Thoughts

10 Top Instagram Tips for Luxury Brands

Instagram is the online shop window to your brand. It is a platform to communicate to your audience who you are, what you are about, your lifestyle, your product or service. With 600 MILLION monthly active users, it’s an opportunity to harness.

So what is the best way to curate an Instagram account you ask? It’s a question we get asked a lot as an organic social media agency and it’s extremely bespoke to each and every brand.

Not only that but it is dependant on your brand’s goals for the channel; Increase in sales? Growth of your audience? Strengthening relationships with your audience? Or are you simply trying to create a visual portfolio that accurately reflects your brand? We understand it’ll likely be all of the aforementioned, but try to pick one to focus on to dictate your over-arching strategy.

Goals and strategy aside, here are a few things that make an account look professional and visually pleasing to the viewer. If you want to speak to us about content planning and curation, please do not hesitate to get in touch – it is one of the many things we pride ourselves on.

10) Plan, plan, plan

Map out your content on a grid. This will help you see the overall visual message you’re presenting to your audience. This also enables you to pinpoint occasions your brand wants to celebrate on Instagram (i.e. Mother’s Day) so you can build content around these moments. See an example mockup grid that we have done for our client 

9) Leave text to the description

Instagram is an image platform. Share images, rather than images that feature text (i.e. a quote). Whilst these may be popular, they often take away from your overall brand and can look a bit like a backup option and ran out of beautiful on-brand content to share. If the text does, in fact, fit very well with your brand, visually, make sure to align the font with the rest of the brand aesthetic (i.e. on your website).

8) Colour flow

Colour flow is extremely important on Instagram. It is no coincidence that accounts that stick to a certain colour theme are very popular. Take a look at @Tibods for example. Stick to a certain colour theme as much as possible. Use a new row of content to introduce a new colour theme if you want to change this up a little bit.

7) Three is the magic number

Instagram is presented in rows of three. Use this pattern to your strengths and plan your content in batches of three. You can even create themes of content for each line. For example, you could share three different features of one product on one line (see @johnlobb). Alternatively, you could do a large landscape detailed image, broken up and featured across three different posts.

6) Sometimes, less is more

Sometimes, more simple imagery works better. Don’t be afraid to post a more simplistic image.

5) Product placement

The more consistent the size of the focal product in each image, the cleaner and more structured your account is going to look.

4) Size really does matter

Whilst now you can upload great quality images in portrait or landscape, Instagram is ultimately a square image-based platform. Play to this strength. By sizing all of your images to the square dimensions, you can guarantee how the photo is going to look in your grid. It won’t zoom in and crop off certain parts of the overall image when viewing on the grid mode.

3) The content equation

Product + Lifestyle imagery + UGC (user-generated content) means your audience won’t feel like you’re being too pushy with sales.

2) Be consistent

Be consistent with your content: the actual content featured, the quality of imagery, the lighting, the colour theme. This is one of the most important pointers to ensure you grow over time as it means your audience will understand the kind of content you will continue to serve up and thus will be more likely to follow you.

1) Entertain

At the end of the day, your fans and followers are visiting your Instagram page, engaging with your content, starting a conversation with you because you are entertaining them; you are telling them your story. Keep up this entertainment.