Improve Your Social Presence in Instagram
I have been on Instagram for almost a year now. My interest in it only picked up speed after shifting to the iPhone 4S which I found marvellous for mobile photography.
Recently, Instagram was released for Android and many people jumped on the bandwagon and started uploading photos and wondered how to get more likes or more followers.
Well here are some tips for you:
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Space out your photos:
Many of the IG users upload photos in bulk (Multiple photos at one time), as a result their photos get buried in other IG users feeds resulting in less views and likes. The best way to make sure IG users enjoy your photos is by evenly spacing them out along a time period.
Statigr.am is a great tool that tells me what time would be the best time to upload my photos to get the maximum exposure and likes. This analysis is done on the basis of likes received to your previous photos.
If you use Statigr.am, these times are available under the Statistics->Optimization section.
If I look at the screenshot for my IG account in Statigr.am, I come to know that the best time to post would be between 8-10am and 6-8pm IST which would ensure that I would get maximum likes for those photos during that time.
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Hash Tag photos relevantly
Whenever you upload a photo:
- Upload a photo with a simple description of it.
- Then add a comment containing relevant hashtags.
Hash tagging in IG is very important and allows users to find those images, kind of like how searching for #Photography in twitter would return tweets related to photography.
There are various photographic groups on IG that organize photographic challenges using hashtags.
One example of such a group would be Gang Family. Gang family on IG has the hash tags — #gf_daily #gang_family.
Each week Gang Family organizes daily challenges
Eg: Monday could be related to images based on red. Tuesday could be related to images based on Squares .
Each daily challenge has a different hash tag. Todays challenge was #gf_daily_redmonday_005 . I uploaded an image related to the theme and hashtagged it –> http://statigr.am/p/186069550326165850_2663403 . In an hours time I received 45 likes.
You can read more about @gf_daily here
Another great set of hashtags are #follow4follow, #like4like #instafollow, #jj #clubsocial, #all_shots
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Interact and Engage
No one likes someone who behaves like a bot. Keep on searching photos and browsing the popular photos of the day. If you like a users photo streams then follow them. If a photo strikes a chord with you then ‘like’ it and leave some comments. People love it when others interact with them thru their photos. Keep interacting and keep building bonds.
PDStein has made amazing posts related to Instagram here . Do check them out!
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Experience of over a decade in the IT and Cyber-security domain. A cyber-detective by nature and has solved numerous cyber-attack-cases during his tenure at Network Intelligence. When not solving cyber-crimes, he enjoys video-games and photography.
Terrific advice, Lionel. I’ve been using statigram primarily as a tool to review and like photos. I have never looked into the tools they offer even though I made a donation to the site, but based on your post, plan to investigate!
Also, your hashtag discussion was very useful!
Thank you for writing! Cheers/Terri
Thank you for your words, Terri. Do give Statigram and the hashtags a try and tell me wether it gives any improvement to your IG interactions