Refreshing Your Instagram Style
While social media marketing can feel like a demanding activity, most social networks are fairly forgiving in terms of how your account looks. The typical social media feed moves at a relatively fast pace and the way your posts appear requires scrolling to see each one.
Instagram, however, is different because of the grid. Your Instagram account page consists of a grid with three images across each row. Whether someone is viewing your account on their desktop computer or, more commonly, a mobile device, they will always see three images side by side, even as they scroll down the page. On a standard mobile phone, a person will typically see four rows of three images at a time when scrolling down the grid.
The Instagram grid instantly reveals a lot about your brand. It can easily appear cluttered and chaotic when you post without considering the aesthetic - a coherent style or look. Establishing and maintaining an aesthetic for your Instagram account can be challenging. Sometimes, you have to create a separate social media content plan just for Instagram to try to adhere to an established look.
Here are some ways to refresh your Instagram style.
- Edit your images. Whether your posting photos or videos, chances are the lighting and color isn’t always attractive. Take advantage of your smartphone camera’s basic editing tools to brighten up your images. You don’t need to go to any extremes but do a digital touchup like professional photographers do. Play around with brightness, saturation, vibrancy, exposure, and contrast. Even the smallest incremental changes can make your images pop.
- Use a color palette. Pick a particular set of colors and carry them through your images. A wine company with a blue and yellow logo could post photographs and videos that showcase those colors, such as a table setting with a blue tablecloth and yellow flowers with a glass of wine or someone wearing blue jeans and a yellow shirt holding a bottle of wine.
- Use creative apps. While you can do a lot with Instagram and its filters and editing tools, you can often do even more with a third-party. Using a particular filter, for example, can transform your visuals into something distinctive and recognizable. Look at apps such as Camera+, VSCO, or Lightroom.
- Create custom Reel covers. You can upload custom thumbnails for your Instagram Reels that will appear on the grid and create a more unified look.
- Create a pattern. Alternate graphics with photos or illustrations in a way that lays out a specific pattern on the grid. Keep in mind that maintaining this pattern can be challenging, so spend some time planning it out far in advance.
- Preview your grid. Tools such as Sprout Social, Later, and Planoly let you pre-plan your grid, giving you a preview of how it will look depending on what you upload. Some even let you drag and drop images into different positions until you get the look you want.
- Create Highlights covers. Instagram Highlights appear under your bio and above your grid and are collections of Stories you’ve posted in the past. You can group them by categories that you come up with and upload custom covers so the circle icons have a particular look instead of using whatever image appears by default.
- Use "Restyle" with AI. If you’re open to using AI to modify your images and short videos, Meta introduced a new feature called "Restyle." You can use a custom preset style or enter some descriptive words to customize the edit. AI will modify and stylize the image or video for you.
As you can see, there are many ways to develop your Instagram aesthetic and tools you can use to achieve just the right look.
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Aliza Sherman is a web pioneer, author, and international speaker. Sherman is the author of 8 books about the Internet including The Everything Blogging Book, Streetwise Ecommerce, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and Social Media Engagement for Dummies.