Everyone knows how to use Instagram, right? You just upload an image, write a caption, and hit upload! Maybe you like some other people’s stuff, leave a comment, watch a story, but it’s all pretty basic.
Well, not exactly.
Yes, the basic functions of Instagram are super intuitive and easy to use. But there are a heap of cool ways to interact with the platform and grow your account you might not be aware of. Here are some of our 6favorite Instagram hacks, tips, and features everyone should know about.
For your business IG account, you should look at the bio space as a powerful bit of real estate. Here you can state your mission statement, link to an external site, let people know what you’re all about — it’s pretty neat.
But you can also make your bio much more attention-grabbing with custom fonts and icons! We love this feature as it really lets you personalize and show your brand’s personality.
By default, IG doesn’t give you any text editing features on your bio. Your choice of emojis is also fairly limited. So how can you spice up your bio?
First, you add a custom font. The easiest way to do this is write your text somewhere where you can change the font (such as Lingo Jam), pick the font you want, copy that, and then just paste it into your IG bio. It’s that easy! IG should automatically recognize the font you’ve picked and display on your page.
Second, add custom icons to represent something more specific to your brand. Download an app such as Character Pad (it’s free!) and copy-paste the desired icon into Instagram. Done! Add a sloth…a chess piece…a cupcake…whatever you want to help show your personality.
Custom fonts and icons can really help draw viewer’s attention to your bio link — and that will help drive sales and engagement on your profile.
If you have a personal Instagram account as well as a business account, you can run both at the same time from the same device without needing to constantly log in and out of either. This IG feature is so convenient!
• Go to your profile and tap the gear icon (Android users will need to tap the menu icon on the top right)
• Scroll to the bottom and select “Add Account”
• Sign in with your other account as normal
You can now switch between the two accounts whenever you open IG. This can make running personal and business, or even multiple business, accounts very manageable.
If you’re using IG as a marketing tool for your business, the way you use IG can either increase sales or it can be a key marketing channel that will drive sales. But this requires a lot of love, care, and attention. You can read that as it requires “time, time, and more time.”
It can be a full-time job running your business’ social media accounts—which means you’d get less time to do other things for your business. And that’s why hiring an Instagram growth agency comes in at number 3 on our tips and tricks. There are loads of companies doing this, and one we found to be the best is FollowFox. They exist to take some of burden off your shoulders of growing your IG account while you concentrate on other aspects of your business.
Companies like FollowFox don’t do everything — you still need to come up with your own content to post. But they do all the time-consuming little bits like keyword research, interacting with followers, following and unfollowing relevant accounts, and optimizing your posting strategy.
With an IG growth platform behind you, you’ll be able to make use of all the other tips and hacks on this page without worrying about messing up and ruining everything.
Hashtags on your posts help your images appear in searches — but your bio also helps with SEO.
Choosing some relevant keywords to pepper throughout your IG bio will help your account show up in search engines. Combined with the tags on your individual posts, this can really help boost how well you appear when people explore IG for new content.
Stories are only visible for a day, and then they disappear, but using the IG hack of using highlight reels can keep them visible from your profile indefinitely.
Let’s say you’ve put together a really neat marketing or educational piece in your stories, and you want people to be able to view it for more than one day. This is where highlights come in — when your story ends, it doesn’t necessarily get deleted — it’s saved to an archive. You can create a highlight reel from your home page and select new or even old stories to display.
You can add, remove, and update highlights any time. If you have a series of stories spread out over days or weeks that you want to compile, this is a great way to show them off.
When you run a business account, you start to attract a lot of people — and not all of them are going to have nice things to say about you. Many of these will be trolls, or spam accounts just trying to boost their own IG follower counts.
IG gives you the ability to filter, delete, and even disable comments on your posts.
Filtering comments allows you to remove inappropriate comments from your posts. You can even set specific words that would trigger the post to be hidden — such as swearing, racial slurs, insults, and other harmful commentary.
You can also manually delete comments under a post.
Disabling comments is rarely recommended, but sometimes necessary. You can’t do this across your entire profile, but you can set it for individual posts. You can disable comments when you get to writing your caption before you post — it’s under “advanced” settings down at the bottom.
Now, take everything we’ve given you, log into IG, and put them all to use! And definitely look in to hiring a growth agency (like FollowFox) to help you along the way. Armed with this knowledge, you’re on your way to IG success!