Your Instagram Account – Finding & Modeling Content that Works

Things I Learned – Social Media Series

Now that you have your Instagram profile set up, you are ready to start thinking about content. Before you start posting, you need to do some research. First, you need to know there are two ways to produce content for your account. We will talk about these two ways and ways to find viral content so that you can reproduce or use for your page.

Two ways to produce content for your account is to find it or create it. Find other people’s content and re-post it. Finding content allows you to see if it will be successful based on its original post. Keep in mind if you are finding content that means we are using other peoples’ content. Image ownership and licensing come in to play here. Create your own content to post. If you create your own content, you can personalize more to really target your market and promote your business. For the greatest exposure you have to model your content after content that is already successful.

Factors that determine successful content are dependent on your niche, specialty, or business. Do your research! Find accounts in your niche or business that have successful content and then you can do the same with your content. Hootsuite makes a good point: “Great Instagram post ideas promote your brand and engage your followers – all while giving them something they can’t help but share with others. But it’s not enough to just post any picture or video. You need to separate yourself from the pack and give your followers unique and creative content they can’t get anywhere else.”

Ways to Find Good Content

Now, how do you find viral content to post or reproduce in your own way? There are two really good ways to discover great content:

• The Discover/Explore Tab – little magnifying glass – Instagram curates posts that are selected based on what you like, people you follow and also based on what people you follow are liking and what is popular in your niche. This explore tab should give you tons of ideas for you to model, create and post for yourself. Find Instagram accounts through here that have a lot of followers and their posts create high engagement or even accounts that may not have a lot of followers but their posts create high engagement too.
• Hashtags – Incredibly powerful way to find viral content in your niche. Hashtags are searchable ways to categorize content on Instagram. Search on the explore tab using hashtags and repeat the process the same way as you did for the Discover/Explore Tab.

According to SproutSocial, the platform is often used as the discovery portion of the sales funnel. 83% of Instagram users discover new products and services on the platform. 81% research products or services and 80% decide whether to buy a product or service. So, don’t just look for content that has the most engagement. Look for content that you think is building trust and affinity or ones that are shown to create sales.