Think of your Instagram profile and bio as your elevator pitch. Instagram is some of the places where a lot of people do social media marketing. You want new followers to know exactly who you are and what you do or sell in just s split seconds after they read it.
A well planned layout of your profile is a key to leaving a lasting impression. Add line breaks to your caption, hide hashtags in your stories, and respond to DM’s in just two taps. Here are the top 15 hacks for creating a stylish Instagram and bios that help you stand out from the others.
Instagram Hack 1: Finding the right alignment for your bio
There are a few ways to make your Instagram bio standout, by getting the right alignment or spacing for your bio could make all the difference. This might take a few or more trial and error to get it right and perfect, but the result will be an eye-catching bio that protrudes out better. Do take note that you only have 150 characters for your Instagram bio, be careful not to compromise your brand message to get your alignment right!
This is how you can change the alignment and add space to your bio:
- Open your Instagram account using web browser (it is much easier to work on compared to mobile)
- Copy the arrow together with the space in between in: >>⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀<<
- Click on ‘Edit your profile’ from your Instagram page
- Go to the ‘bio’ section and paste the space that you have copied from above. If it is not what you wanted or if its not in the center, you can always delete or add spaces until you achieve the perfect alignment that you want
Instagram Hack 2: Reorganising your Instagram Stories highlights
Look at your Instagram Stories Highlights as your brand’s lookbook or a portfolio. You only want to show cast your best content upfront and center on your Instagram profile page. There will always be 4 Instagram stories highlighted above your grid. Make sure that you optimize that space and show off your best highlights.
If you release a new highlight, your existing highlight will be shifted to the right and users may need to scroll to find them. Getting the order right on your Instagram stories highlights is super important and critical if you want to attract your audience to tap through your highlights.
For some reason, there is a trick to always having your best highlights at the front and in the top 4 spots!
Here is how you reorder your highlights:
- Tap on the Instagram stories highlights the ‘+’ button, it will bring you to the front of your highlights list
- Then select on ‘ edit highlights’
- Tap on ‘ archive’ to access all your achieved Instagram stories
- Tap on add story to your highlight and click done. This will move your highlight to the front of your highlights
- You will need to repeat the steps above, but remember to unselect the story that you just added to you highlight
The process will take not less than 60 seconds, it is unlikely that anyone will catch this super quick hack in action!
You may think that 60 seconds is a waste of time but the benefits really pay off as your ebay highlights are the first to appear on your page!
Instagram hack 3: Using presets to edit all your Instagram photos
Want to gain followers and build your brand awareness on Instagram? You first need to have a strong and recognizable Instagram aesthetic across your whole feed and stories. By editing photos so that they all look and feel the same vibe. It takes time and effort to edit and get it right, especially if you are new to photoshop.
But not to worry! There are always presets. Presets are one click photo editing tools that can dramatically speed up your workflow and give you professional look photos for your Instagram. For no fuss editing and a quick and easy way, VSCO app is one of the best and favourite photo editing apps that influencers and brands. It has lots of free presets, called the VSCO filters. You have a variety of presets to choose from, you can start experimenting right away and choosing your favourites for your brand.
There is always a second option which is the Lightroom CC. Photoshop takes time and effort to master, the Lightroom app allows you to use mobile presets to quickly edit images on the go and it’s FREE!
Instagram Hack 4: Get more Instagram Stories Views by using hashtags
Bet that you guys did not know that you can add up to 10 hashtags for each of your Instagram story posts. By adding hashtags to your story, you are giving your content an added chance to be seen by new audiences. Most geolocation tags and hashtags have their own stories attached to them, this means that they could appear on the Instagram Explore page.
To maximize on this under utilized hack, add 10 relevant hashtags to your next story simply by typing them into your Instagram story using text. Here two ways to hide your hashtags on your story:
- Do not clutter you hashtags, shrink the text size and hide it under a GIF or sticker
- Blend it with your picture. Select the colour tool and match it perfectly to where you want your highlight to be (works well with solid backgrounds)
Instagram Hack 5: Share a sneak peek of your post on story
Entice your audience and share just a tiny highlight of your Instagram story. Here is how you can do it!
- Open you Instagram story and take a photo or select from your camera roll
- Tap on the pen icon and select a colour that you want
- Tap and hold on the screen for 1 to 3 seconds, it will filled up the whole entire photo with a solid colour
- Tap the eraser icon and select the size of the eraser to be
- Swipe on the screen to reveal the underlying image
- If you are happy with your image, press on to add it to you story
Take note: if you were to fill in the screen with a marker or the neon brush, you will get a translucent colour filled in
Instagram Hacks 6: Change highlights icons without publishing them
Instagram icon helps to draw your audience and persuade them to tap through to see more of your stories. You have to make sure that your highlight does not only match your overall aesthetics, but also let your audience know what your highlight is about. How to upload highlight cover without actually posting them? This is how:
- Tap and hold on you highlight that you want to change the cover of
- Tap on ‘edit cover’
- Scroll all the way to you right until you see an image icon appear. Tap on the icon to access your camera roll
- Select any image you want to use as your cover and it does not need to be published to your stories or added into your highlights
This can be particularly helpful if you are using cute icons as your instagram highlight cover. Here is an example of an aesthetics highlight cover
Instagram Hack 7: Appear more search results on the Explore Page
Did you know that the ‘name’ section in your bio is searchable? This means that you can change it to words that highlight what your instagram profile or business is about!
By including important keywords in your ‘Name’, there will be a higher chance of appearing in the Instagram Explore page if anyone searched for those keywords!
Instagram Hacks 8: Create a cover photo for your video content
Here is our favorite hack to maintain your Instagram feed while posting more video content. First, start by using apps like Abode , Canva, or any app design software to create a still image to the beginning or end of your video clip. Then you can select the clip to be the cover image when you are publishing your video post on IGTV or feed. Creating a branded video cover has become more important now that IGTV videos can be shared on your Instagram feed as a preview.
Instagram Hacks 9: Post when your audience is most active
Knowing when your audience is online is the best way to hack into their home feed and to make sure they always see your post. It takes one simple step to do this.
First, you should take a look at your Instagram insight to learn when is the peak time for your audience. Under the audience tab, you will see spikes in your Instagram engagement from your audience and you can pinpoint the days of the week or the time of the day that your audience are the most active at.
Instagram Hacks 10: Use Instagram stories templates to maintain consistency
Instagram stories templates are now a trend for lots of people who are doing business and also influencers. They carefully create their own branded stories that have a uniform colour, tone, style and format.
One of the huge benefits of having an Instagram stories template is that it makes creating on-brand content super easy and simple so that you will never fall behind on posting stories and growing your business. Creating your own unique templates using Instagram’s styles, font, GIF and colours, or even using design apps such as Over, Unfold to use predesigned templates to edit your image!
Instagram Hacks 11: Add your own brand font
You should know by now that the importance of maintaining your brand aesthetic on Instagram is to stay consistent with your fonts. If you like to integrate your own branded fonts, you have to add them to your design app. This can really help to improve your brand awareness and will make your Instagram stories stand out more!
To add your brand’s font, suggest you to use Over app for an easy way to achieve the look, by just following this simple steps;
- Send your fonts from your computer to your phone
- Download the file on your phone
- Open the Over app and navigate to fonts in any of your draft templates
- Your fonts should be installed in the available option
Instagram Hacks 12: Hiding old post without deleting them
You might be given your Instagram aesthetic and there might be a few posts that do not fit in with your new theme. Thankfully, you do not have to delete them from your page, just hide them in your archive! Here is how you can archive your posts:
- Tap on the three dots on top of the post that you want to remove
- Select ‘archive’ and it will be remove from your feed
- Tap the archive on the top right of your page to view all your archive
- Tap on ‘show on profile’ if you want to restore the post and it will show up on its original spot
Instagram Hacks 13: Reply comment faster
Running a business is not easy on Instagram, you could find that lots of your followers are asking similar questions and you want to provide all of them with prompt answer,
To do this, you will need to open your profile and tap the button with the three lines on the top right corner. This will open the sidebar menu where you can access your Instagram setting. Then, tap on the settings, scroll down to the business setting and you can see an option for ‘quick reply’.
This will open a new window where you can create both keyboard shortcuts for the quick reply. Tap on the ‘+’ on the top right and create a new quick reply. Once you are done and happy with it, tap on ‘save’ and you are good to go. You can always come back and edit or delete your quick reply in the near future.
Once you are ready to use your quick reply, type the shortcut you created. This should cause a blue quick reply button to appear in the message box. When you tap on it, the quick reply message you wrote will automatically appear.
Instagram Hacks 14: Switch to a creator profile to streamline your DM
The new creator profile comes with some major benefits. With more DM filtering options, the creator profile inbox allows you to prioritize messages from brand and friends, or rank them by relevance or time to make sure they never miss an important message or request.
Instagram Hacks 15: Turn off your ‘last active’
For privacy reasons and not wanting anyone to know when you were last online. All you have to do is to turn off your activity status from your Instagram settings.
Here is what you need to do:
- Go to setting from your profile
- Scroll down to privacy and tap on activity status
- Tap the slider button to turn off show activity status
There you go! 15 easy and simple ways to achieve Instagram tips and tricks that could help you boost and build your online community of your dreams! If you need help with your Social Media Marketing, just give iClick Media a call at 6362 0123 today!
