Last Saturday, ‘The League of Extraordinary Women’, hosted their annual ‘Run The World’ conference in Melbourne.
In attendance was a 500-strong crowd of people (I say people, because there were a handful of men in attendance, but the estrogen was strong, my friends!), there to hear from nine female entrepreneurial speakers.
I love attending conferences and events where I get to hear from entrepreneurs, expert thinkers and even futurists, like Brian Solis at last years SocialBiz conference in Melbourne. You never know that pearls of wisdom you’ll glean!
I digress, one speaker who I just loved listening to at #runtheworld2015 was Elizabeth Briedis, one half of Byron Bay label Spell & The Gypsy Collective.
The label has almost 500K followers on Instagram alone, not even counting their other accounts and web traffic, so it was with rapt interest that I listened to Elizabeth talk about their instagram strategy.
So here are here top five tips for a successful instagram account:
- Quality, quality, quality!
Elizabeth suggests investing in a DSRL to take your pictures, rather than relying on the in-built phone camera. Use high-res images where you can with good lighting, so that people can clearly recognise what you’re photographing.
- No bedroom/bathroom selfies
Unless your bedroom is gorgeous of course! Try to think about your background and setting to project an image, rather than taking a photo in the mirror of your bathroom with a toilet in the background.
- Have a unique #
Particularly if you have a business or brand, offer followers a unique hashtag they can use to tag photos of your product. If the photos are good quality, re-gram them by trying to get your hands on the original image from the account holder. People enjoy seeing their images promoted so it’s a win-win for your followers and your brand.
- Laugh to your shoulder
What?! That’s the pet phrase they throw about in the office and on photo-shoots, meaning that when they’re shooting a model they say, ‘Laugh into your shoulder!’ so she smiles but turns her head at the same time. Images with movement in them, where the face isn’t the focus, but rather the clothes, seem to resonate more with their audience.
- Use filters outside of Instagram
Elizabeth suggests that as everyone uses the filters within Instagram, try using an app like VSCOcam or even process your images in Photoshop. It will give them an individual look so when people are scrolling through their feeds, your images will stand out.
So there you have it folks, as you can see, the images from Spell and The Gypsy Collective are pretty special and it’s obvious they put a lot of time and love into the feed.
Do you have any tips or tricks for Instagram? I’d love to hear them below!
