History: IG wants to attract as many users as possible. You earn your way in by attracting followers, creating content that engages and make them come back to the platform. Buy your way in to buy ads. But work with both. Follow your dream 100 and (More on this coming..) see what they post, what hook, description and images make you take action and where they land you to get ideas and inspiration. Then comment and like on their posts. In your profile and Instagram TV you sell nothing. Your brands and personality is the key to get people to follow you. The difference you bring in the ecosystem and serve is the secret that you’ll create your true fans. 

JK5 strategy: Choose 5 categories of your life/brand and publish it in order but not in real time. Story is for real time. Build 5 different albums in your phone and sort out your photos.  

Before posting any content in IG ask yourself these following questions:

1. Aesthetic: Does it visually show something that fits the personality of my brand? 
2. Brand: Is it aligned with my dream client or something they will engage with? 
3. Consistent: Is it consistent in terms of color or quality to fit within my overall feed?
4. Diversity: Is this something different than my last post? 
5. Does it create recognition beyond what I sell?
6. Quality: Is this up to the quality I want my clients/followers to expect? If this stood alone, would it fit my brand? 

While creating your content try to make a compelling story for your audience and make sure one of these three components are included in the story.

• Inspire: It compels others to feel inspired and capable of big things. 
• Educate: It teaches or educates your followers on a subject. 
• Entertain: It provides entertainment for your followers. 

In your captions use one of these alternatives:

1. Captions: story telling, daily life story. 
2. Ask Questions: what is the best book you have ever read? 
3. Make a list: five facts about my business, three things people did not know about me.

CTA can be like, share, comment or invite them to a landing page. As social media is for networking, it wants us to be social and less salesy. If you have a link you can put it in the first comment. Hashtags are sort of keywords that boost your content and share it with thousands of other content under one profile (#hashtag). You can use 30 hashtags. You can use hashtags at the end of your post but if you want, it works in the first comment, too. 

Engagement in your posts rewards your post for more promotion. If someone comments, answer it, and it increases their comment in the future and also encourages others to comment. 

Stories are more freestyle and you don’t have to be methodical. By letting people participate in a project’s process they will be more invested in that project. After 10.000 followers you will get a swipe up function in your Instagram story, where you can put in a link. Story highlights are for longer than 24 h and do as 5JK- 5 categories of your life/brand to highlight. Remember, consistency is the key, provide value and become the cool kid in the party and they will follow you home. 

Now you have learned all these tactics you don’t need to spend tons of time to engage if you don’t have the necessary resources. I have seen many people struggling to grow their social media presence, therefore I have created a step by step guidance on how to grow on social media organically. You can find it here. Hope you get some value from it!