Understand Feed Posts

The content you put on your feed and stories need to support the goal that you made in your focus statement. 

When you look at your feed, picture it as the face of your brand. These posts reflect who you are as a brand and in turn, help you reach your goal of brand awareness, sales, etc.

Each feed post has 3 elements:

Visual: Can be an image, a video, or a carousel of images and video

Caption: Text seen underneath your visual

Hashtags: Placed in your caption or in the comments section of your post

When strategizing your feed posts, make sure you’re focus is to make them:

• Evergreen: Posts stay on your profile forever (unlike your stories)
• Ideal for reach: Optimize each post to grow your audience and engagement
• Cohesive and branded: Make your brand recognizable
• Curated: Feed content should be planned out to make sure you’re consistently posting new content
• Quality: If you can’t figure out the benefit of posting something, don’t post it

There are 3 types of feed posts and each of your feed posts should fit into one of these categories:

1. Inspiring/Motivating
2. Educating/Informing
3. Entertaining

Here are brands that have a distinct and focused Instagram strategy.

Oatly’s brand strategy is to break the normal pattern seen by most food companies. They’re bringing this strategy into their Instagram feed which builds brand awareness and a community of advocates who love a transparent brand that doesn’t try to market to them like everyone else. This post is an entertainment post.

Forbes has nailed down consistency with their Instagram strategy, posting several times a day as promotions for articles that just went live on their website. They’re regularly posting educational content that builds brand awareness, drives traffic to their website (their product), and establishes them as an authority on business and financial news. This type of content also creates engagement in the comments, which boosts them into more people’s feeds.

MVMT, an ecommerce watch company recently sold for $100 million, was built on Instagram advertising. Their focus statement would have been something like “By using Instagram for our business we will increase brand awareness and showcase our products by creating and posting content that’s inspirational and motivational to millennials 7 days a week.