Up Your Instagram Game in Under an Hour

Photo by Elizabeth LaDuca Photography

Ah, Instagram. At this point, it’s pretty much essential that you, a planner and small business owner, dedicate time to your instagram account each day. It’s the easiest way to keep your portfolio up to date, share what you do behind the scenes, showcase your latest features, and connect with prospective clients. That said, it’s important to have an account that looks intentionally curated and personalized to reflect your brand. Today, we’re sharing some easy ways to achieve this. You can do all of them right now. So, what are you waiting for?

1. Post to your Stories

You should be posting to your stories every. single. day. This is a great way to drive new followers to your account and to show people what you do behind the scenes on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to get in front of the camera at first, but it gets easier over time! You want your stories to be an extension of your brand, so you’ll want to be consistent with the fonts you use, as well as the filters you select. Consider adding custom filter to your instagram, too!

2. Instagram Highlights

Instagram Highlights are a great feature that let you keep stories live for longer than the typical 24 hours. This is a great way for you to showcase your work. For example, if you do a wedding and capture all of the behind the scenes details, you should save that to your highlights so that prospective clients who visit your page can see what it’s like on a wedding day with your team, long after the 24 hour period for the highlight has expired. One of the easiest ways to make your instagram look professional and polished is to have a custom icon for each of your instagram story highlights. If you do not have cover pages on your Story Highlights, we designed a complete set of Icons for you to use! They’re available in our boutique here. You can use them as is, or use the Adobe Photoshop files to customize them to your branded colors. This is such an easy way to up your instagram game and make your page look professional.

3. Make sure you’re searchable

If your handle is your business name, consider making your name be what your company does. For example, we’re @brillianteventplanning, so we don’t need our name on insta to also be “Brilliant Event Planning” - it’s repetitive. Our name is listed as “NYC & Boston Wedding Planner”. This is helpful because if someone types NYC wedding planner” or “Boston wedding planner” into the search our account comes up since it’s our name. You want prospective clients to be able to find you, so this helps optimize your account for people who might be looking for a planner.

4. Get a central link for your profile

You are only allowed one link to be a part of your instagram profile. So, you link to your website, right? Wrong! You should be using a central link to drive traffic to recent publications, blog posts, reviews, and more. If you want people to see your content, you need to link directly to it, not to your homepage (or at least, not only to your homepage). Linktree offers this feature, but you can also get it through scheduling apps like Tailwind.

There you have it! These four actions should take you under an hour to do and make such a big difference in your account looks to visitors to your profile. If you’re looking for other ways to easily improve your planning visit, visit our exclusive Planner’s Collection in our boutique.