Friday Social on social: Louise's instagram tips

Are you a busy business owner who feels like you could be making better use of 'social' in your business?

But do you feel stuck on where to start, and what to do when you DO find 5 mins to get on with it (particularly if you're not that enthusiastic about social media anyway .. ).

This is SO true for me .. and a lot of tenants at Harland Works.

One thing that helps is a regular meet up with other people based at Harland Works to share our social media content challenges. Regulars have included Zagyoga Iyengar Studio Fallen Giants Blue Elephant Pottery and Maz Ink Tattoo Studio and this time we also had Third Angel Clumsy Hooves and Sincerely Louise

It helps because doing it as a group makes it more fun .. and we can act as each other's sounding blocks... "is this too boring to post?", "how can I edit photos with my phone?", "what hashtags should I use?" .. Things you can get totally stuck on when you're doing it alone can get sorted out if you get a bit of help / friendly just-get-it-done type encouragement from a group.

And you never know what specialist skills other people have that you can tap into. For example, it's a bonus, in the context of content creation for social media, if your small group turns out to have no less than 3 people with commercial photography experience ;)

This week Louise of Sincerely Louise (a knitter extraordinaire - come along to her next knitting social on June 26th to sample her lovely studio, see her knitted animal head 'trophy' wall and even buy her new book!) led a session for us specifically on instagram.

This was a really great session - thank you Louise for being such a patient and supportive teacher! We learnt a lot.. Louise even managed to get us all to take ACTION there and then by getting us all to do our own posts IMMEDIATELY ... a quite unheard of rate of progress for some of us!

Some of her top tips included things like:

1. Post daily. Or every other day at a push. Less than that and the instagram algorithm won't share its love with you.

2. Use the rule of thirds when thinking about your pictures. You can get a grid on your phone - google is your friend for more on this.

3. Aim for at least 16 hashtags per post. 16! Some of us almost keeled over at this ... social is obviously not for the faint hearted/not-very-committed... but Louise is made of sterner stuff and persisted .. and showed us all how to choose the ones for us... and made us all do it there and then.

4. Support each other - like and comment on each other's posts. Respond to all the comments on your posts. It all encourages instagram to make your content visible.

5. We started to look at instagram stories .. but ran out of time ... so we're going to come back to that at a future Friday Social on social.

All these sessions are helpful - but this session was particularly fab thanks to Louise. Looking forward to the next one. And enjoying being part of a supportive group of business owners at Harland Works :)