Instagram Hacks - The most important points in brief: |
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Two billion people worldwide use Instagram in 2023, 27.45 million of them in Germany. By comparison, TikTok is used by 1.5 billion people worldwide and 19 million in Germany. Instagram is therefore an immensely important platform on which you can reach customers of almost any age with your business. But how can you stand out among the more than 200 million businesses that use Instagram? We have 25 valuable tips for you.
Instagram hacks are tips and strategies that can help you optimize the success of your Instagram account. Instagram hacks can assist in gaining more followers, increasing interactions, and enhancing the visibility of your Instagram account, including your stories, reels, and posts.
To be successful on Instagram, you first need to optimize your profile and bio (the section below your username where you can describe your business in a few characters) so that you can be easily discovered and stand out among competitors.
Businesses invest a lot of time and often money in building and professionally designing their branding. This includes selecting fonts that align with the company’s image. However, at first glance, it may seem that you have access to only one standard font for your Instagram bio. In reality, you can use a custom font for your bio.
To change the font in your bio, you’ll need the assistance of a font generator, such as igfonts.io or instagramschrift.com. There, you can enter your desired text and then choose a font style that matches your corporate identity. Simply copy it and paste it into your bio.
Here’s how you can easily change the font in your Instagram bio.
The profile picture you choose for your account is immensely important. It’s not only displayed when someone visits your profile but also in every post you make. Additionally, your profile picture is the only thing your followers see when you post a story. If you want your stories to be clicked on and viewed, the image must be interesting and attention-grabbing accordingly.
To make your bio appear more frequently in search results, you should enter relevant keywords into the name field of your bio. To do this, tap on “Edit Profile” and add the appropriate keywords in the “Name” section.
To find the right keywords, you’ll need to conduct keyword research. Take a look at your competitors’ profiles and discover the keywords they are being found under. You can also easily input your keywords into the Instagram search. Under “Accounts,” you’ll see which Instagram accounts are found under these keywords, and under “Tags,” you can see how many posts are tagged with these keywords, helping you determine if your keywords are commonly used.
The Instagram feed is what users see when they visit your profile, apart from your bio and highlights. The feed is a collection or compilation of your posts, with the most recent post always appearing first. Therefore, individual posts should harmonize with each other, and the overall appearance should align with your corporate identity.
Within your company, decide on the colors you want to use for your Instagram posts. Ensure that your employees adhere to the corresponding color guidelines when posting. For example, posts from specific categories such as “Behind the Scenes,” “How to,” and the like could consistently use the same backgrounds. This not only creates consistency in your feed but also establishes recognition value for your followers. For modern or art-related companies, it may also make sense to design each post in different colors to create a vibrant impression.
Some companies post so cleverly that the various posts in the feed come together to form a composite image. However, this requires a lot of effort, and with regular postings, the result in the feed may quickly move down.
A feed like the one from sunlab, of course, requires more effort but is a real eye-catcher.
Originally launched as a platform for photos, videos now reach significantly more audiences than images and photos. This is not due to the algorithm but rather user behavior. Users simply prefer to see videos over photos. This applies not only to posts but also to stories. This doesn’t mean you have to post videos from your business every day, as photos, graphics, and the like still bring in a fair amount of reach, albeit not as much as videos. So, take the opportunity to post a video whenever it presents itself. However, just like with photos and other creatives, make sure to publish only high-quality content that is interesting to your users and provides added value. The content can be humorous but should not make your company appear ridiculous. Also, pay attention to appropriate color schemes when creating videos.
60% of Instagram users watch videos with sound. Conversely, this means that 40% watch videos without sound. To ensure that they still understand your content, you should add subtitles to your videos. Learn HERE how to easily subtitle your video posts (Reels) and stories .
If you frequently post photos, such as those from your company’s daily activities, trade shows, employee events, or similar occasions, they are often taken in different rooms or even buildings, with vastly different lighting conditions. To maintain a consistent look in your feed, you shouldn’t post these photos without any editing. Decide on the filters you want to use within your company. By consistently applying the same filters to your photos, your feed will remain harmonious.
You can arrange your favorite filters so that you don’t have to search for them every time you make a new post. To do this, when uploading a photo or video on your smartphone, tap your favorite filter and drag it to the desired position. It will then be available at that position for future posts as well.
Learn how to create your own Instagram filters HERE.
The possibilities for editing photos and videos within the Instagram app are relatively limited. Of course, you can use filters or adjust parameters like colors, saturation, brightness, and so on for your creatives. There’s also the option to add music to them. However, for truly appealing and eye-catching creatives, you should consider using external design programs such as Canva. There, you can enhance your images and videos further, for example, by adding frames or backgrounds, incorporating graphic elements, and more. In such programs, you can edit videos, overlay text, choose from a much larger music library, and much more. Design templates ensure that even inexperienced users can create attractive posts with these tools. Many of these providers even offer the capability to schedule posts.
To increase the reach of your posts, take the opportunity to tag individuals or products in your content. Did you have a company event where many of your B2B clients were present? Tag the clients or their companies that are visible in your post and mention them in your captions, thanking them for their visit, for example. This way, you can reach the followers of your clients with your post and showcase your valuable collaboration with them. Feel free to also include your location in your posts, as well as in your stories, especially if you are a local business.
Instagram provides many obvious and some hidden features for creating stories that you can leverage for your business.
Currently, you can choose from nine different fonts for writing text in your stories. However, just like for your bio, you can use fonts from font generators and copy them into your story.
When you write text for your story, you’ll find various colors for the font in small circles at the bottom. If none of these colors suit your needs, simply tap and hold on a color, such as a red circle or the circle with the eyedropper. This will open a color gradient, allowing you to select the suitable color for you. You can also make the text colorful by, for instance, highlighting individual letters or words and giving them different colors.
Alternatively, you can highlight the text you want to be colorful. Then, go to the color wheel. While holding down a color, open the large color spectrum. While still holding the color, start dragging the text selection from right to left, simultaneously swiping your finger across the color spectrum. The text will take on the various colors you swipe over with your finger, creating a rainbow effect.
You can align your text to the left, right, or center, or simply drag it with your finger to where you want it. When working with two fingers, you can also position the text straight or at an angle and make it larger or smaller in this way.
With the “draw” function, you can draw within your story content. However, this function can be used for more than just drawing. When you select “draw,” choose a color, and then press and hold on the screen, the entire background will be colored in the selected color. This can create interesting effects. You can now use the eraser to reveal parts of your original background, which can also be a video. This is useful, for example, when you want to draw attention to a new post but don’t want to reveal everything about it in the story or when you want to create a sense of mystery around an upcoming product.
Always make use of stickers whenever the opportunity arises. You can link to your posts, website, or shop using stickers. You can mention profiles of people featured in your story or those you want to bring attention to your story. Stickers allow you to indicate your location, create polls, add music, call for donations, ask questions, insert GIFs, encourage interactions, display the time, show a countdown, and much more.
You can add hashtags to your stories using the hashtag sticker or the simple text function. You can place hashtags visibly in your story or hide them by dragging them down with your finger outside of the frame (note: do not drag them into the trash can symbol).
Stories on Instagram are typically visible for only 24 hours. If you want to make a story accessible to your followers for a longer period, you can save it as a highlight, either during the creation process or even afterward by simply opening the story and marking it as a highlight in the menu at the bottom. You can also create different highlight folders to organize your stories thematically.
Similar to the profile picture, you can also upload your own images here that are suitable for your story highlights.
Direct messages (DMs) are becoming increasingly important on Instagram. They serve as a kind of messenger or chat system, and the messages are not publicly visible. The conversation takes place exclusively between you and the customer. Companies primarily use Instagram DMs to support customers throughout the entire customer journey. However, for businesses with a large customer base, it can be challenging to respond to and manage all messages as quickly as possible. That’s where some Instagram hacks come into play.
You can set up automatic replies on Instagram, such as welcoming new followers, answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), promoting new products, and much more. In the business settings, you’ll find various options for this, including “Saved Replies,” where you can create responses to commonly asked questions, “FAQs,” where you can offer pre-selected questions for customers to choose from during the chat, or “Greeting Message,” where you can save a message that customers receive at the beginning of a chat.
In the business settings, you can make a lot of helpful presets.
You can sort messages by clicking on the filter option next to the search box in your inbox. Here, you can choose to display all unread, unanswered, or marked messages.
Unwanted, offensive messages don’t have to reach you at all; you can have them pre-filtered and sorted out. To do this, go to “Settings and Privacy” and then click on “Hide Messages/Comments.” Here, you can set Instagram to automatically filter out offensive comments or disable it if you’re not afraid of confronting trolls.
Further down, you can also specify your own terms and phrases that should trigger the filtering of messages and comments.
HERE is an overview of how and what you can use Instagram direct messages for in your business.
You’ve already learned how to filter out offensive comments in the “Instagram Hacks for DMs” section. There are more interesting Instagram hacks that can help you manage comments and optimize your community management.
Positive comments are the best thing that can happen to your company on Instagram. With the “pin” function, you can select which comments should be displayed to your profile visitors from the multitude of comments. Click on the relevant comment and pin it using the pin icon.
As helpful as positive comments are, negative ones can be harmful. You can easily delete negative comments on Instagram. Click on the corresponding comment and then on the trash can icon. This way, you can also report or block individuals or posts.
Be careful not to delete every negative comment, but only those that are genuinely offensive or could trigger a significant backlash. Deleting too many comments can harm your company’s credibility.
In addition to the option of not allowing comments in general, you can also disable them for individual posts. To do this, create your post as usual until you reach the page where you can enter your captions, hashtags, and the like. Tap on “Advanced Settings” and then on “Disable Comments.”
Disabling comments should be well-considered because the more interactions your post receives, the better.
Want more Instagram hacks? We have five more tips for general settings that could be helpful in specific situations.
If you don’t want your followers to automatically see when you’re online, you can easily hide your activity status. To do this, access the privacy settings, tap on “Activity Status,” and disable it using the corresponding switch.
On Instagram, others can tag you in their photos or stories. If you don’t want this to happen, you can prevent it by disabling this option in the privacy settings as well. Go to “Tags and Mentions.” In the menu that appears, you can set whether and who can tag or mention you. It is recommended to choose the option “Manually Approve Tags” here. This way, you can control who tags you and in what context.
This is how easily you can determine who can tag or mention you.
You follow many other companies, colleagues, and important individuals in your business, and as a result, you also see stories and posts that are uninteresting to you? In this case, you don’t have to immediately stop following these companies and individuals; instead, you can easily mute their posts and stories. To do this, go to the account you want to mute. Tap the “Follow” button and click on “Mute.” Now, you can choose whether you want to mute only the posts or also the stories from this account.
Alternatively, you can simply long-press on the story icon of the corresponding company and make the same selection.
You can undo muting by going to the settings under “Muted Accounts” and deactivating the respective mutings.
If you don’t want to share all your posts or stories with all your followers, you can create a “Close Friends” list. To do this, go to the “Settings and Privacy” menu and then select “Close Friends.” Now, choose the followers you want to include on your “Close Friends” list and tap on “Create List.” The list can be edited as often as you like by clicking on the + button in the list.
There are countless more Instagram hacks to mention, especially when it comes to designing posts and Stories. There are various websites that describe these hacks, as well as YouTube tutorials that provide tips and tricks for the success of your Instagram account. However, it’s best to explore the application yourself, especially in the “Settings and Privacy” section, to discover the features that Instagram offers for you.
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