it for me?” and focus on quality content, your feed will organically take shape and frame your brand in a desirable way.

Example: Legion

When someone arrives on Legion’s profile, it is abundantly clear what they are all about — they sell high-quality supplements that help people get in shape.

Notice how only one of twelve posts in this grid view is self-promotional. The rest focus on helping their audience have better workouts, stay motivated, and feel excited about their own personal health and fitness journey.

Legion sells products and coaching services that help people lose weight and build muscle. Testimonials, results, and before-and-after photos act as powerful visual social proof for curious visitors. This shows that real people are getting real results, and suggests Legion products are helping them do that.

Example: Dain Walker

Dain Walker runs the full-service digital marketing agency Victory Front, and follows a consistent templated approach with his posts.

Notice how every post has a clear value proposition with one big idea or insight. If you’re a service business, using headlines that take up 50% of the visual can help increase clicks.

Takeaway: You don’t need to be precious about investing in highly-polished visual flair if you can identify your brand's core themes and sub-categories that help convey the broader narrative—your why.

Step 3: Interact with other accounts

Earlier when we covered how the algorithm works, we mentioned that relationship is one of the three main factors the algo looks at when determining content to favor.

When you constantly interact with other accounts, using Instagram’s full spectrum of features, you’ll be rewarded with greater reach and access to new audiences.

Plan to spend at least 30 minutes a day socializing in a meaningful way:

• Make sure to like and reply to comments on your brand page. Reply to inbound DMs, reply to comments, and like photos. This shows Instagram and your followers that your account is alive and active, someone worth paying attention to. If any followers mention or tag you, consider sharing that content either via a post or stories.
• Interact with top posts for relevant hashtags. Perform a search for the top 10-20 popular hashtags in your industry and make a point to interact with the top posts for each hashtag daily (these will change every day).
• Keep tabs on adjacent brands. Turn on notifications for profiles in your space. Each time someone posts or comments you’ll receive a notification. Reply or comment to add to the conversation and show you’ve consumed their content.
• Engage with stories and reels. Respond to prompts and engagement stickers in Stories you watch. Sharing other brands’ content in your Stories is a good way to network, spread your own company values, and remind the algo that you’re an active user worth rewarding.
• Like and comment on their followers’ posts. Tip: look for accounts with high engagement:followers ratio on the last 10 posts. This means their followers are real. Follow these users, enable notifications, and look for opportunities to add to the conversation.

Step 4: Seek out partnerships

Interacting with other accounts helps put you in good standing with the algorithm, and can indirectly help get in front of new audiences.

Brand-by-brand partnerships give you direct access to audiences and are one of the only ways to increase your reach organically. The goal with partnerships is to absorb followers from large accounts with similar audiences.

Look for complementary brands who aren’t direct competitors.

Even if you don’t have the resources to invest in influencer marketing, you can arrange organic partnerships to show your content to new audiences.

There are two main strategies to experiment with:

1. Gifting: Send influencers free products in exchange for content promotion. Keep in mind that the bigger the influencer, the more engaged and loyal their audiences are likely to be. They might be more stringent with who they partner with, and likely past the point of gifting as an attractive offer.
2. Share-for-share (S4S): The same as gifting, but for mutual content promotion.

To maximize your hit rate, we recommend engaging with your target’s content in advance.

We say this for two reasons:

• Reason 1: If they’ve already seen you like, comment, and reshare their content, they’ll be more likely to reply to your DM and entertain a conversation.
• Reason 2: Relationship is a key ranking factor, remember. By interacting with other accounts in your space, you’ll earn algorithmic brownie points (the best kind).

When you do reach out, remember that a real person is behind the company account. Do some research and personalize your message to show them you made the effort to familiarize with their brand and audience, and when you reach out with the ask, make it easy for them to say yes.

You can do this by pointing out how a collaboration would be in their audience’s interest.

Example: Protein Cookie Butter

To help promote a new product launch, Protein Cookie Butter recruited the help of a few content creators and influencers in the health and fitness space.

While it’s hard to tell whether this was paid or unpaid, you see how powerful this can be.

Three profiles introduced the new product to their audiences using the Story feature.

Protein Cookie Butter then re-shared each of their stories to his Story feed.

Everyone who participated in the collaboration benefitted:

• Protein Cookie Butter introduced their new product to three relevant, new audiences.
• Participating accounts gained exposure to Protein Cookie Butter’s audience—an opportunity to acquire new followers who might be interested in their products too.
• Social proof builds anticipation and desire for the new product amongst Protein Cookie Butter’s existing audience

Example: Eat Pastry Cookie Dough

To enter this group giveaway, you had to follow all participating brands and tag three friends.

Niche food products work especially well because:

• Decadent foods, snacks, and treats are inherently visual
• Giving away free product doesn’t cost you anything
• Niche market,  broad appeal (everyone loves to eat and it taps into the tribal, community element to the product selection)

Example: Poppi

Poppi, who you met earlier, held a joint giveaway with a complementary apparel brand, Zig Zag Goods.

Both brands posted the giveaway to their feeds and tagged each other.

Poppi shared the post as a Story:

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To enter, contestants had to like, follow, and tag both brands.

To make this even better,  Poppi could have made re-sharing the post to Stories a mandatory rule for entry.

Example: The Sill

Guest posting is a common tactic content creators use to show their work to new audiences (and, typically, generate valuable backlinks in the process).This example follows that same approach.

The Sill has a massive following on Instagram. They sell indoor plants online and from their retail locations in a few major U.S. cities.

Their collaborator, Canopy, has a much smaller following. They sell small humidifier units and market the benefits they have on skin health and breathing air quality.

Most likely Canopy approached The Sill with a guest post offer, knowing they share a similar audience.

The Sill agreed because they received a free piece of quality, relevant content (plus partial credit for the post) that their audience cares about.

The result: Canopy gains mass exposure to The Sill’s audience (78x the number of followers).

• The post was liked nearly 6,000 times and generated dozens of authentic comments.
• The content is a perfect fit because it addresses a common concern among plant owners: humidity levels.
• Keeping plants alive is perhaps the most common struggle for The Still’s audience, and humidity is an important variable in a plant’s health and longevity.

Step 5: Strategies to turn followers into leads and customers

In the last step we showed you how to seek out organic partnerships using these proven methods:

• Gifting and mutual content promotion
• Joint giveaways
• Guest posting

In this section, we’ll walk through the tactics that will give you the best chance of converting followers into leads and paying customers.

Here are the tactics:

1. Use swipe-ups to drive traffic
2. Test different profile links
3. Tag your products in shoppable posts

Use the swipe-up feature.

If you have 10k or more followers, you can unlock the swipe up feature in your stories that lets you send traffic to a link of your choosing.

To make the most of this feature in your stories, we recommend storyboarding what you need to communicate before asking your followers to swipe up and visit an offer link.

Example: Brave Social Media Marketing

To promote his book for agency owners, Marketing Harry posted a mini-training delivered through a sequence of stories, then finished with the swipe up feature and CTA:  an offer to buy his new book.

This strategy is similar to tweet storms on twitter or email drip campaigns: both are designed to deliver a ton of value first, and escalate towards a reasonable and expected ask at the end.

In the example above, the value was delivered as a free mini training on increasing engagement with your social media audience.

• Throughout his 6-sequence “Story storm” he included multiple polls to boost engagement and ask for critical feedback.
• He shared actionable tips to help improve social media engagement metrics.
• In the final Story he mentioned the book and used the swipe up feature to drive traffic to a landing page to collect emails and show them an offer for the book

Example: Precision Nutrition

Here’s a similar flow for health coaching company, Precision Nutrition.

Unlike the previous example, Precision Nutrition led with a clear offer (open enrollment for a coaching program with the first month free). The sequence went like this:

• Introduce offer and include swipe up link to a landing page with more information.
• Give value by answering relevant FAQs in individual stories throughout the day.
• Take breaks to drive traffic to valuable and related content and free lead magnets.
• End the sequence with a final CTA emphasizing the special offer: swipe up see more on the offer landing page.

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TIP: If you are going to use this strategy, make sure your landing page is optimized for mobile experience.

Drive traffic to a link in your profile bio

If you don’t have the swipe up feature yet, you’ll want to take full advantage of the link in your bio to test different offers.

Like blog posts or gated lead magnets.

Or a link to download your app from the app store.

Insight: Avoid using links in your captions

Links aren’t clickable in your captions, so don’t include them. Most users won’t want to manually copy and paste a link into their mobile browsers. Including caption links is poor UX and a sure way to tank click-through rate.

If you want to drive traffic to multiple destinations off-app, consider using an Instagram link service like Linktree or Linkin.bio.

Linktree lets you create a no-frills directory of links for you to drive traffic to.

Linkin.bio is a little more sophisticated because you can create a dynamic, trackable link to a custom feed page with posts that link out to your URLs.

Tag products in shoppable posts

This is without a doubt the most powerful strategy to acquire customers from Instagram. But to take advantage of it you must sell physical products.

This feature allows you to tag products featured in your photos or Reels videos.

When a user taps the photo, the tag pops up with the price and allows the user to tap the tag to buy the item either through the website, or, if you qualify, directly through Instagram’s ecommerce platform.

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Provided your company sells products that are eligible and compliant with Instagram’s terms and policies, this shopping feature lets you to list products for sale and link to them directly in your content.

Setting up a store page is pretty straightforward. All you need is a business account, and make sure you meet the requirements. You can even take it one step further and set up Instagram Checkout for a completely native ecom shopping experience.

Take notice: Instagram has been consistently building out new features to support native ecommerce experiences. That means if you sell D2C products online, you should keep an eye out for new updates and features that could make it even easier for your company to make sales on Instagram.

Example: Patrick Ta Beauty

This is the ideal example because a user can discover the product, learn about it, desire it, and buy all within the Instagram app. For an ecommerce product company, that’s incredible.

The shopping bag icons at the top right-hand corner of certain posts indicate that shoppable product tags are being used. You can use them in both feed posts and Reels.

Note the engagement: 159 comments and over 7,000 likes.

As we covered earlier on, Reels work great for boosting engagement when you can capture interesting textures and real-world product applications. This example works because it depicts the vibrant colors and textures, which is exactly what you want to do for this type of product.

As a prospect, this type of content gets you thinking about the various ways these products could look like on your own skin, which creates desire.

To learn more about the product, users can click through to a product collection page with products featured in the Reel.

• Add a product to cart or buy now
• Buy now takes you straight to a checkout page
• Or if you’re window shopping, you can add it to a wishlist and save it for later.

Step 6: Use tools to help streamline the process

Tools will save you time. Time you can spend creating quality content and community building. Here’s a list of our favorites:

Content management

• Later for post scheduling. With Later, you can pre-plan your posts, for various times in a day, week, or month — with the context, tags, and hashtags, if you wish.
• Dollar Eighty for fast and convenient interactions on desktop.
• Facebook Creator Studio for manual posting on desktop.

Tracking and analytics

• Flick or Iconosquare for hashtag research.
• Modash spam checker and influencer research tool.
• Instagram Insights is Instagram’s free built-in analytics tool.

Image editing & design

• Word Swag, a simple image and text overlay mobile app.
• Canva for content creation on desktop.
• Flocked to write clean, nicely-formatted captions to copy and paste.

Video editing

• Wavve lets you turn a podcast clip into an Instagram Story.
• Inshot is a popular all-purpose video editing app for mobile devices.
• Clips is a nifty app that adds subtitles to your videos while you record.

Free stock imagery

• Pexels
• Unsplash
• Pixabay

Organic Instagram do's and don'ts

Do

• Delete bought or fake followers. To remove followers manually, tap the follower number in your profile and start removing followers. If you have more than 5k followers, consider hiring someone for $25 to do this work for you.
• Maintain an aesthetic on your profile feed to encourage followers.
• Invite your existing community to follow you on Instagram. Send them a newsletter and give them a reason to join. Give them a discount. Host a subscriber-only giveaway. Plan a special AMA on IG Live (use the countdown timer in your stories to give your followers the heads-up).
• Create a memorable branded hashtag. Check it periodically to source new UGC content to share. Incorporate it into the rules of an upcoming giveaway to give it a push.
• Repurpose content while you get going. Repost YouTube videos on your IGTV. Post podcast clips. Take screenshots of tweets and turn them into feed posts.

Don’t

• Buy followers, likes, or use automated engagement tools, services, or bots. Fake engagement may inflate your vanity metrics, but it won’t contribute to your growth. And it’s not worth the risk of breaking Instagam’s terms of service and getting your account banned.
• Join engagement groups (your intentions might be good, but you have no control over other people’s behavior). Plus, Instagram can detect unnatural automated behavior and they’ll ding you for it.
• Focus your content on status or looks. Teach your followers something new. Show them how to get the most value from your products. You’ll attract a loyal audience that way.