In this post, I am going to reveal my foolproof strategy that’s a surefire way to get the most engagement on Instagram and grow your account. Plus, I will give you 25 ideas to help you know exactly what to post on Instagram each day.
7-Step Strategy to Post on Instagram and Get More Likes
With Instagram moving away from showing how many likes you get on your posts, you might be wondering why getting more likes is relevant. Let me just say this: the more organic likes and comments you get on your posts, the faster your account will grow.
It doesn’t matter if people can see your engagement or not. It will still impact your growth. I assume you want to know what to post on Instagram to get the most growth for your business.
1. Define Your Niche
Fastest Growing Niches on Instagram in 2020
If you haven’t quite decided on a niche yet, read on! Pick one of the most profitable Instagram niches for your account for the fastest growth.
- Quotes/encouragement for moms: anything to inspire moms on their journey. Quotes about childhood, learning, memes about motherhood, etc.
- Health infographics: The health and wellness niche is competitive and you might find it hard to grow your account if that’s your niche. However, if you create infographics using canva.com, you will be able to succeed in 2020.
- Women over 40: I follow a few accounts by women in their fifties who have experienced tremendous growth. It’s safe to say that many of their followers are males. Nonetheless, this is a niche with much growth potential.
- Memes: Who doesn’t like a good meme? Memes accounts receive a lot of engagement and they grow fast. Moreover, no need to take pictures when you have a memes account.
- Fashion and beauty: The fashion and beauty niches are still extremely popular. Before and after posts work well in these niches.
Recipes still do pretty well, but I have been finding that the competition has increased a lot in this niche. It makes it harder to consistently get enough likes to grow your account. Again, if you want to provide recipes, an infographic might be the best option.
For more help with defining your niche, read How to Pick a Profitable Niche for Your Online Business. Understanding how to pick your niche is very important. Growing your Instagram account will not make you any money if you don’t understand how to implement the Who, the What and the How of your online business.
2. Find Your Competitors
Hey, but don’t just take my word for it! Once you have your niche, look at what your competitors are posting and what posts are getting the most likes and comments. This strategy has been the most useful to help me figure out what to post on Instagram.
How to Find Content for Instagram
Looking at my competitors’ posts is my most effective strategy to know what to post on Instagram for the most likes and fastest account growth. I do it in two ways:
- I follow a few popular hashtags that relate to my niche and see what comes up. I save the posts that could serve as a starting point to create my own posts.
- I check my Explore page to see the top posts. Again, it helps me see what kind of posts are gaining the most traction in my niche. I save the ones that I think my audience would like and that I could re-create in my own way.
Finding content for Instagram by looking at what other posts in my niche are getting the most engagement has been by far the most effective strategy for me.
3. Create Your Hashtag Lists
When you are deciding what to post, you need the make sure you stay within your sub-niches and your hashtag lists will help you do that. You will pick the hashtag list that applies to the content you are creating. Using the right hashtags is super important to get the most engagement and account growth.
I created a very in-depth post to help you do just that, it’s called How to Pick the Right Instagram Hashtags to Grow your Account. Moreover, in my course My 5-Step Formula to Master Instagram for Your Online Business, I provide you with worksheets to help you figure out what you need to post on Instagram and what hashtags you should use.
Watch my Instagram Workshop here:
4. Take Your Pictures
You don’t need to be a professional photographer to grow your Instagram account. What I recommend, however, is that you batch your picture taking. You may get some excellent pictures on the spur of the moment during your day-to-day life, but it’s a good idea to take an hour every two weeks or so to take at least 20 pictures that would fit in your content buckets.
Creative Instagram Photo Ideas
Here are some ideas you can use during your photoshoots:
- Lay flat photos: Use a nice surface (a white surface or a beautiful table for example) and create a display. Depending on your niche, it could be office supplies, food, natural remedies, books, etc.
- Lifestyle photos: Take various pictures that depict how you spend your days.
- Boomerang photos: Boomerang photos are a fun way to show your face or any product that you would like to promote.
- Selfies: Selfies are easy and quick. You can post a selfie when you want to write a caption to talk to your followers as a friend.
- Outside photos: Photos capture in your natural outdoor environment work well too. If you live in the city, it could be you walking on the street or in front of a building. If you live in the country, show yourself in your garden or in your backyard.
- Your family: If you don’t have children, you can show your dog, your boyfriend/husband. Pictures of them alone, pictures of you and them all are good examples of family photos.
5. Create Your Captions
With engagement going down on Instagram and the competition ever-increasing, you need to provide more and more value. A good way to do that is through your captions. Great captions increase the likelihood that your posts will be shared and saved.
Ideas for Instagram Captions
The good news is, you don’t always have to think of something super wise to say to create a caption that will resonate with your audience. Let me share some ideas for your Instagram captions that will help you provide valuable content without spending hours thinking about what to write:
- Quotes: You can Google quotes in your niche and share them in your caption as they relate to your post.
- Questions: Give your audience choices between different foods, outings, books, coffee brands, etc. Ask them what their favorite one is.
- Practical tips: If you are a blogger, podcaster, or YouTuber, repurpose your content to provide practical tips in your niche on Instagram. Write a summary of the information you provided on your other platform and share it with your audience.
- Recipes: This one works only in certain niches, but recipes tend to do pretty well on Instagram.
- Humour: If you found a funny meme somewhere, save it and share it in one of your captions.
- Your Story: Talk about our life, your struggles, your victories.
- Lists: Lists of your top 5 favorite books, recipes, apps, restaurants, etc. Whatever applies to your niche.
- DIY projects: Again, this one is not for all niches, but it will help many different audiences.
6. Schedule Your Posts
Scheduling your posts will make your life so much easier! For this purpose, I recommend Planoly. You can do enough with the free plan. You can save your hashtags, move your pictures around (up to 30 per month), and even get the app to auto-post for you.
Best Instagram Posts
When I plan for the week and I am deciding what I will be posting on Instagram, I look at all the best Instagram posts I saved in my niche. I look at how much engagement they received compared to the other posts that the person has on her feed.
When the post I saved has a lot more engagement than her other posts on her feed, I know it will be an excellent post idea for my account too if we have a similar niche (which we should).
In this case, I look through my pictures and find which ones I can use to create something similar. I like to use a few posts inspired by my competitors’ posts each week. These usually end up being my best Instagram posts. For my other posts, I experiment with different ideas and see what my audience likes.
7. Evaluate Your Results
This is the last step of my strategy to know what to post on Instagram. Growing your account and finding what works with your audience is a lot about experimentation. You will try different types of posts, different sub-niches, different captions, etc. Then, you will see what your audience likes best and you will post more of the same thing.
I am a big fan of the content bucket idea. Once you have experimented for a while, you will start seeing trends with your audience. You will learn what resonates most with them. Usually, you will see that you get the most engagement with 3-5 different types of posts. These will become your content buckets.
Knowing your content buckets makes it a lot easier to know what to post on Instagram. All you need to do is cycle through them. Create more similar posts.
25 Ideas to Post On Instagram
If you are just getting started, you may not know what your content buckets are yet. To help you start experimenting, I am going to share 25 post ideas that you can use.
- A day in the life: Talk about how you spend your days from morning to evening.
- Your workplace: Share a picture of where you spend the most time during the day (whether it’s your kitchen or your office).
- A poll: Polls are pretty popular in Instagram Stories (read How to Build Your Audience Using Instagram Stories, but they work well on your feed too. For example, share a picture of your morning coffee and ask your followers: “Are you a tea or a coffee person?”
- A video: Share a video to demonstrate something you do every day.
- A carousel: A carousel is a series of images. You can post more than one image on your Instagram feed. Carousels improve your chances of getting more likes and comments. Instagram will show the image that does best to more people.
- What you are currently reading/watching or listening to: Tell your followers about your most current obsession.
- A routine: It could be your morning routine, your evening routine, your meal planning routine, your workout routine. Something that will inspire your followers to do the same.
- A mistake you made: Share about something that didn’t work out for you so you can help your audience learn from you.
- A promotion: If there is a sale on products you are promoting, talk about it. Or just talk about a great deal you found.
- Your latest blog posts/YouTube Video/podcast: Help your followers find you on other platforms.
- An object that you love: Something pretty that goes well with your brand.
- Your favorite tips and tricks: Talk about something you learned in a practical way by sharing tips and tricks. Life hacks are a good example.
- Your goals: What are your dreams, your passions? What drives you every day?
- Your freebie: If you are doing Instagram right, the link in your bio helps you collect email addresses. You are giving away something of value to your followers in exchange for their email addresses. Talk about what it is and how it can help them.
- Repost: You don’t need to create all your own content. Reposts are a great way to network with other Instagrammers and share proven posts with your audience.
- Something you are working on: Talk about a project that you are working on.
- Someone you admire: It could be another Instagrammer, a writer, a blogger, etc. You can tell your followers about anyone that inspires you.
- Where your followers can find you: Give them more information about the other plate-forms you are on (your Facebook group, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.)
- A quote: Many quotes do very well on Instagram.
- Clients/customers: Talk about a specific client or customer and how you were able to help them.
- Giveaways: Create a giveaway and ask your followers to repost and tag a friend to get a chance to win.
- Your story: Talk about what makes you who you are.
- A recommendation: Mention your favorite restaurant, book, recipe, etc. Make a recommendation.
- Fun facts: Tell something funny and interesting about what you do or who you are.
- Frequently asked questions: Answer frequently asked questions about a topic in your niche.
Now you have enough topics and ideas to plan for almost a month of Instagram content. You will find that not all of these posts will receive the same engagement. See what worked best to grow your account by checking your analytics.
I show you how in my post How to Grow Your Instagram Account in 5 Simple Steps. Going through these steps is essential to decide what to post on Instagram.
In Summary
Knowing what to post on Instagram doesn’t have to be complicated, but for the best results, planning is critical! When you start using Instagram for business, your account is no longer about you, it’s about your followers. You need to pay attention and see what they want to learn from you. Planning your Instagram posts will allow you to be strategic with your approach and see the growth you want. I teach you exactly how you can plan your post using Planoly in my course My 5-Step Formula to Master Instagram for Your Online Business.
Moreover, you can learn about how to grow your network marketing business on Instagram by watching my Instagram Workshop: