I’ve got to be honest with you – Instagram hasn’t always been the most enjoyable social media platform for me. For a really long time I felt incredibly overwhelmed by the idea of trying to come up with daily content to post that was “on-brand” and perfectly positioned for the ultimate feed. Do you know what I’m talking about? I’ll bet you do! The thought of unplanned Instagram posts sounded near impossible to me because I believed that I needed time for curation.
Enter my friend Jaimie Myers– social media strategist and Instagram pro. Earlier in the year Jaimie challenged me to 30 days of unplanned Instagram posts and, never to back down from a challenge, I accepted.
Here’s what I learned from 30 days of unplanned Instagram posts.
People are more interested in your life than you think they are.
After spending the few months prior carefully laying out my feed with branded images, quote graphics and staged selfies I was a little surprised to witness my Instagram community (or what you may refer to as a follower count) grow more rapidly and steadily than it had in the few months prior.
More people engaged with my images and showed a genuine interest in getting to know me than ever before.
You might think that people are looking for the perfect feed, but it seems that real everyday life images are what catches people attention! I noticed that when I posted a picture of myself my community grew, while pictures of quotes and images without me in them caused a loss of community members.
When you don’t plan your posts you feel inspired to engage more with your people.
I’ll be real with you–in the days when I had a perfectly laid out Instagram feed planned a month in advance, I’d show up to Instagram, copy and paste my image and caption from Later and then bounce.
Sad right?
I never hung around to see what anyone else was up to and I showed very little interest in the community that I had been building. I had no idea how to be social on social media. Am I preaching to the choir right now?
When I was challenged to show up daily on Instagram and provide original unplanned content that all changed. Now that I had a reason to be there, I became curious about seeing what other people were up to! These days I have to set myself a timer to make sure I don’t get lost in the rabbit hole!
There is no one-stop-shop for Instagram success.
I told you how I used to copy, paste and run? Well I spent so little time actually observing how people responded to my images and the associated hashtags that I had no real idea what my audience was enjoying or where to find new community members.
There is no one set of hashtags that work for everyone. There are successful Instagram accounts with quote images posted everywhere, there are other accounts doing the same thing that aren’t so successful.
That’s because you have to figure out what works for your audience and the only way to do that is to show up, engage and observe.
Instagram is far less serious then we think it is.
There was a time when I would research captions and google the “best times of the day to post on Instagram.” I would try out every single filter available to me and make sure that I had the perfect crop before hitting post.
If there’s anything that my 30 days of unplanned Instagram posts taught me it’s that Instagram is not that serious.
People will find and follow you at all times of the day. Beautifully curated feeds with quote images dispersed between every other selfie don’t always win. And at the end of the day being social will get you a hell of a lot farther than being perfect.
