Growing Your Audience & Flat Lay Shots
Starting off with post recap, the previous food photo I posted was quite successful! I was pleased with the results and it commemorated my accomplishment of two-thousand followers.
Growing your audience and gaining Instagram fame certainly isn't easy. It takes time, dedication, and knowing the inner workings of socializing in and out of the web to grow. Even I've only reached a tip of the iceberg recently hitting two-thousand followers since I started last year! In this blog post, I'll take the things I've personally learned from my book, Capture Your Style by Aimee Song and share the tips and tricks I've used to gain a decent following. Disclaimer, growing your audience requires time, effort, and dedication. If you're not passionate enough about a hobby, you won't see improvement, that same rule applies to Instagram!
Before I begin discussing hashtags, this is something Aimee said that everybody must keep in mind: "It's not all about growing numbers; it's about engagement, as well. It means nothing if you have millions of followers, yet only a hundred people are liking your images" (Song Aimee, 168). This means that even if a person has thousands of followers, if only a small fraction of those people are paying attention to their posts, the following counts importance decreases; we call those people ghost followers. As I said in the first blog post, be engaged with the people who like and comment on the things you decide to put on your page! Try and reply to every comment, spam your followers with likes, follow people back, and be nice! I wouldn't want to follow someone who's consistently rude to the people that support them. With that said, hashtags are a perfect way to get yourself out there and begin engaging with others who have similar interest.
A hashtag ("#") is a discoverable piece of text that allows you to see other images on Instagram that are also hashtagged with the same text (Aimee, 170). They are important because it exposes the photo you posted to a whole library of other photos that people can view! For example, if I posted a group photo with my friends and used the hashtag #groupselfie and clicked on it, any other images with the hashtag #groupselfie on it would also appear. Although, it can now be seen by others with the same hashtag, Aimee explains that using specific phrases that already have a lot of reposts would make it difficult to be seen; so be specific! A cliche you'd want to avoid would be using too many hashtags in a post. Your followers are more likely to be annoyed and it ruins a clean caption so it's important to keep it at the maximum number of five hashtags. Another variation of this would be geotagging; essentially the same concept but for places! Posting a photo with the geotag Starbucks at that specific location would show any other images at the same place. Hashtags and geotags have become the universal search engine for Instagram so using them in conjunction would drive more traffic to your page. Besides hashtagging and geotagging, there's a ton of other ways to get noticed.
If you're into fashion and post an outfit of the day, tag the brands! This will get you noticed by the companies and can be a way to market yourself, more on this in the next post. Another would be to shout-out and tag the people who appear in your photos because now you also appear in their tagged photos. Also, don't forget to comment on other people's posts! Aimee says that "When you comment on other people's posts, you're not only spreading goodwill among the community, you're getting your own username out there and making yourself discoverable to the masses" (Aimee, 170). So comment on posts whenever you can! The last piece of advice from Aimee is consistency and timing. Post at least once a day and if you can't, on the days you do take photos, take extra shots so you're never running out of quality content. Know your audience's habits and the time-zones so you can figure out when your posts receive the most attention. I tend to post around twelve to four pm because people are the most active around those times. Lastly, stay true to quality! Only ever post if you feel that what you are putting out is the best you can. Quality is king!
The definition of a flat lay shot is "a bird's-eye photo of a grouping of strategically arranged item that typically share a color scheme or theme" (Aimee 152). The purpose of this kind of image is usually for retailers to show off new or in-store products but can also be a visually dynamic piece of art that showcases what you love in a neat way. Applying the rules for photographing food, (Lighting, angles, etc) it becomes the same concept but taking organization and neatness to another level. Here's some examples of layout images other people have done.
I tried to go for a urbanized, modern look with the glasses and the sweater while giving it a breathe of life by adding plants. I've also tilted some of the items so they didn't look so uniformed and boring and this is the image I ended up with!
Head to my Instagram page @cameralenzz to see the edited version!
What hashtags are trending currently and what have you been using in your own posts?
Works Cited
Song, Aimee, and Erin Weinger. Capture Your Style: Transform Your Instagram Images, Showcase Your Life, and Build the Ultimate Platform. New York: Abrams Image, 2016. Prin
Growing your audience and gaining Instagram fame certainly isn't easy. It takes time, dedication, and knowing the inner workings of socializing in and out of the web to grow. Even I've only reached a tip of the iceberg recently hitting two-thousand followers since I started last year! In this blog post, I'll take the things I've personally learned from my book, Capture Your Style by Aimee Song and share the tips and tricks I've used to gain a decent following. Disclaimer, growing your audience requires time, effort, and dedication. If you're not passionate enough about a hobby, you won't see improvement, that same rule applies to Instagram!
Before I begin discussing hashtags, this is something Aimee said that everybody must keep in mind: "It's not all about growing numbers; it's about engagement, as well. It means nothing if you have millions of followers, yet only a hundred people are liking your images" (Song Aimee, 168). This means that even if a person has thousands of followers, if only a small fraction of those people are paying attention to their posts, the following counts importance decreases; we call those people ghost followers. As I said in the first blog post, be engaged with the people who like and comment on the things you decide to put on your page! Try and reply to every comment, spam your followers with likes, follow people back, and be nice! I wouldn't want to follow someone who's consistently rude to the people that support them. With that said, hashtags are a perfect way to get yourself out there and begin engaging with others who have similar interest.
A hashtag ("#") is a discoverable piece of text that allows you to see other images on Instagram that are also hashtagged with the same text (Aimee, 170). They are important because it exposes the photo you posted to a whole library of other photos that people can view! For example, if I posted a group photo with my friends and used the hashtag #groupselfie and clicked on it, any other images with the hashtag #groupselfie on it would also appear. Although, it can now be seen by others with the same hashtag, Aimee explains that using specific phrases that already have a lot of reposts would make it difficult to be seen; so be specific! A cliche you'd want to avoid would be using too many hashtags in a post. Your followers are more likely to be annoyed and it ruins a clean caption so it's important to keep it at the maximum number of five hashtags. Another variation of this would be geotagging; essentially the same concept but for places! Posting a photo with the geotag Starbucks at that specific location would show any other images at the same place. Hashtags and geotags have become the universal search engine for Instagram so using them in conjunction would drive more traffic to your page. Besides hashtagging and geotagging, there's a ton of other ways to get noticed.
If you're into fashion and post an outfit of the day, tag the brands! This will get you noticed by the companies and can be a way to market yourself, more on this in the next post. Another would be to shout-out and tag the people who appear in your photos because now you also appear in their tagged photos. Also, don't forget to comment on other people's posts! Aimee says that "When you comment on other people's posts, you're not only spreading goodwill among the community, you're getting your own username out there and making yourself discoverable to the masses" (Aimee, 170). So comment on posts whenever you can! The last piece of advice from Aimee is consistency and timing. Post at least once a day and if you can't, on the days you do take photos, take extra shots so you're never running out of quality content. Know your audience's habits and the time-zones so you can figure out when your posts receive the most attention. I tend to post around twelve to four pm because people are the most active around those times. Lastly, stay true to quality! Only ever post if you feel that what you are putting out is the best you can. Quality is king!
The definition of a flat lay shot is "a bird's-eye photo of a grouping of strategically arranged item that typically share a color scheme or theme" (Aimee 152). The purpose of this kind of image is usually for retailers to show off new or in-store products but can also be a visually dynamic piece of art that showcases what you love in a neat way. Applying the rules for photographing food, (Lighting, angles, etc) it becomes the same concept but taking organization and neatness to another level. Here's some examples of layout images other people have done.
As you can see, each photo has a separate purpose but uses the same techniques. I'll be demonstrating the tips Aimee gives to post something that I feel represents the goal of a flat-lay. The anchor piece, or the central point of the image is important to a flat lay because it holds all the images together (Aimee, 156). An important question to ask yourself before taking the photo is do the items make sense in a larger, overall lifestyle scheme of the things? After deciding the items that I wanted to attempt to style, I neatly arranged them in a way I thought would look aesthetically pleasing and took several shots in different layouts until I ended up with an image that I liked. I tried to keep the background simple so each piece in the image has space to breathe and shine individually. This is the image I ended up with!
Head to my Instagram page @cameralenzz to see the edited version!
What hashtags are trending currently and what have you been using in your own posts?
Works Cited
Hey there Alenz!
ReplyDeleteI really am enjoying your guide on techniques and advice that you can apply to Instagram. On my Instagram, I love putting hashtags and geotags, namely because I like labeling my profile. I knew that Instagram grouped the hashtags, but I never thought about them as a "family" and that use need to be very specific and aesthetic with hashtags and captions, because you want your photo to stand out among the library of photos with that hashtag.
I also strongly agree that you shouldn't use too many hastags, because then it becomes cluttered.
Thanks for this perspective and I really like how your are incorporating so many ideas!
Hello again Austin!
DeleteBeing able to incorporate ideas into something as seemingly simple as Instagram has been the goal of my blog posts since the beginning, I'm really glad you noticed. But I do definitely agree with you that using too many hashtags can be cluttered, if you're gonna do it space the caption and then put it in an empty area!