Written by: Riley Fouts

Cheers to 1,000 followers on Instagram! We recently hit a big milestone that we have been working towards for a few months now, and it makes us so happy to see our brand grow. To celebrate, this post is dedicated to sharing a few strategies that worked for us in building our following + becoming more involved on the gram. 

Consistency

This is by far the most pivotal technique that upped our IG game. Before we developed our new regimen, our posting schedule was very infrequent and haphazard — we posted whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. While this may have worked in the early stages of our business, we figured out that it’s actually *easier* to develop a realistic posting routine and follow a schedule.

For us, this means posting three times a week and posting to stories every weekday. We have also adopted other smaller rituals like liking + responding to comments, adding stories to highlights, taking advantage of SEO and more. While there have definitely been periods where we don’t live up to our consistency goals, we like to remind ourselves that we simply can’t be perfect — no one is + that’s how it should be! 

Engagement

Our recent obsession has been polling our followers on stories, whether we ask for their preference RE color palettes, logos, fonts, mood board visuals, or even vibes for the upcoming season via Pinterest finds. Just as many of our clients are dedicated to building a tight-knit community, it is equally as important for us to establish a circle of our own.

Social media serves as the perfect outlet for us to showcase more of our personalities behind the work we provide. With both our team and clients residing in locations all across the nation (and beyond!), we know how important it is to show up online and create authentic conversations.

Planning

Planoly is our BFF. A few weeks before each month’s end, our team brainstorms content ideas for the following month. We tend to look at upcoming holidays, project timelines, untouched educational topics or even past projects not talked about yet. Once we review these ideas, we put them into our Planoly calendar *tentatively* (because things change all the time, let’s be real). We’ll then draft up some captions and voila! 

This whole process alleviates any stress when we are preparing a post. While we still have to create each one, at least now we can see what’s coming up + get designing in advance!

Inspo

We will be the first to admit that we frequently get caught down a rabbit hole when looking for inspiration or perusing for trends (OK, or stalking 🤣) on social media. Sometimes it’s hard to avoid comparing ourselves to others when doing this, but this exercise is helpful to discover what else is out there, gauge our capabilities + come up with goals to hit in the future. We tend to look to other accounts in our industry for inspo regarding trending audio, reel formats, project launch announcements and educational topics — all so that we can apply these ideas to our unique ways of doing business.  

Resources

Along our journey of social strategy improvement, we noticed there were countless projects in our portfolio that had never seen the light of day — not to mention specific aspects of each project that could make up a whole post themselves. Instead of ignoring this content because it wasn’t current, we used it to our advantage to stock up the calendar for months to come. These previous projects, in combination with recent / upcoming ones, offered us content for days on end that may not be new to us… but that our followers had never seen before!

On the note of being resourceful, we realized that if a post does well (or has repeatedly done well), it’s not a sin to keep doing just that. Why change something that already works!? For us, we see the most success with new project launches, photoshoot recaps and team lifestyle content. This will vary from biz to biz, but the only way to find out what works for you is to go back to step #1 and be. consistent. From this plethora of posts, you will be able to better assess which are performing better than others. 

To end it off, we’re revealing one of our favorite IG tactics that we do every Friday: our weekly recaps! It’s basically one big photo dump on stories, consisting of random moments throughout the week like a new recipe, client meeting, workout class, pretty walk, farmers market stroll, OOTD… anything really. This for sure will not be ending anytime soon — so join us every Friday to see what we get up to 🤗

While we’re always refining + revamping our own social media approach, if you’re a brand in need of social media guidance, (1) we’ve been there and (2) we’d love to help! Fill out this link or feel free to visit our IG where you can click the link in our bio (& visualize these methods IRL)!