Kate Butcher

Hello, and welcome to today’s episode of business foundations for mums. Today I really would like to talk to you about some basics of Instagram. Instagram is a fantastic tool, if you use it well. And today’s episode is really for you if you are using Instagram personally and you would like to understand a bit more of it, so that you can use it better for business or if you’re using Instagram for Business, and you’re not really sure if you’re doing it quite right. And also if you have never used Instagram but you know that you need to get your business on there. It can be a really useful one to get your business out there. If that’s where your target market are.

So I’m going to start with covering the basics of your Instagram profile and the things that you need to have on your Instagram profile. So if you are on Instagram, and Instagram is primarily a mobile based app it is designed and aimed to be used on a smartphone, you can use it on a desktop and you can schedule to it as well. But the main aim of Instagram is it’s used on a tablet or a phone primarily, and therefore most of the features are most easily usable and most readily available in the mobile app as opposed to anywhere else.

So if you are in the mobile app, you will see your profile picture, your profile. And if you click on that, and it’s normally in the bar along the bottom, I do think that some phones are a little bit different but I’m using my iPhone. So on my iPhone, it’s on the little bar at the bottom, on the right hand side and if you click on that, that will take you to your profile. The first thing to think about when setting up your profile is your handle, and your handle is your username. Your handle is the bit that if you go to www.instagram.com forward slash your handle is the bit that comes after that that will take people to your feed, to your content, to your profile. And it’s the way that people can find you, it’s the bit that people can tag you using your handle. So for example they can put in an at symbol followed by your handle, and anyone can click on that and will go straight to your handle using that at tag. So that’s how people can tag you using your handle. It’s your username. It’s the way people find you. And it’s a really good idea to have something that is original, so that you stand out, to have something that’s quite simple, so it’s easy for people to remember. And to have something that represents who you are. It’s really good if it’s something that’s, you know, a bit shorter. Again, it is that remembering factor so that people can remember it more easily. And what’s also really, really useful if you have other social media channels that you work with. It’s really good to have, if you can get it, the same tag as your business name and the same tag across social media platforms. Again, it helps people to find you and it’s much easier to say my handle, my account on all platforms, is business foundations for mums, for example, because it makes it much easier for people to go to the same place everywhere they go.

The other thing that you have is your profile picture, and your profile picture, if you have a business logo, that can work really well in the profile picture. If you have a headshot of you, something that’s really personal, something that shows who you are. That also works really really well because with your profile picture, I don’t know if you’ve listened to previous episodes, something that’s come up more than once already. People buy from people, and if people can see your face it makes you more relatable, people like to know who they’re dealing with and who they’re engaging with. So having a photograph of you in your profile picture can be really really beneficial as well. It is really useful to remember that, if you do have a profile picture, as much as possible if you have strong branding colours to try and make sure that the colours in that photograph in the background or in what you’re wearing, fit with your your overall colours, with your branding colours. And it’s really important to either think about having a clear background or something that works really well with your overall aesthetic. Maybe think about having props, and maybe think about keeping up with the seasons and changing it on a regular basis. A photograph of you standing in the sunshine isn’t going to look quite as effective in the winter and equally a photograph of you standing in the snow. It’s not going to quite work in the summer. So think about whether it fits with everything that’s going on around you.

The other thing that you have on your profile is your name, so as well as your handle, your handle is the way people can find you, you also have your name. So for example, my handle is “business underscore foundations underscore for underscore mums” yet my name on my profile is “Kate Butcher”. So you can have your name and you can have your handle, and in some situations it’s worth making sure that those two things are aligned. In other situations the handle can be a way for people to find you, but having your name on there can also be really beneficial. And below that. You have your bio and your bio is really, really important. It’s really essential that you think carefully about what you want to say in your bio, because this is where people will go to your profile and they will start to read your bio to see what you do. And the first line is the most important line. Your followers, or the people that you want to follow you, need to be able to read that first line, and they need to see whether you are the right person for them to follow. So it’s really useful to have a call out in the first line, even in the first few words to say exactly who you are serving, who your account is aimed at, who you’re trying to talk to. So mine starts off with “supporting mums in business” is the very first phrase that I’ve got in there because that’s who my account is for. So if a mum in business comes to my profile, straightaway, they’ll see “okay, this might be an interesting account for me to follow, supporting mums in business, I’m a mum of business”, that straightaway helps them to know that it’s the right profile for them. And then you need to say what it is that you offer them what it is you do what it is you provide how you can help them so rather than saying “this is what I make”, say how you help them what problem you solve for them, how you support them. That stuff is really interesting because that is where the connection lies and that’s what will get people engaging.

You also have the opportunity for a link, just one link that you can put in there so you can direct people to your website, if you have a website, or you could direct people to a Facebook group if that’s where the main bulk of what you do goes on, but you just have the opportunity for one link. Now if you have, for example, multiple places that you want to direct people to, you might talk about your particular blog post in one of your posts and you want to direct people to that blog post. And then in another post, you might be talking about a special offer that you have and you want to direct people to where they can find details of that special offer. And then you might be talking about something else that you really want to direct people for, and you can’t have separate links for all of those different things in your profile. You also can’t put links in the text within posts. The only place you can put a link, on Instagram, is that one single link in your bio. So if you want to direct people to different places, it can be really useful to use tools such as Link Tree, Link Tree is probably the most popular one out there, but there are lots of other options as well as Link tree, and actually something that I often recommend, if you have a website of your own, I always suggest that you create a page on your website that has a list of all of those links, and when you come onto your Instagram account and you post something and you want to point people in the direction of a new link, then you add that link to your links page. Because by having your links page, you’re directing people to your website, you’re getting the benefits of that SEO, but you’re also bringing people straight into your website where they can see your menu, for example, they can see all the other things on your list of links to different places that they might be interested in. So it’s really good to direct people somehow to your website, in one way or another.

The next thing that I want to think about is about posting on Instagram. First of all, thinking about the posts that you’re creating. It’s really important to remember that Instagram is a visual tool. It’s something that I have, I’m going to hold my hands up here and say that I am not a visual person, I’m an auditory person, I listen and I learn best through listening. So Instagram, I am on Instagram, but it’s not a platform that I found easy to learn, because images aren’t what grab my attention. Instagram is all about the images. And because I’m not a visual person, I also struggle to create content that’s visually appealing. So therefore I’m really really lucky, I’ve got somebody who works on my team with me, who is visual and who creates a lot of the visual content on my feed for me because I do struggle with it, if you give me a structure to work with, I’m absolutely fine. So sometimes it can be really useful to have a structure to your grid and think about how you want your posts to go out in the overall grid but first of all, we’ll look at the individual posts. When you are posting, as I say it’s all about the images, it’s all about the pictures, that’s what will grab people’s attention. They’re not going to read the caption unless the image has already grabbed their attention. The image is what draws people in, and the image is what gets people engaging. So think really carefully about your images.

Your images can be photographs, but they can also be graphics that you create. They can be graphics with words on them, they can be small videos as well, you can create graphic videos on your grid as well. So you can put things on that are potentially going to engage people. The other thing to really think about when you are creating your images, is how they will look in your overall grid. So again, if you go to your profile, and you look at the grid or if you haven’t got a grid yet go to somebody else’s profile and look at their grid. And the grid is when you scroll down past the bio. It’s the photographs that you can see underneath that, it’s the combination of photographs that you see on your screen. Most smartphones will show either the most recent 9 images or the most recent 12 images, depending on the screen size, so it’s really important to think about how the most recent 12 images, in particular, work together because if somebody goes to your grid, and it’s a real mix of different styles of photographs, combinations of things that just don’t seem to visually work together. A lot of the time people will look at that and we’ll go “okay, I’m gonna move on”. However, if your grid is aesthetically pleasing, if people come to your grid and it looks curated, and it looks visually appealing, that is often going to grab people’s attention and they potentially, from there, we’ll start scrolling further down, they might follow you, they might start to engage with some of your posts. So having images that work really well together can be really, really useful.

And you can do this by bringing in your brand colours. So thinking about the colours that you have, having a combination of your brand colours in the graphics that are on your grid, having a mixture of graphics and photographs. Patterns can work really well. So crisscross patterns, alternate patterns is a popular one and that’s that’s how I do it on my grid. I have a graphic and then a photograph and the photograph may not always be a photograph that takes up the whole screen. It might be a photograph on a background, but it’s both a combination of the graphic with just words. And then the next post is an image, or a photograph. So it’s about thinking about what works to make it visually appealing. If you have a main brand colour then having a nice consistent colour throughout your grid can be great. If you have two or three brand colours, find a pattern with those colours that works. And I will talk in just a moment about some tools that you can use to help you to plan your grid.

Another thing that can really help with the aesthetics of your grid is a filter. So potentially having lots of different photographs. But having the same filter on all of them keeps the brand aesthetic the same all the way across. It’s about thinking about a consistent look throughout your profile.

One thing that you might see on some grids, curated images are multiple images that make up one larger image within your grid. So you may have seen these on some people’s feeds, on some people’s posts. They look absolutely fantastic if they’re done well, but they do take a lot of planning to get them right, and as those images move down your feed, to keep those curated images looking as they should. You have to consistently post three posts at a time. Otherwise part of the image will move down and the rest of it will stay on the other side and then it will stop being a curated image, it won’t work as well. So it does take time and work to maintain a profile where you have curated images on there. And it’s worth thinking about it because you may be really interested in doing curated images now, but in a year’s time, you may not be that interested in doing the same thing. And if people scroll down your feed and find that you’ve got these curated images further down that aren’t in line anymore, it will definitely be noticeable. If that’s something that you want to do. It can be really visually eye catching. Bear in mind, however, that the individual squares within that curated image will all be posted independently in the newsfeed, so people will see part of the image and that can be quite intriguing and eye catching and that can bring them to your profile to look at the overall image, or it can be quite confusing.

The other thing that you can do with your posts is to have either a single image or a carousel. A single image is exactly what it says on the tin. It is a single image. A carousel is when you have more than one image within one post. However, only the first image will show on your grid. So when you’re posting a carousel you need to actively select which image comes first because that is the one that will appear in your grid and that is the one that will appear on your feed. You can spot a carousel on somebody’s grid quite easily because you will see that on that image, it has a little white square with rounded corners, in the top right corner, and it looks like there is a shadow of another page, another square, behind it. And if you click on that you will be able to see, you’ll be able to scroll across and see the other images that are in that carousel. So you can move from one one image to the other by swiping left.

As I say there are lots of other areas of Instagram that we can cover. We haven’t even touched on stories. We haven’t even touched on reels, but those are things that we will cover in another episode because they are topics entirely of their own. So as I say again, I’m not necessarily an expert in those things. So I will be interviewing some mums who do those things amazingly and who are really really good at them. So keep an eye out for those episodes going forward and let us know what you think about Instagram. Let us know if this has been useful. We’d love to hear from you.

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