How to make your Instagram profile stand out

Social media is the most important space for reaching your customers and fans in everyday life worldwide. We use the internet and social media to share information and news, to discover products and to advertise. To reach most people, it is no longer enough to have a website somewhere in the vastness of the internet where nobody finds it. The same now applies to social media platforms like Instagram and co. For anyone who wants to reach people here, it has long not been enough to just create an account and a few posts. For your business to grow, however, it is essential to be present here too: it builds trust, strengthens customer loyalty and serves to win completely new potential customers. More and more freelancers sooner or later come to the conclusion that social media is a must, whether with paid advertising or purely organic; both are legitimate. It brings significantly more reach than classic media, and advertising has never worked as well and as cheaply as it does with today's social media platforms. If you want to do everything to stand out from the crowd, it is not enough to just do social media on the side; planning and optimization are required. So what can you actually do?

1. Competitor analysis

As so often, you should start on Instagram by analysing your competition. What are others in the same niche as you doing, which content works particularly well, and which has performed exceptionally well measured by average likes? Check how old an account is and how many of the followers like the posts. Over time some inactive followers naturally accumulate, but if the like rate is consistently high, you can orient yourself on that account's content. You should take all of this information into account when designing your own content.

2. Hashtags

Whether it's about getting more likes, increasing your follower count or something else, hashtags also play an important role in making your profile stand out. Hashtags help make your content more visible: besides users who use hashtags to find posts, hashtags help Instagram classify your content and suggest it to the right users. You can add up to 30 to your post, but you really shouldn't! What the right number is has to be tested, but here too you can orient yourself on your competition when choosing and counting hashtags.

3. Make your page eye-catching

Once you have first ideas for content, it's time to design your profile. Use a colour palette that suits your business and presents a pleasant picture to visitors of your profile. This naturally applies to your posts as well as your profile picture; ideally, use quickly recognisable, recurring templates for these. In our article Tips on designing your profile picture you will also find some ideas and inspiration for designing your profile picture. Which colours are the right ones has to be figured out; many studies have looked at the psychological effect of colours, and the right palette for your business has to be determined. If you want a tool to help you design your palette, the website Coolors is an ideal starting point.

4. Communicate with your followers

Not to forget, behind all the numbers are people. When you communicate with your followers, you can strengthen their bond with your business and thus become even more successful in the long term. Reply to comments, tell something interesting in your caption, and keep your followers up to date about your business where appropriate. We also have a guide on writing interesting captions. Instagram offers many ways to get in touch with your followers, and you should use them: this creates interest in your content that goes beyond a quick laugh or purely informational interest.

5. Cooperate with influencers and other profiles

A cooperation with an influencer or other large profiles offers the chance to win more followers and prospects, as well as creating great trust in your business. This costs money, but such a campaign can be significantly more profitable than a classic advertising campaign, especially in the long term and potentially also in the short term. An influencer's followers have a special bond with them, and recommendations from them are perceived more like a friend's recommendation and not as advertising.

6. Post regularly and stay active

On Instagram, as on other social media platforms, it is extremely important to stay active regularly and consistently. Create new posts and stories regularly, comment on other accounts' posts, and stay in your followers' minds.

7. Post at the right time

Instagram does not display posts chronologically, but the first few minutes of a post determine how much reach it will get in the long run. To find out when the best time to post is, it helps to look at your insights: under the Audience tab you will find the times and days on which most of your followers are active on Instagram. Set the time you post accordingly, and you will generate significantly more engagement in the first minutes from your followers alone, and thus gain more reach. If you implement all or at least some of these tips, you are already on a good path to making your profile stand out. Keep working on optimising and improving your social media campaign, and you will certainly have great success in the long run.