Instagram is an important tool in every social media manager or influencers kit. Producing high-quality images and videos that are seamless and creative is vital to help you engage your audience and stand out from the crowd.

Cultivating the perfect Instagram feed isn't always as easy as it looks, and it can take practice and skills learnt over a period of time before you can get to the standard you are happy with. But the longer it takes you to reach this point; the lower your overall impact will be. Ideally, you will be hitting the ground running from your first post, but if this point has passed, it is never too late to learn new skills that can help you improve your feed.

Choose Your Aesthetic

It is important to figure out the aesthetic that you want for your Instagram profile. Doing so involves looking at other accounts to find inspiration.

Which social feeds do you favour? Do you prefer a lighter, brighter look? Or is a darker style something that would work best for you? Also, look at if there is some kind of established structure to their arrangement.

Deciding on an aesthetic that best reflects your brand can be achieved by looking at your favourite profiles and seeing what does and doesn't work.

As a business, you can look to your branding and style for your social media aesthetic ideas.

Create Your Content

When you have determined your Instagram visual style, you can create and curate Instagram material that fits that aesthetic.

Stock photographs and user-generated content (UGC) are wonderful ways to add visual interest to your feed while creating a sense of community.

Decide if you want to stick to images only or if you will be experimenting with reels or IGTV for longer content for your followers on the platform. When creating videos, you not only need to edit them to fit the allocated time allowed (30 seconds for reels), you need to source music if you aren't talking. This post looks at how to add music to an Instagram video https://backlightblog.com/add-music-to-instagram-video.

Consistent Editing

One way to make sure all of your images fit your new theme is to use the same editing options before uploading. There are many different apps available to edit pictures for your grid, but sticking to the same settings and filters can help you pull your theme together.

Preplan Your Feed

Next, we need to think about how your entire feed will look. There's no getting around that your Instagram posts will need to match with one another if you want your account to have a cohesive aesthetic.

In a nutshell, you want to make sure that your feed is an easy place for new viewers to go throughout and develop a good impression of your brand.

This can be via implementing an Instagram layout template that effectively turns your whole feed into one giant image as background elements flow from one grid post to the next.

Experiment with different compositions to help you find what works for you and break up your feed with different types of posts; you can find Instagram grid templates online to help you to visualise how your content will look once posted.

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