Code 003 – Increase Engagement with Instagram Hashtags – Jenn Herman from Jenn’s Trends
Jenn Herman from Jenn’s Trends breaks down her best Instagram tips and tricks today on the Outdoors Online podcast. Whether you are brand new to Instagram or if you have been using it for a while, Jenn shows you how to increase engagement with Instagram hashtags today!
Listen to the Jenn Herman Podcast below:
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Increase Engagement Instagram Hashtags
Find out why you should probably be posting less on Instagram and how to find out what your audience really needs. We get the great super secret hash tag strategy to get your stuff out now, tomorrow and this week.
Even if you are brand new or struggling to use Instagram Jenn has some tips that will get you going today. I’m excited to share this one with you today.
Show Notes with Jenn Herman
06:30 – Evo Terra was on the podcast in episode 2 and talked about SEO and podcasting.
08:00 – Corbett Barr’s post called “Write Epic Shit” is a classic blog post that says it all when it comes to blogging.
13:00 – Take a look @JennsTrends for an example.
18:45 – We note Link Tree and the alternative strategy to using this service by creating your own page on your website that essentially does the same thing.
20:45 – When to utilize the Facebook pixel on your Instagram landing page.
24:55 – How to check your insights and find out what has the most engagement.
56:00 – I note the fake video and whether you should use a fake video for your podcast. Jenn notes that Instagram live is another great resource you can share to IGTV.
59:15 – Instagram for Dummies and the other good resource
59:55 – Jenn’s Trends Facebook group
You can find Jenn at JennsTrends.com here.
How to Increase Engagement on Instagram
- The name and the username are the only real searchable criteria on Instagram so make sure to have main keywords in those two fields.
- For the Bio think of these three things: Who are you, what do you do, and what’s in it for them
- The first bullet in bio should say exactly what the main thing your business does.
- You don’t have to post everyday. Try posting less frequently so your content doesn’t compete with itself.
- Use Instagram stories to post random stuff but save your feed for only amazing content that serves your audience.
- Use your insights tab to filter by the most engaging content and post more of the content that is working well.
- The color blue and adding photos of people in your posts can help with engagement.
- Make sure to include a clear call to action for each caption.
- Instagram Stories – You can post more often on stories compared to your feed.
- IGTV – If your video is over one minute length, you can put a one minute preview into your Instagram feed.
- Have fun and be social!
Jenn’s Super Secret Instagram Hashtags strategy
- Pick hashtags that are relevant to your brand, your business, your niche and your industry.
- Choose 3 to 5 hashtags from popular hashtags or about the 500,000 to a million posts listed on search.
- If you choose any hashtags over 1 million you start attracting spam bots
- Then choose three to five from the moderately popular hashtags from 10,000 up to the 500,000 range.
- Then choose three to five hashtags from niche specific super targeted hashtags from 1000 up to 10,000.
- Then choose 1 to 2 personally branded hashtags
- To find potential hashtags, search for a keyword in instagram and it will give you suggestions.
- You can click on a keyword and It will show other related hashtags
- Think about what your audience is doing on Instagram when choosing a hashtag.
- You can post the hashtags in a comment so it doesn’t distract from your caption.
Resources from the Show
Resources on How to Increase Engagement on Instagram
Instagram for Dummies by Jenn Herman
Videos Noted in the Show
Instagram Insights Analytics: A Helpful, Data-Driven Feature
Read the Full Transcript with Jenn Herman:
Click here: Jenn Herman’s Podcast PDF Transcript to get the Full PDF Transcript
or continue reading below……..
(Apologies for any transcription errors – this was generated automatically by Otter.ai)
Jenn 0:00
When you hit the return key and drop down, you want to drop down two spaces. So you leave a space between the paragraphs don’t just start on the next line, you want to go down to spaces. But you also can’t have an emoji or duplicate characters or a space at the end of the paragraph. So what I mean by this is if you start typing and you’re like, duh, duh, duh, you know, period, you have to hit enter immediately after the period. That was Jen Herman sharing a few Instagram tips and tricks. Welcome to today’s session of the marketing podcast. This is outdoorsonline.co the marketing podcast that helps you elevate your business through online marketing master sessions. Join Dave each week as he helps you grow your online influence via interviews with leading entrepreneurs from around the world. Here you go. Jenn Herman from Jenn’s trend, share some killer Instagram tips that you can implement right now.
Dave S 1:00
Find out why posting less is more how to edit your pics and what you need to know about captions plus, Jen super secret hashtag strategy that works. Instagram stories IGTV and more. Turn up the earbuds and enjoy today’s episode with Jenn Herman. How’s going Jenn? I’m good. How are you, Dave? Great. Great. It’s really good to have you on here. I’ve been doing a lot of research in the background on you. And you’ve got a ton of killer podcasting information. I think I first saw you on social media marketing on on that website. But maybe before we get into all Jenn’s trends and everything you have going, can you just talk about how you first got into online marketing? Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been doing this for over seven years now. And it legitimately started as a hobby. It was one of those things where I’m somebody who can’t sit around and do nothing. So I had a full time job. And in that role, we were learning to embrace social media and at that full time job, I work with
Jenn 2:01
It’s mostly military government contract work. So it’s a lot of old school mentality who don’t necessarily want to embrace social media. And doing so in getting that like the upper management and the CEO and people to understand what it meant to be social and share things about the company. We overcame a lot of those challenges. And I realized, you know, there’s probably other people that could learn from this. So I started the blog Jenn’s trends in social media, really, as a hobby just meant to kind of share those sorts of lessons learned and little fun facts and things that were going on in social media at the time, and there was no business plan, there was no posting calendar there. There was no strategy, it was totally just a hobby. And in the process, I started developing, oh, I want to do this and oh, I can use this now for business. And I did turn it into a full business model and strategic plan. But yeah, it really was just a hobby, something that I enjoyed to do and wanted to help others understand social media. That’s, that’s cool. And then and then you really
Got into so did it start with Instagram? Or where did it all started? How did you get into Instagram as because that’s kind of your main your you’re known as the expert in that for sure, right? Yeah, I’m totally. I’m known for Instagram. I work with clients on social media strategy in general and other platforms. But I’m known typically for interview speaking and that sort of thing as an Instagram Expert. I’ve written multiple books on Instagram. But it totally didn’t start out that way. And actually, at the time, I was on you know, Facebook and Pinterest and LinkedIn and Twitter. And I was like, Who’s got time for another platform? Like, I don’t want to deal with this Instagram thing. But all of my friends were on Instagram. And having had the blog at this point for about six months, I realized Okay, Instagrams becoming more and more popular. If I’m going to talk about trends I have to embrace this app called Instagram. So I downloaded it, I started playing with it and I genuinely fell in love with the app. I am not a photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do love photography. So there was a natural inclination with
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A visual platform like Instagram, and I love the engagement and the community that I started forming really quickly on the platform with like minded people. And it just really snowballed for me in terms of something I really enjoyed doing. And then I was like, Okay, if I like this, let’s start looking at how to do it from a business perspective. And I, of course, went to Google and searched you know, how to use Instagram for business and all these sorts of things that at the time, this was seven years ago, there really wasn’t a lot of content out there, everything was very superfluous, as you know, use filters and like more content, and it obviously was also a more rudimentary version of Instagram compared to what it is now. But in that process, I was like, well, that’s not very helpful. So I had this little blog that’s not doing you know, too bad all just start blogging about Instagram. And I did I wrote one blog a week dedicated to Instagram and I was blogging at a time about two to three times a week. So one blog a week. I mean, all of a sudden, people start googling
things and Google’s over here like, well, this Jen’s trends.com has all this information. And I started a ranking and search and next thing you know, I started getting asked for interviews and podcasts and speaking. And that would and I already had a bit of a platform with, with friends in the industry on, you know, social media in general. So it really wasn’t a chance circumstance. And it was a very lucky boat that I fell into with Instagram. Because obviously, it served me really well for the last seven years, but it was not a plan. I did not wake up one day and say, Hey, let me be an Instagram Expert. I really did Hard Knocks, I really kind of you know, let’s figure it out. Let’s test this. Let’s do this and, and just kind of grew it from there. That’s cool. That’s cool. Yeah. And I want to dig in Instagram. I want that to be the focus here because it is a big struggle for a lot of people. Before we jump there, you mentioned your website. I’m curious because I just interviewed somebody that was kind of an expert in SEO. I’m curious, you know, it sounds like Google, you know, really got your traction these days. How do you do you know not to dig into SEO but when you think about posting
Your stuff, your blog post, do you have any tips or specific things you do to help get ranked? Yeah, so, um, I do focus on SEO to some extent, but I honestly don’t make a big deal about it, I make sure that my header, the title of my blog, is something that someone would search for. So how to get more engagement on Instagram, okay, that’s gonna be my blog post title, because that’s what’s going to be the most searchable thing that someone’s looking for. I don’t stress a lot about what I put in terms of SEO into the actual post itself. My average post is about 1000 words so they are long form blog posts. And throughout there I am saying things like engagement on Instagram or Instagram engagement enough times and conversational speak that it ranks from an SEO perspective. I will go over to my SEO Yoast you know kind of thing and just see where I’m ranking. And if I can tweak something, I will but I honestly don’t over stress about it only because I
At this point, I mean, I still get probably three quarters of my traffic comes from Google search. And I get on average 2000 visits a day to my website. So I’m getting a ton of traffic already. And Google knows that. So I don’t have to overdo the SEO, because I already kind of have that Priority Ranking. But earlier on, I did make a bigger stride towards that in terms of you know what those keyword longtail keywords were, that I want it to be found for, and making sure that, you know, I have blog post titles, like I said, making sure that my, if I have videos or photos or anything in that blog, I put the alt text again, as something related to those keywords and all those sorts of things that help show up with the search rankings, right. That’s right. Yeah, that’s exactly what Evo talked about. You know, he mentioned that I think he talked about Yeah, I mean, you just write great content. You know, I think one of my mentors Corbett Barr, he’s, he’s got, you know, he’s part of the fizzle community.
Dave S 8:00
And he had this thing that just his title was write epic. That was Yes. You know, if you write epic, that was the title of his this that blog post that really went viral back in the day, you know, he’s been, I think it was maybe it was about the same time you’re talking about 2013. And, but that’s the bottom line. You can’t, you can’t I mean, I think you can blackhat and all that stuff, but it’s the bottom line is you just got to write something that’s helpful for people and then Google will pick it up. So and that’s it. Like I always tell people I write like, I write my blog post as if I’m talking to a you know, 45 year old woman sitting across from me at the coffee shop.
Jenn 8:36
I don’t have a full blown you know, persona of you know, who I’m talking to, but that’s my general target audience. But I, I talk a certain way and I do know how to write properly, but I write the way I talk. So I’ll say I’m gonna do it. Rather than saying I’m going to I say I wanna I use slang. I don’t use proper grammar all the time, because I
Write it the way people are going to read it and contextually follow along. And yeah, it really is about making sure that those blog posts are they’re not fluffy, fluffy, they’re like, Okay, this is what you want to know. 1234 done. And when you give people the answer to the question they’re looking for, they will come back for more. And there’s a time and a place for telling your story and mixing in, you know, some fluffy content. But if someone’s going to Google to learn how to do a specific task, they don’t want fluff they want an answer. And when you give them what they want, you start showing up That’s it. That’s it. No, there’s good and I think obviously, we can go down a bunch of rabbit holes here. I’ve got a whole bunch of Instagram questions. I want to start just digging into some of these because I was just talking to somebody yesterday who who is really struggling hasn’t really dug into Instagram yet. He no in fact, just got his first smartphone. You know, that was the reason he was held at home, you know, is holding them up because he had a phone but he didn’t think he could use you know, he needed a smartphone for Instagram to do it. Anyways. He was really he wants to get go
Dave S 10:00
So let’s just start back. This is taking the basics, we’re going to get into some a bunch of stuff. But talk about I mean, first, I guess that would be the question, where do you start? If somebody is brand new to it, and they have a business say, I mean, this guy, he’s been in business almost 30 years. And what would you tell him? So first and foremost, if you have not used Instagram, don’t start a business profile yet. My first advice to a newbie is to get on Instagram as a person as a human being. And just hang out for a few weeks and look and see how the platform operates. Get familiar with how content is shared. understand whether you know you like certain types of content more than others. Are you drawn to videos versus photos? are you liking stories or are you liking the feed? You know, what works for you and your style? Look and see how people interact? Understand how when someone replies, what does that look like when someone likes what does that look like? Spend some time at least you know, three or four weeks, just exploring the
Jenn 11:00
platform following more people connecting with you know, other businesses that you may know celebrities, friends, family, you know people in the industry that you are in any of those sorts of things that allow you to start to see what others are doing. And I do recommend you go and look and see maybe what your competitors are doing what other people in the industry are doing. So you get an understanding good or bad of what they’re doing because they’re if they’ve been doing it longer, they probably learned some of the to do’s and not to do’s so that’s usually the first thing is just get on there get comfortable with the platform. Then you are going to either want to upgrade that profile to a business profile or start a second profile for your brand. We do in some ways want to keep them separate. There’s always a you know, great component of adding your personal content to a business profile. But if you just for your business you’ve had for 30 years, you have customers you have a brand. You want a business profile you and there. I do want to stress because people always
freaked out, if you’re familiar with Facebook, you know, Facebook punishes business pages, you get lower reach and all this sort of thing. There’s no punishment on Instagram, they don’t get reduced reach, they don’t have any penalties against them. It helps you to be a business profile. Because you get analytics and insights, you get contact buttons, so people can email you call you all these additional things. So, that would be the first step would be to either upgrade that new profile or start one purely for the business as an actual business profile. Okay, okay. And that’s, that’s the start. It’s great. And then so let’s say we get the profile up. Can you talk about a little bit about how to, you know what goes into a profile you know, you there’s, you got a little bit of text you can write, can you talk just briefly about what they should have there any, any specific tips there? Yeah, and this is key, you guys, I really want to make sure that people pay attention to the profile on Instagram because there’s a couple key things that are very different from other platforms. First and foremost, the name is
Going to be the dark bold font that is on the profile. The username is how you are actually known on Instagram. So, for example, I’m at Jenns underscore trends on Instagram. My name says Jen Herman Instagram Expert. So they’re not the same thing. You can change the name as often as you want, but your username becomes essentially your URL. I’m instagram.com forward slash Jenns underscore trends. So once you pick a username, you really want to stick with that because now you have backlinks and referrals and things to that link that if you change your username, you lose all those links down the road. So pick a username that is brand representative when you Like Comment, Share, interact with other people you are known as your username so maybe that does become your business name. Then the name function is can be anything you want. It may not be your personal name. If you are a an actual business you want to have maybe the business name if you’re a if you serve a local
Audience if you are, you know a brick and mortar type location, you want to include something related to that actual physical city or location as well. And here’s why. The name and the username are the only real searchable criteria on Instagram. So regardless of what you put in your content, regardless of what you put in your profile description, which we’ll talk about in a second, if someone goes to Instagram and searches for an Instagram Expert, if Instagram Expert is not in my name, or my username, I will not show up in search Oh garlis of where I have it. So if and I know you have a lot of people in the industry, you know around outdoor activities and sports, fishing and all these sorts of things. You want those keywords in the Name field, if you serve specifically served people in, you know, the Denver area or if you are down, you know, at a in like I’m down in San Diego, maybe you’re down here, whatever that is, you want to put something in there because if someone’s looking for fly fishing
Utah, well, then you need to have fly fishing in Utah, in your description or in your name. And that’s a short I mean, there’s a limit right to the, to the size of that. So, so yeah, so you want to have so if it was if you had to fly fishing company if you were in like you said, Utah, you’d want to have at least Utah and fly fishing in there somewhere and then not necessarily your your, well, you’d want to have your brand name to or how would you choose? Because it’s a limited size, right? Yeah, so you get 30 characters for the name and the username each. So I would put your business name as the username so let’s say your you know, your ABC fishing. Yeah, so at ABC fishing, and then the name would say fly fishing Utah. Oh, gotcha. So between the two, you’ve now cut so if someone’s looking for ABC fishing, they’re gonna find you. If they’re looking for fly fishing, they’re gonna find you if they’re looking for fly fishing Utah, so they’re kind of so and so for this example if you look at you know, the, the wet fly swing podcast is a fly fishing podcast. The username is wet fly swing, and the name of
You probably wouldn’t need to put wet fly swing in there, although it does stick out when you have that on that first line down there. But you could just put fly fishing podcast. Yes, absolutely. That’d be perfect. That’d be perfect. So yeah, so those are the two key points for searchability to make sure that people can find you because that’s one of the downfalls of Instagram is their search criteria just pretty much sucks. So if you want to get found, these are where you want to put the focus. Now the next step of your profile is what we call the bio, and that’s that text box, which is limited to 150 characters. So again, not a lot of written space. And you really want to think about this in terms of three components. Who are you, what do you do, and what’s in it for them. The reason this is important is most people will never read your bio after the first time they come to your profile. So this becomes your 30 second elevator pitch. This becomes your first impression This is your chance to wow them and say who I am, what I do, and how I think
I’m here to help you. So if you know, as a podcast, you’re gonna say, you know, new podcast episodes on, you know, for business tips, once a month, once a week, whatever it is something like that, that, you know, okay, that’s what you do, that’s who you are. And that’s what they’re going to get out of it, they’re gonna get a podcast every week, you know. So those sorts of things are what you want to keep in mind. You want to write it in the context of them coming again for the first time. So I always say make what you do the first bullet point really strong and powerful. What is the key thing that you do as a business that you want people to come to your profile to go? Oh, okay, they are a fly fishing company. Oh, okay. There is no shooting company, like whatever it is, be very clear in that first bullet point, then you can get a little bit more into like the fun factor. Like you can say, you know, whether you’re in a specific geographical location that you target a certain audience, any of those sorts of things and then again, follow up with that. What’s in it for them. It could be be something like, you know, get your free resource and point down to the URL, it could be follow us for tips on XYZ, whatever it is, you’re gonna want to make sure you include that kind of call to action value proposition for that.
And again, only 150 characters,
Dave S 18:17
right? Sure. I know that’s, that’s the struggle. And then and then I think on the and then the link, typically, you know, like what I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing not, you know, I think you’ve you could do teach this but instead of link tree making my own URL with a bunch of links, do you still is that still a good thing to do?
Jenn 18:33
Absolutely. And so a lot of people are familiar with link tree. The challenge with Instagram is you only have that one clickable link in the bio and so you can change that link as often as you want. But if this week, you’re promoting a podcast and next week, you’re promoting a blog article in the next week, you’re promoting a download in the next week, you’re promoting, you know, a friend’s Facebook group, you know, every time you change the link, it’s only relevant to whatever that content is for as long as that link is there. The next time someone sees that post the following week that link is no longer active. So it’s people will use something like link tree, which is again, you have the one link and then they go to a drop down menu type thing, and they can choose where they want to go. The problem with using a third party tool is they now own that traffic. And it’s an it’s a step between your Instagram and your website. I would rather keep all my traffic to myself. So what I recommend doing is building a landing page on your website. With no widgets, no pop ups, no sidebar menus, no place to get lost. It’s a very simple landing page, but it now has your branding, it’s on your website and create you know, 3456 options on there in terms of what you would normally offer. So for example, I have obviously links to my my blog pages on there. I do Instagram training. So I have that on there. I have my 360 marketing squad, that’s a membership program I offer so I have that on there. These are the things that if I’m putting a call to action on Instagram, and I’m saying go Click on the link in my bio, it’s gonna go to one of these few options, whether it’s go read the latest blog post, whether it’s hired, you know me to work with you, whatever it is, then they go to my website and they now have those few options. There’s not 20 options, there’s only a handful of options, they can click on it and that navigates directly to that page. Not only is this easy, but a you own all of that traffic. You know, all the people that came to that web page came from Instagram, because that’s the only place you’re sharing that link. So now you can use your Google Analytics and you can track all the behaviors and conversions and traffic directions off of that page. You could also put your facebook pixel or anything on there and you can now retarget all of those people with Facebook and Instagram ads because you can know they came to you from Instagram. And you can turn around and say, Okay, I’m noticing that most people that come to this page are going to the blog. Most people that come to this page are doing this option, whatever it is, and you You can now get smart about how you craft your calls to actions and your content on Instagram when driving traffic to your website, because that’s where you’ve been sending them. So for people that have a product line, break things out by product, so maybe you sell fishing poles, maybe you sell, you know, water, recreational activity, you know, thing. So maybe there’s they’re separate, right? So you could have two or three separate product options, that if you’re promoting a product, they go, Okay, I’m going to go to, you know, the recreational activity button. And that’s going to take me over to these types of products on the website. So whatever it is, we want to direct them easily from Instagram to where you want them to go on the website. Perfect.
Dave S 21:41
Perfect. And can you also talk about the you know, I think another struggle is is posting right, you know, you have to post every day every day. I mean, can you talk about whether you first of all, do you have to post every day and then talk about what kind of content or what is amazing, you know, what should I think that’s a struggle for people like you know, posting just a crappy picture versus something That’s really awesome. Talk about that a little bit.
Jenn 22:02
Absolutely. We don’t post crap. Like, let’s just put that out there right now. Yeah, like if it’s crap, we just don’t even waste your time. So, and this is I think a fear that a lot of people have is they feel like they have to post every single day. And that’s actually wrong the way and I always joke that we as marketers ruin everything. And we as marketers ruin social media by posting more content, because we’re like, oh, if I post more and more people will see it. And no, that’s actually not the case. The platforms become so saturated that if you post that frequently, your content is actually competing with itself for exposure. So if you’re posting every single day and getting 20 likes and only getting maybe you know, 150 people on your reach, you’re like, Oh, it’s just Okay, I’ll post more and that’s not gonna help. It’s actually posting less. So if you went down if you were currently posting every day, go down to three times a week. Now you don’t have Tuesday’s post competing with Mondays for attention. Because Tuesday you didn’t post. So now, Wednesday’s post is like, okay, Monday’s post is kind of done. It’s it’s excursions it’s been seen. Now, when you post on Wednesday, it’s fresh content for your audience. So posting less is actually better. If you want to take that back to your managers, if you’re listening on the call, and you’re like, Look, Jen, Herman lets you have my full permission. Use me as an excuse. But definitely, I always use the criteria. If it’s not all amazing. content. We don’t post it. Yeah, I live on Instagram. I teach Instagram for a living. And on average, I post one to two times a month.
Dave S 23:38
once per month.
Jenn 23:40
Yes. Cool. And it’s because I only post when it’s highly relevant content for my audience. If it’s not what they want. I’m not going to post it. It’s not about me, it’s about them. So I will post something if I have a new blog post. Sure. I’ll post it. If there’s Instagram news and features and updates. I post about it. That’s why they’re following me They’re following me for tips and tutorials, they’re not following on the feed to find out what I’m doing with my daughter, they’re not following to see if I saw a pretty rainbow this week, they don’t care. They want to learn and when I post high quality, valuable content for them, I get crazy good engagement crazy good traffic to my website. And it serves me well in that end goal by posting only what they actually want from me now I’ll use my stories and post the randoms and post the beautiful, you know, sunset or what I’m doing with my daughter on a weekend. Because that’s, that’s okay for stories. But for feed content, definitely keep it tight. Keep it exclusive to what your audience wants, and make sure that you know how that resonates with them. So you need to be looking at your insights because I could sit up here all day and say Oh, do this this and you’d be like well my insights tell me I should do this. Well then do what your insights tell you. So go to the business profile you have on Instagram, go to the the the settings Or the three line button in the top corner, you click on that you have an option for insights. And you can actually sort if you go to your content tab, you can sort through and see all of your content. And you can see how you can actually filter it for engagement for likes for website clicks, for follows for all these different criteria over a period of up to two years, and so if you go through and sort your content and say, Okay, looks like every time I post a photo of a fish, I get crazy good engagement. Okay, I’m going to post more fish photos. If every time you post something where there you know, are maybe your customers and the photo great, how do we get more photos of your customers? You know, so look and see what is working for you. That being said, a couple tips. Just for general best practices, the color blue is great for engagement usually increases engagement about 20 to 30% by Using the color blue, so blue sky, blue clothing, blue products, blue vehicles, anything with a pop of color of blue can help people in the photo help as well. You don’t just have to be a selfie doesn’t have to be your face like front and center. But it could be a photo of two people, you know, out on a hike, it could be a photo of two people in a boat fishing, it could be a photo over someone’s shoulder where you just see a portion of their body, it could be just their feet. It doesn’t have to be an actual, you know, physical face. But when you put people in the photos that will generally drive up engagement. You want to clear point of focus in your photos. So if you take a photo, and let’s say this beautiful, you know, landscape image and there’s a person fishing, okay, let’s crop down the photo a little bit. So there’s less of the surrounding imagery and more focused on but there’s a clearly defined person in the image, maybe, you know, shift them off of this Besides, you can still see the you know, the landscape behind them. But clean and simple. We don’t want something where there’s a ton of busy background and there’s there’s things everywhere. And there’s, you know, lots of distracting focal points, because at that point people can’t clearly focus and they almost get overwhelmed. And they’re more likely to scroll past that content. When you have that clear focal point, it generally increases engagement as well. Cool.
Dave S 27:22
Well, what about what about text on a photo? Is that something I guess, you know, it probably depends, but it is,
Jenn 27:27
that could be a good thing. It can be in general, I don’t recommend it. But it’s something that I do because it’s worked well for my audience, and it continues to drive results for me. So I do it. When you do text on an image, have a good clean, real photo, not something that you you know, designed in Canva or in PowerPoint where it’s a, you know, just kind of a sketch or a drawing or a graphic type thing. You want a good clean real photo. That would be great. Awesome. it’s own. And then you want to really simple text overlay with only about two to three words. So something just enough to point out what that post is about. So it could be new podcast available, great. It could be something like new inventory arrived. Great. You know, if you’re doing a contest, it could say contest or giveaway, something like that. Just a little quick description, and then all of your information goes into the caption, you’re not going to put something out there that says, you know, new product arrived, available in store starting on Saturday, we’re open Monday to Friday did it like you’re not going to put up all of these things on an image? No, that all goes in the caption. We want the image to stay crisp, clean, crisp and clear, with just a couple texts on it if needed.
Dave S 28:49
Okay. And you mentioned the caption and can you talk a little bit about, I think you know, currently with mine on the podcast, I’ve been doing some transcriptions and pulling out quotes from my guests. And that that seems to be helpful for people. I always think of that, you know, how can I be helpful? So what what what is a caption? What What should it include? How long should it be, you know, maybe talk about some details there.
Jenn 29:10
Yeah, so a caption can be 2200 characters, not words 2200 characters. And once you get to the end, you can’t type anymore. So you know, you’ve gotten to the end. That’s a lot. Most people are not on Instagram to read a novel. So most people are not going to read that much text. Now again, I’m the exception to the rule. I’ve conditioned my audience that I use Instagram as a micro blog. And I do write really long captions that usually get close to that max if not maxing out the content. But in general, 123 short paragraphs is what most people are willing to read. Now over the years, Instagram has actually shown, there’s been various studies that have shown that longer captions are doing better, like so four or five years ago, two or three sentences was all you wanted. Now people do want contacts. They do want those Longer kind of caption. So again 123 short paragraphs is usually the ideal range. And you want to make sure that your first sentence is that very powerful statement. It could be a bold statement a question. Think of it like a blog post title, think of it like an email subject, something that’s really going to get people’s attention because you’ll notice if you’re scrolling through Instagram, you see the photo or the video. And then you see the user name, you’ll see the first like two lines of the caption and then you get truncated with dot dot dot more so unless they click on …….. More, they are not going to read anything you wrote. So if you’re rambling or making it seem like it’s not anything of value to them, they’re less likely to click on that caption. If you make a bold statement if you’d like you could you know for the podcast be like you know interview with Jenn Herman on all things. Instagram, people are like, Oh, I want to know more dot dot dot more. You could ask a question something like that. Do you want to know how to catch more on your next fishing trip? Yes, I do do a lot more. So when you have that context that’s valuable to them, they’ll click on it and read it. You spacing definitely don’t write one big long run on paragraph that’s hard to follow. space it out.
Dave S 31:19
tell you that with a space, is there an easy way? Because I know if you just type in Instagram, it doesn’t allow you Is there a program or something you could use to add bullets and all that stuff?
Jenn 31:27
Yeah, so Android is usually better for this. It’s like one of the rare times that we Android users get an advantage over iPhone users. iPhone users, I actually recommend you write your caption in a note outside of Instagram, copy it and then paste it in when you go to upload your content on Instagram. A couple things to be aware of though, when you hit the return key and drop down you want to drop down to spaces so you leave a space between the paragraphs don’t just start on the next line. You want to go down to spaces, but you also can’t have an emotional Or duplicate characters or a space at the end of the paragraph. So what I mean by this is if you start typing in your like that it uh, you know, period, you have to hit enter immediately after the period, you will often default when you hit the period, the automatic spacing puts the space after that period, you want to Backspace to that period, or the exclamation mark or whatever it is. Because if there’s a space, Instagram immediately eradicates all of the spacing. You just put, oh, I don’t know why they do this. You think they could recode this, but no, this is the weird glitch that everyone comes in contact with. So Backspace, that last character, but again, and I’m notorious for, you know, double, triple exclamation marks because I get very excited. If I use two exclamation marks, boom, there goes my spacing, so I can only use one exclamation mark. Likewise, if you use an emoji For some reason, it’s the same thing. You put an emoji in there, hit return. Nope, you’ll lose your spacing. So use emojis just use them in the middle or towards the end. So you don’t end up with those weird, you know, spacing breaks. It’s really weird. I don’t know why Instagram has to make this so complicated for us. But that those are the tricks to being able to put spacing in there.
Dave S 33:21
Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. So it makes it make it easy to read. So I can just kind of quickly consume
Jenn 33:27
Yeah, cool. Short bits. Like even a sentence could be a paragraph like write a cool like a good sentence, drop it down, start a new paragraph if you need to anything you want to call out really break it up. Make it again, valuable to the reader. So like you said, from your podcast perspective, you know, what, who was the interview with what was the topic what was like you said a key quote or takeaway, something that makes somebody say, Yeah, I want to know more about that. That’s going to make them want to then follow your call to action. Not every post will have a call to action in the capture. But most of the time, you’re trying to get them to do something, right. So it’s click on the link in the bio to listen to the podcast, click on the link in the bio, to get your free resource, click on the link in the bio to you know, check out the new products, whatever it is, other calls to action, maybe something like send us a DM and we’ll answer your questions. It could be you know, leave a comment below or you just flat out ask a question and say, What are your weekend plans? And that’s essentially a call to action, you’ve asked them a question, they will now leave comments with their responses. So you don’t have to do this on every post. But that does help generate that engagement when you put a clear call to action in there for them. Cool.
Dave S 34:42
That’s awesome. Those are great tips. So I want to touch on just followers a little bit because this again is another I think issue of you know people have questions about Yeah, talk about you know, I think people, you see some big hundred thousand whatever Instagram you’re like, oh, man, you know, I need to get followers to talk about whether you need to get how all that works. And it’s again, this is Dennis, this is a person I just talked to, he’s gonna be brand new to it. What would you tell him about the followers and all that stuff?
Jenn 35:09
Okay, so the first thing I always come out as caveat, and I say, how many people can you realistically serve in your business? If you currently have 500 paying customers? And if you could potentially double that, and at the max capacity serve 1000 physical customers in your business? Why would you need 100,000 followers on Instagram? You don’t? Why would you need 10,000 followers on Instagram, if your business cannot serve those people, you don’t need them as followers. So you want to set a realistic expectation for your follower count. Based on what you can actually serve. You don’t have to be the super popular account with 10s and hundreds of thousands of followers. If you’re a local business that is happily serving a few hundred people. We want to make sure that your content and your resources are serving Those people now, if you’re growing an e commerce business, and people are able to buy things online, and you could serve more people, great, but that just means maybe again, you’re at 1000 1500 as an ideal follower count, you’re still not going to go for 100,000 followers. So keep in mind from a business perspective, realistically, what you think in terms of your potential to serve each and every one of those followers. Now, obviously getting started, you’re starting off from zero, I highly recommend you start the account, upload a photo, a day or a video a day, start uploading content for about a week without any promotion, don’t tell anybody about it. Don’t go out looking for followers, just start getting some content up on the platform, realizing you’re not going to get a ton of engagement, but start doing some things just to get some content on there. So when people do come and follow you, they go oh, you actually have content or not you have one photo or you so start up slow. Just get some content. on there, then start reaching out to maybe brands or other people in your industry that you typically partner with. So maybe you have other companies that you have done work with that you could tag them tag a product. So if you’re working with a specific vendor, or if it’s a specific product in that photo or video, tag them in the captions and be like, you know, thanks to at ABC fishing, for you know, taking out on this excursion last week, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever that is something in there that now other people in the industry are starting to get tagged in your content, they’re going to see you. And then again, this is all over like that first kind of, you know, week, seven to 10 days, then you can start telling your existing clients so send out an email and say, by the way, we’ve launched an Instagram account, we’d love for you to come check us out. It is new. We’re we’re open to any thoughts on you know, what do you think we should be including? Ask for their input, let them know let them be a part of this journey with you. Do the same thing if you have an existing Facebook page, or if you’re already you know, if you’re doing something on LinkedIn or wherever it is that you’re already on social, then tell all of those people, but again, space this out, so maybe post it on your Facebook page, and then three, four or five days later, go and post about it on Twitter, then three or four or five days later, go and post about it on LinkedIn, we want to space out that growth. Because we do want to surge we want to make sure that you’re getting quality content and not all of a sudden, like this burst of activity, and everyone just hanging out being like, well, what are you gonna do next. So if you just kind of paste it out, so this gives you like, a good two or three weeks of time to start to, you know, get your existing audience out there. Then think about adding it to your email signature as well. Think about putting it on your receipts if you’re a physical business, put signs up in your store, if your physical business let customers know when they come in, hey, by the way we’ve launched an Instagram account. Chances are we’re gonna be doing some giveaways in the future. So if you want to go follow us, we’re at Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, give them incentive and reason and take advantage of the existing audience, you have to build up that audience, it may take you, you know, a few months to get to 100, you may get to 100 in two weeks, depending on how active your audience is and how you share that content with them. And then, as that happens, you’re going to start using things like instagram hashtags and locations and all these other strategies that, you know, we use on Instagram, for growth and exposure to find new people over time. But that’s kind of what you want to do to take advantage of your existing audience to really get them to come hang out with you because they already love you. That’s awesome.
Dave S 39:35
Yeah, that’s perfect. That gets us going. And then and then on the hashtags, I did want to ask you about that because I wanted to very I know you have a strategy that is pretty awesome. And I wanted to see if that’s still the strategy, maybe just talk about that, that hash the strategy for your tag. Yeah.
Jenn 39:49
So I call it my super secret recipe that I tell everybody, right?
Because it really is one of these things. I’m like, I want everybody to know this. But it’s one of these things that people until they Until they know about they’re like, Oh, this was like a secret. And I’m like, No,
Dave S 40:04
exactly. If I had to put a title to this podcast, you know what I mean? It would be dead super secret, hashtag strategy, because it is amazing. You know, I mean, when you, when you listen to what you’re going to describe here, it makes total sense. So I love the fact that it sounds like it’s still working.
Jenn 40:18
Yes. And it’s funny because I do like I, I do do this. And I tell people about it. And I always love when like, I’ll get a comment on a blog post or on a YouTube video and people like, Oh my god, I use this and it totally worked. I’m like, Oh, thank God, it still works.
Cuz it’s like one of these days really working. But it really it does work. And it’s been working for years. So the way this strategy works for this is you do have to look at multiple buckets of instagram hashtags. So you’re going to pick hashtags that are relevant to your brand, your business, your niche, your industry, you’re going to pick three to five, popular hashtags. So these are hashtags that if you go on On Instagram and you hit the little magnifying glass, you type in a hashtag. And it will tell you how many posts are associated with each one of those hashtags. so popular or about the 500,000 to a million, anything over a million you start attracting spam bots, and really annoying things that aren’t going to serve your business anyways. And they’re so popular at that point that when you post that content, you’re buried in the archives in a matter of seconds, so it’s not really helping you anyways. So in general 500,000 to about a million for your popular so three to five instagram hashtags from that category. then same thing three to five, from the moderately popular, these are the kind of high 10s of thousands up to about that 500,000 range, and then three to five, niche specific these may only have a few thousand, maybe even, you know, seven 800 posts associated with them, but they’re super, super targeted to what you do the problem you solve solution. You have the product, you have that sort of thing. And then you’re going to have your one to two personally branded hashtags. So the reason this works is again, you have create content, your audience is already following you, they see that content, they start to like it, the hashtags start to generate engagement, the popular ones get you an initial burst of activity, because there’s lots of people looking for those your content shows up, people start clicking on it, liking it, interacting with it, even if it’s only two or three people, it’s still immediate interaction from non followers, then the moderately popular content actually keeps you active for hours into days because again, those popular ones within a matter of minutes you start getting buried in the archives, but the moderately popular keep you active hours in days same thing, non followers start seeing your content. And what happens is Instagram looks at this and goes well, your followers are liking your content. Non followers are liking your content. You got an initial burst of activity, and it stayed active for a while. longer period of time, you didn’t have a massive, you know, drop off and engagement. And so Instagram goes, Oh, look at you smarty pants, you figured out how to create high quality content. Let’s show it to more people. And so what typically happens now is in that niche specific hashtag, those really targeted ones, you will actually rank as a top posts, meaning you’re one of the first two or three, you know, photos or videos that show up in that hashtag search. And when you’re the first post, someone sees, they click on it, they’re on your profile, which we talked about how to write that amazing profile, they’re looking at your content, they’re reading that great caption, they’re following through on that call to action. They’re going to your profile, and they’re following you or they’re emailing you or they’re going to your website, and boom, you just made a sale. You just got a new follower, you’re making conversions in whatever that looks like to you. And they’re targeted because they’re actually interested in what you have to offer. You’re not just getting engagement off of something with you know, hashtags. Hashtag fun? No, you’re getting traction off of things that are directly related to what you do and who you serve. That’s, that is amazing yet I love that strategy. And I think you also touched on this is another great tip that you talked about in, you know, where do you get your tags and just searching on on Instagram is probably the best place right? If fly fishing was your keyword, you plug that in hashtag fly fishing, and there’s like 6 million, but if you it’ll give you suggestions, right, exactly. So there’s other there are some third party tools that you can use, but nothing beats just going into Instagram because Instagram knows what Instagram knows, any third party tool is pulling that data from Instagram and Twitter and it’s again a third party resource and what Instagram chooses to share publicly versus what Instagram knows. So I would rather rely on Instagram St. Like you said, just go into the search. Start typing in even if you just start typing in hashtag fishing, and it will pull up a whole bunch of related hashtags that have the word fishing. And it will show you how many are associated with it. Then let’s just say you clicked on hashtag fly fishing at the top, it will also show you other related hashtags that may not even have the word fishing in there. So it may be something like you know, outdoors or fun outside or something like that. And now you click on that one, and now you go down that rabbit hole, and then you go down the next round. So it’s really easy to get lost in in a hashtag search, but write them down. I do recommend you look at those hashtag results like so let’s say you go to one you know, and you’re looking for, you know, hashtag by fishing, you go and pull up and you’re like, Okay, that’s cool. Let’s say you go to one that says hashtag fish and you’re like, Oh, no, no, no, that’s a whole lot of other content that it’s not what I had in mind. So because people will take advantage of certain phrases terminology, they will try to hijack certain hashtags with inappropriate content that you may not want your content associated with. So don’t just assume that because that’s your target in disregard that’s you know your product or service, that it’s a safe hashtag, always go look at those hashtag results first and see what type of content is in there, and what other people are creating around that hashtag before you just jump on that hashtag and potentially put yourself in with content. You don’t want to be associated with perfect, perfect.
Dave S 46:18
And I had a question here. This is coming from Hunter from the Facebook group he was questioning or had a question about this is also on the hashtag idea. He’s got a business, he’s in the outdoor space and he does skull carving, if you could imagine this is like a, like animal skull carving
it’s actually pretty cool. What he does, but he was saying, you know, he’s got a couple of different different audiences, right? He’s got hunters that follow them. Then he’s also got these hobbies. So he’s got a few different niches in his within his niche, right. What would he use for hat? What would you recommend he used for hashtags? Should he focus on one or two? Can you mix it up a little bit?
Jenn 46:54
Absolutely mix it up. And different content may be more focused on Different parts of those audiences. So you may have some content that is more focused on the hunters, in which case use more of those related hashtags. If you’re doing the ones that are more on the hobbyist and the craft tees, and all those sorts of people, then use a heavier set of those hashtags on that post, you can use the same hashtags over and over again, you can use the same ones on multiple posts, that’s totally fine to do. What I do recommend though, is think about what your audience is doing on Instagram, not necessarily what you want to be found for. So typically, most people in your audience are going to be able to use the hashtags that their audience is looking for, because people are going to be looking for things like outdoor activities, or you know, whether it’s you know, fishing recreational things, you know, any of that sort of stuff. That’s what they’re looking for on Instagram, because they’re looking for ideas and inspiration, what other people are doing in that space. But for an extreme example, I’ll share with you the car insurance example that I always use, where no one goes to Instagram To look for car insurance, right, they’re going to go to Google like, no one’s going to go look for hashtag car insurance. So if you use it, the only people you’re gonna attract are your competitors. So instead, you want to think about what your audience is doing on Instagram. So people are looking at hashtag dream car, hashtag new car, hashtag my first car, and somebody who’s looking for their hashtag first car is going to need car insurance. So think about what your audience your audience may not just be doing, you know, looking for things really efficiently may be looking forward to vacations, retreats, they may be looking for, you know, family activities, look at what your target audience is most likely doing and looking for on Instagram, not just where you want to be found and mixing some of those hashtags for additional exposure to that ideal target audience.
Dave S 48:54
Those are this is cool. I you know, there’s, as we kind of wrap this start to wrap this thing up here. You know, obviously, the There’s so much on Instagram we can’t dig into fully, but I did just want to touch on, you know, because like Instagram igtv Instagram stories, those are some big things. Can you just briefly talk, maybe start? Start with Instagram Stories first and wherever you want to go to if you had a couple minutes to dig into that and talk about what we might need to know if you haven’t done that before.
Jenn 49:21
Yeah, so most of the we’ve talked about so far has been for the feed like the regular Instagram, you log in, you go to the home screen, and you see all the content. And that’s most of the things we talked about today have been that type of content strategy, Instagram stories, or if you go to that homescreen up there across the top, there’s all those circles, and there’s all the people’s photos in them. Those are people that have new stories. So a story is short form content, it’s content that lives for 24 hours. It’s a combination of photos and or videos and or text and you create them. They’re very raw, where we like to have a lot of polished content in the feed store. Stories are what Instagram was seven years ago, when it was meant to be Insta, aka instant. And so stories tend to be a bit more raw, they aren’t heavily edited heavily staged, they’re a bit more of the behind the scenes where people like, you know, kind of quote, unquote, let their hair down. It’s a bit more of, you know, personality in there because the contents short lived, people aren’t worried about, oh, well, this is gonna live on forever. I have to make it perfect. They’re like, yeah, this is what I did tonight. Hey, come join me, you know. And so it tends to be more relaxed content. There’s all the different stickers that you can add, you can use the pen tool, and you can doodle and draw on it. It can get a whole lot of amazingly creative content. Or you can be really simple and just upload a photo or a video and be like, cool. I did it like I participated. So it’s really up to you and wherever your creative in you know, ingenuity takes you in that situation. But they are usually stitched together as a quote story meaning there’s a beginning a middle and an end, they’re designed to be some sort of a story. Some people will upload things just kind of randomly and they just kind of, you know, throughout the day, or whatever it is, that’s fine. In general, three to five is the ideal number of posts for each story. And each one of photo plays for six seconds of video plays for up to 15 seconds. And then the text based ones are also about six seconds. So you can add music or all these other things, but they only they’re quick bits, like they literally rotate to the next sequence right away, they move really quickly. So you just want to have this kind of maybe three to five as an ideal range. After seven, you get a huge drop off and retention because if you think about the average 10 seconds, once you get to seven, now you’re over a minute, so now you’ve really capitalize their attention. They’re like hey, and we’re done with you. So aim for that three to five. Have fun with them, try out different things. If you can do those more often Like if you want to really like ramp down on the feed and only do the feed one or two times a week, and do stories every day, that can be helpful. You know, you do want to use things. You can use hashtags in there as well. But hashtags, you do want to go more broad, you want to go for the more popular ones. For more chanted exposure in a short window. You can use location tags, and they’re all these service things that again, help get some more exposure on your content. They’re really fun, go play around, you know, kind of experiment look into other people are doing. And then after the 24 hours, it disappears. You can save anything. If you go to your archive in your profile, you actually have access to every story you’ve ever uploaded, and you can put those into a highlight. So these are great for product lines. So again, you can have a different highlight for each one of your product lines, or the different services you offer. You could have one for winter activities, one for summer activities. You know, off peak on peak activities, any of those sorts of things, and you can create a different highlight for each one. And then you add your story to any of those highlights so that now people that come to your profile can actually still see those stories, months, even years after they were originally posted to your story because now they live on in a highlight. So that can be really fun. It’s great for like I said, like a product gallery. But it’s also great like you can tell like a behind the scenes one of like, just what you and your team do like behind the scenes and again, give people an inside view into your business that you wouldn’t normally put on your regular feed content.
Dave S 53:38
That’s cool. Okay. And then what about and then igtv is that different and can you talk about that same thing, a little short summary of what that’s all about.
Jenn 53:47
So I GTV is technically a standalone app, but you can watch it within Instagram so I GTV is meant to be longer form video. They did originally launch it with the undisclosed intentions of taking down YouTube which haha Good luck Instagram, I love Instagram but let’s be realistic Ain’t nobody taking down YouTube, they so they want longer form content so it’s a minimum of 15 seconds up to 10 minutes for most accounts some accounts can go up to 60 minutes depending on it used to be for only a cantilever 10,000. But now some other accounts are getting it so but you can only upload over 10 minutes on a desktop. It is designed to be vertical video. So the nine by 16 just like a stories, that vertical video, although you can now upload horizontal video and they can rotate it in igtv. But it’s designed to be a vertical video format. And it’s basically whatever you would do on YouTube, right? So you can have educational videos, tips, tutorials, trainings, resources, product demos helpful you know insider information, interviews, whatever you want, because it’s long form content. So you can upload that and get that on there and have everything ready to go on a igtv channel. Now, what you can do because IGTV kind of runs as a standalone and people don’t really like go there to look for things. If your video is over one minute length, you can actually put a one minute preview into your Instagram feed. So what happens is they watch the first minute in the feed because it popped up in that way like they would normally see your content. And then they get prompted at the end to keep watching and when they keep watch, it actually goes and opens the IGTV app to watch the rest of the video. So that being said, you want the first minute of anything on iGTV to be super impactful. get right to the point, super short intro start talking immediately get their attention, because if you don’t get their attention, they’re not going to watch the rest of the video on iGTV. So you really want to maximize that first minute get their attention deliver value, give them reason to want to go and watch the rest of it.
Dave S 56:02
Okay, perfect. And what about on the line of fake videos this is kind of a funny thing you know, with YouTube you have like with audio content you can say for a podcast have the audio you can put up a photo and create a you know, it’s they call them whatever you want to call, but some people call them fake videos because it’s just you’re listening to on YouTube, is that sort of strategy make any sense with iGTV where you put that thing they could listen to it there?
Jenn 56:25
You absolutely can. As long as it’s saved as an mp4 as a video file. You can upload it to igtv in that way and you could absolutely do it so you wouldn’t be able to translate the podcast. In that way you can totally make that happen. You can also do Instagram Live which runs on the Instagram Stories platform. And you can actually I know have the feature and it is rolling out that when you finish your Instagram Live you can share that to igtv so if you are doing if you were doing a podcast or anything like that and if you want to throw up your your Instagram Live at the same time, and have that running off on the side capturing, you know that audio and video component of it, and then save that and then put that up on iGTV you could do that as well. So there’s lots of ways that you can take you know, different pieces of content and get them up on iGTV.
Dave S 57:15
Yeah, it seems like a perfect, you know, have a lot of casting instructors, right. They’re teaching how to cast with live and, and I know one of them, Tim, who I’ve talked about quite a bit, but he, you know, I think this stuff would be perfect for him. I’ve noticed he’s been posting on just the normal, the normal feed, but getting into some of these deeper things, because a lot of times, you know, you want to see more, but it’s such a short clip,
Jenn 57:37
right? Because videos on Instagram are only 60 seconds, or up to 60 seconds. So yeah, doing something on igtv. You could do with three, four or five minute video. You could have way more information in there but you’d still have the first minute broadcast to your feed so people would still see it, they would still see high quality content and go Oh good. I can get more. I will keep watching and by clicking on that button, it opens the IGTV video where they get to watch the whole thing.
Dave S 58:04
Perfect. That’s it. All right, Jen. Well, like we’ve mentioned at the start, I could keep going, but I want to just take us out of here with Yeah, I got just a couple of quick ones random ones here. I guess one thing would be, you know from today from what we’ve covered, any any takeaways anything you throw out there that if they had to take one thing away and maybe implement something today, if you think about maybe, like we said, Dennis, at the start who’s brand new to this,
Jenn 58:27
Mm hmm. So two things, one, have fun. I can talk strategy all day, I can go nitty gritty and like bombard you for six hours of content. But in all reality, Instagram is a fun platform. People want to have fun, whether the content is helpful, educational, anything else, it still has to have a fun component. When you have fun with your content, your audience will have fun with your content and that keeps your engagement up. Additionally, really think about the content that you’re putting out there. Like I said, really make that content amazing, high quality. If it’s not serving your audience, if it’s not a value to them, don’t waste your time on it. And make sure that it really is that good standout high quality image to capture their attention in the feed and get them to them want to read the caption, do all the other things that we talked about perfect. And
Dave S 59:15
is there any budget you know, as far as a resource for Instagram, if somebody wanted to go deeper, maybe something else that wasn’t the stuff you teach in any recommendations there.
Jenn 59:23
I have a ton of them. You go to Amazon and search for Instagram for dummies, Instagram for dummies and Instagram for business for dummies, which are both available on Amazon Barnes and Nobles and major book retailers. And those are like 300 plus pages in both books have everything you need to know about Instagram from installing the app troubleshooting all the way through more complex things. The business book does go into things like giveaways and contests and running campaigns and ads and those sorts of things. So definitely some resources there. You can always join my facebook group if you just go to Facebook and search trends in social media. That’s where I share all breaking news related to Instagram. It is an active group and people come in and ask questions and tips and things about Instagram all the time. And we as a community will answer them and help you out. So that’s a great resource as well.
Dave S 1:00:14
Perfect. Perfect. And one last thing before we get out of here, you know that we do talk about a lot of outdoor companies. Do you have a outdoor activity you enjoy doing out there?
Jenn 1:00:24
Oh, that’s a good question. Um, so I grew up very country doing a lot of outdoors things. I grew up on a boat. I grew up fishing. You know, snowmobiling, I grew up skiing. I mean, I did it all. Like I was like, legit backwoods Country Girl. And now I’m a diva. And yeah, I definitely don’t get out.
Dave S 1:00:43
What was the last day? What was the last thing if you think of fishing, what was the last thing you did? What was that? What was that thing you did? Do you remember that was in the outdoor space. Was it fishing was a hiking was I mean, it could be even walking right out in the woods. Yeah,
Jenn 1:00:56
it would be like the hiking because I live in San Diego. We have a lot of trails. So I take my daughter out on some of the my ex there’s this really cool place here in San Diego and it’s it’s like off on the cliffs like off on the side of the freeway you would never know is there and you walk about a mile in and then you are literally rock climbing on these like whitewashed rocks and it’s an amazing experience. It’s on my best friend was here last month. We went out and did that. So there I am with my long nails and everything up the rocks. It was we had a we had the best time it was really fun. Perfect.
Dave S 1:01:27
All right, Jen. Hey, I appreciate you coming on here. Jenn’s Trends. They want to follow up with you. And I’m sure definitely some people will. This has been helpful. I’ve been loving the content you’ve been putting out there and all I’ll keep sharing your stuff with with my community and keep in touch with you.
Jenn 1:01:41
Thank you so much. This was awesome. All right. Thanks, Jenn. See ya.
Dave S 1:01:45
Today’s takeaway for me, less is more, less is more. I’d like to find out what you think of the new show and how I can do a better job at it. You can send me an email directly at Dave@outdoors online co workers Stick with me on social at outdoors_online. all good things must come to an end. So let’s scratch out of this one. See ya on the next one.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:11
Thanks for joining us today and for your support of the marketing podcast. If you found this podcast helpful, please share it with one other person and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the show.
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“When you give people the answer to the question they’re looking for, they will come back for more.”
Conclusion with Jenn Herman
Jenn Herman shares her best tips on Instagram today including the best colors to use, how often to post and how to setup the main link in your profile. Find out what Jenn’s super secret hash tag strategy is all about and how to increase engagement on Instagram today!
