How to make your Instagram feed take flight
I recently volunteer work for a small NGO that serve a good purpose on connecting books to other aspect of culture and link up people. But before I exactly talk to the founder of the NGO, their page look more like a bookshop to me than culture activist platform. And I found out they have some problems
Lack of variety on content
They are culture activist, so they host a lot of activity before pandemic. But now in pandemic outbreak again, they can host much less activity these two months. So most of the post are now about their secon hand book sale.
These is not a problem yet, but when then don’t have other update related to book or culture, the page look like a bookstore in the most recent feeds. So I make some suggestions: write about other bookshop stories that they have work with before, share some big activity back stage, and some more information that is related to their core believe.
Show people more, give them information and also entertaiment
Why their core believes and backstage?
Because this can provide a sense growing with the organization, and diffrentiate from other secondhand platform or other society. Provide emotional value to target participants is one of the key way to produce long term relationship.
Make people emotionally attached to you and be your advocates.
The layout of the feed
This is an art form if you want to attract people to your content. Every post needs to work to perfect, that’s for sure. But, after people see that link and decided to visite your feed, they will want to see something that is pleaseant and clear.
And the feed of the NGO is not that close to the target.
Now: As they have multiple people working on the feed, they have no cohesive colour scheme and style. One style is using a much darker tone or close to monotone and the other is vibrant pastel colur. And the colour have nothing to do with content type, is the personal style. Not easy for people to look for specific post.
Messy color tone makes some of the post so hard to be seen
Suggestion: Make an uniform colour scheme for the organization, or use the diversed colour to separate out content type. Also arrange the post by type and have a pattern, let followers know what to expect. Help them save some thinking time, and put all their focus to the content. This is easy to do, by using a content calendar. If you want to see think in a more visulized way, there are many app out there like UNUM and Tailwind
These are all very useful tool, I once used UNUM , but now i focus on using Meta business suit instead. If you are focus on using facebook and instagram mostly, the data and fuction of the suit works very well. And if you need more inspiration on planning, Pinterst is absolutely the place to go.
Nobody hate beautiful and aesthetically organized things
Post Frequency
One of the editor post regularly, the other not so much. This will cause two problems:
It is hard for you to plan your post.
When one post regularly and one don’t the feed will get wrong easily. If you are using the paid feature of UNUM, this may still can be fixed. But as a small NGO and don’t have much budget on paid tools, it means they will have to hide one of the post, than report the content again when the time is right. This cause you lower interact rate and lower organic reach to your followers as instagram thinks you post something twice. Under new alogrithm, the organic reach is already low, don’t make it go any further.
People don’t know when will you post something
Even if you have low organic reach, if people knows you regularly post at some time, they know when to visit your profile. But if you don’t, than the post that off schdule is kind of doomed. Because, if the interact rate of the post in first 24 hour is low, they will have less tendancy to show your post to your follower or show them in the discovery section. This will lower your reach to non-followers too. Not to mention too many low interact post will drag down the reach rate of the whole profile. OUCH
Let people know what to expect, no surprise is better than shocked followers
Conclusion
So the content variation and balance is very important. Also make sure the post can help you create value to the content consumers, including emotional values. Organization story and core values is one of the great way to create emotional value.
Also mind the feed style, post with a cohesive style makes your feed looks way more attractive. And post with a schdule, let follower knows when to reach your profile for new content. This helps you raise the reach to specific post and your profile.
