Best Practices to Grow Your Audience with Instagram

Grow with Angie and April: A Podcast for Teacherpreneurs

Today we are going to jump into how to use Instagram to connect with your audience and best practices to build your brand through the platform. If you want to continue the conversation join us at our Facebook Mastermind group www.growwithusmastermind.com and let us know what's worked for you and what questions you have. If you haven’t already, join our group to find the support and accountability you need to grow your TpT business. April and I were really excited to have Jacqueline Ortiz from The Little Ladybug Shop come on the podcast to share with us her Instagram tips and trick.s Jacqueline's had a lot of success growing her brand and followers through the platform. A little of Jacqueline's Instagram story Jacqueline started doing TpT back in 2015. At that time her focus was on Pinterest and FaceBook. However, she started to notice a shift for bloggers and sellers starting to use Instagram. She's found that a lot of teachers are now using the platform a lot like Pinterest. It's a faster way to scroll through and find resources you're interested in and new teachers to follow. So, in 2017 she started to really focus on Instagram. She started to grow her following and find other teachers to collaborate with. Today she has a little over 20K follower and her platform is the 3rd largest traffic source for her store and one of the top sources for her blog. From our podcast conversation, here are the best practices to use to grow your TpT store and following on Instagram. Use hashtags Using hashtags is a great way to help teachers find you that aren't already following you. One thing that a lot of people don't realize is that you can also use hashtags on your Instagram Stories. If people search these hashtags they can find your stories as well as your regular posts. When you look at your insights for your stories you're able to see how many people found your story from searching with those hashtags. Engage with your audience Instagram is just like any other platform if you want to grow your following you need to engage with your audience. One of the best ways to do this is to know when your audience is online. Jacqueline, April, and I have all found that the time when the most amount of our followers are online is in the evening. Because of that, our posts perform better when we post them during the evening. If we post earlier in the day there just isn't as much engagement with the posts. You also want to make sure that you are responding to any comments that are left on your post. Be consistent It seems like it comes up time and time again, but consistency truly is key. Jacqueline shared that she tries to post to her feed at least four times a week. The more consistent you are the more people will see your posts. But, if you disappear for a while, when you come back and start posting again you won't get the same reach that you were getting when you were being consistent. There are some tools that you can use to stay help you stay consistent. They can also help you post at those crucial times of day when your followers are on the platform. Tailwind has some great tools to help you if you are using that resource. If you don't use Tailwind, you can do what I do. You can actually create draft posts directly on Instagram. Earlier in the day, I will start to create my post but before hitting to publish I will hit the back button. It asks me if I want to save the post as a draft. Then, I set a timer on my phone to go off each evening. When the time goes off all I have to do it go in and hit publish. Protect your time A