As a blogger, I have used my Instagram as an extension of my blog. I share products there that I have written a post about, and outfits I have styled on the blog as well. I look at my Instagram as part of my resumé as well hence mine is focused on beauty and fashion (sometimes food and my fur babies!). I am more particular now with what I post on my Instagram because I want to give a good first and lasting impression.
As a fan of beauty and fashion, how do I get you to want to see more from me? to follow me?
As a beauty and fashion company, how do I make you want to work with me?
Questions I ask myself before I hit that "share" button.
This is going to be a long one since I'm about to share with you some tips and tricks that I use.
LAYOUT
I started with a particular layout last year (2016), and decided to change it for this year. I'll probably do this every year, this way I see a break from each year, and honestly just to change things around.
For this year, I stayed with the square profile and alternated my flat lays with outfit photos, makeup selfies and with other non-flatlay pictures and videos.
I find my iPhone 7+ the easiest to take my flat lay pictures since there's a setting in the phone camera to take square pictures. And sometimes, I do use my Sony a6000 - which I use for my blog pictures as well.
For my flat lay photos I learned that a white marble background gives the picture some texture and depth instead of a plain white background, which can look flat and plain and boring.
Since I don't need a whole marble table for the house, and don't have a lot of space for it anwyays, hubby suggested to get a marble tile instead at Home Depot.
Home Depot has many marble tiles you can choose from. I chose the Impero Calacatta Oro tile in 12"x24" | $4.99/sq.ft. because it has that matte finish which won't have any glare when I take pictures. I set this tile by the only window in my room, which I assigned as my "product photo corner". Sometimes I use a white faux fur rug to change it a bit and add more depth to the picture.
tip: It's best to use daylight so it doesn't cast shadows on the products.
To compose my flat lays, this can take days or seconds for the idea to come to me.
If there's a particular product I want to show, like the photo used here, where I want to emphasize the Urban Decay's Naked Heat palette, I want the rest of the products on the picture to complement the main item. All the items I use on my photos are all items I do have on my desk. I do always have coffee, my blog notebook, my makeup product and tools, and either a chocolate or a cookie when I work that's why you see these a lot on my feed.
Take as many pictures, in different angles and review them afterwards. Once I feel that I've taken that one good photo, I go to a few different apps to tweak it.
FILTERS + PHOTO APPS
Besides the phones photo editor to straighten and crop it, I upload this to VSCO app and apply the HB1/ Hypebeast filter. I adjust the level of the filter to my liking. Add more brightness, contrast and sharpness from the app if needed. I save this to my camera and upload the filtered photo to the next app...
I have learned this trick from YouTuber, Desi Perkins. She uses facetune's WHITEN filter to whiten any of her white background. Though I use a marble background, this filter helps make the white marble to be uniformed with the rest of my flat lays because there are some days the photo either have gray or yellow undertone to it (maybe because I took on a cloudy or super sunny day? I'm not sure).
After all that adjustments, I do one last check using the app Planoly. Here I upload my new photo and see how it looks with the rest of my feed before officially posting on Instagram. From here I can also schedule when I want to post it. This has been a very helpful app especially on days I have a few pictures I want to post but not sure which one to post first or which picture looks better with the previous picture and so on.
Now I've scheduled it and have written my caption, I use one last app to help me with my hashtags. Focalmark app is an app that filters through thousands of hashtags and picks out the best ones for a specific category. Here I use beauty and women's fashion categories a lot.
Besides the created hashtags I do also add my own hashtags to my photos:
I also add many other hashtags I've noticed a lot of other Instagram accounts used and hashtags that the brands use besides tagging them on my picture.
It has been very tricky posting on Instagram since they keep changing their algorithms, which I have no clue how it works or how to work around it. And so I base my posting schedule from my Instagram Insight numbers to see when do I have the most reach and so on. So to not miss any of my posts, turn ON the notifications which I have done with my favorite bloggers and accounts. It's easier to scroll through my notification bar to see whose posts I've missed than scrolling through Instagram's feed.
I specifically use my Instagram for my blog and so I don't have a lot of unedited, very personal pictures here. I also want to say numbers don't matter but it really does in this industry. Hence it takes a lot of planning and editing before I post. I do still make sure though you get to know a little bit of me with every post by sharing some fun facts about me in the caption.
This is definitely different from my usual beauty and fashion posts but I really had fun sharing you my tips and tricks! Reading tons of other bloggers post on this and watching YouTube videos on the same subject definitely helped me improved my style.
I hope you picked up a few tips from reading this.
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