Social media is a powerful tool for promoting yourself and your business. No platform is this more apparent than Instagram if you’re in the photography industry.

Here are our top tips to help you organize your Instagram feed as a professional photographer.

Develop Your Brand

Use your Instagram profile to create and define your brand’s aesthetic by posting photographs that portray your main specialism. This could be a specific subject (such as fashion, architecture, or weddings) or a certain photography style (for example, minimalist or monochrome).

People will follow your feed based on your theme, so don’t deviate from it too much, or you’ll lose followers. Developing a consistent aesthetic via a common subject and sticking to it will help you to retain any followers you attract.

Showcase

Get into the habit of only posting your best work on your feed. Think of your Instagram profile as a digital portfolio – every time you post an image, consider how your photos look collectively as a grid and use every post to market your work to the best of your ability.

If you’re using several images in one post via the multiple picture option, remember that only one will show up on your feed as a ‘front page’ for the album. Make sure that this photo is not only concurrent with the overall grid aesthetic but is intriguing enough that your followers will want to click on it to view the rest of the pictures.

Once you’ve built up a substantial folio of the best pictures on your Instagram, you can look to have them curated into a storybook - print Instagram photos and will bring your Instagram feed to life by helping you create photo albums, scrapbooks, or portfolio books.

Strategic Posting

It’s important to be strategic in how and when you post when organizing your Instagram feed as a professional photographer. Be careful about oversharing and repetitive posting, as these can irritate people. Your followers are likely to get fed up with multiple, generic posts every day, so focus on quality rather than quantity and make sure your posts are unique.

Consider utilizing hashtags to help widen your reach and think about tagging clients and other businesses. For instance, you might tag a person who appears in one of your images or the business where the picture was taken. This technique will help to engage other users with your posts, as well as potentially build your community as the tagged images will appear in the other user’s or business’ library. Also, make sure you identify the peak times for posting in order to reach the widest audience possible.

Network

You might be an active poster on your Instagram, but to fully take advantage of the platform as a photographer, you should look to engage with others and network as much as possible.

Monitor your feed regularly and respond to any comments and queries as soon as you can. This will not only boost customer relations and expand your audience, but it will also help to maintain your brand’s reputation and build up trust with clients. Also, search for other photographers and start following them, liking and commenting on their posts to encourage interaction.

Conclusion

While organizing your Instagram feed as a professional photographer, it’s important to concentrate on maintaining consistency to attract and maintain followers. Used correctly, Instagram is a highly effective way to showcase your portfolio, build interest in your work, and connect with potential clients and with other photographers.