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How to Use Instagram Like a Beauty Brand
Who run the world? Beauty brands, apparently…or at least the Instagram world.
You ever wonder why beauty brands, like Glossier and Milk Makeup, are able to absolutely dominate Instagram? We know what you’re thinking. Probs something like, “Yeah, but they create a product that’s easily shareable.” To that, we ask, “Why don’t you?”
For real. You can do it too. Don’t worry, this isn’t some inspirational email today. We’re going to show you the steps you can take to make your brand perform like a beauty brand on The Good ‘Gram.
Here goes…
Why do beauty companies’ posts just look better? Yes they use beautiful models, pretty sceneries, and cosmetics in clean packaging. But we ain’t talking about that.
They do essentially four things for every post:
- Their subjects are beautiful
- There are limited primary focal points, and tons of negative space.
- The hues across images are complementary
- There is consistency in their separate posts. Separately, their posts look great. Together they look even better.
To achieve this look, you gotta be really deliberate about your posts. Plan ahead, plan ahead, edit, and plan ahead. Yeah, editing is part of it. Glossier might have professional photographers, but if you can’t afford it, you should still edit using a freemium tool like VSCO.
Okay, well, what about hashtags? That’s another the beauty brands do well. They use popular hashtags…AND…and…photo tags. Photo tags give people another opportunity to engage with your brand. And now that shoppable tags have rolled out, you’ve got a whole new frontier for photo tags.
So what else? Well, beauty brands talk to their followers! Remember, social media is social, media. Ask people questions, answer other’s questions, host contests to pump up engagement.
Final note: don’t neglect Stories! All the beauty brands are big into IG Stories. The brands also use Stories Highlights, which if you’re not familiar with these, we’ll let Elite Daily describe it ’cause we’re outta time and outta room.
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How (and Why) to Write a Series for Your Blog
Time to take some notes from Netflix and start creating a binge-worthy series. Nah, we’re not talking about creating a TV show. We’re talking about a blog series.
Creating a set of blog posts that link together to fully cover a topic has literally (intentionally misusing that…sue us) a TON of benefits you probably haven’t given any thought to.
First of all, it allows you to dig deeper into a topic revealing your expertise in the subject. It also keeps your audience comin’ back for more. Heck, maybe they’ll even bookmark your series.
And don’t forget about the opportunities it gives you to use internal linking. That’ll encourage people to poke around your site a bit more rather than bouncing after one read.
There are two main approaches to series posts:
Type #1: Time-Limited Series of Posts. These are just a limited number of posts around one topic.
Problogger pulled this off with a series of five blog posts on how to create products for your audience.
This is a quick way to build out solid cornerstone content that can be repurposed into an ebook or course later.
Type #2: Ongoing, Regular Series of Posts. This type can run indefinitely, with standalone posts appearing between posts within the ongoing series.
Example: Tim Ferriss uses this approach with his weekly Five Bullet Friday.
So…like…where do you get ideas?
- Choose a topic that you have written about before but use the series to go more in-depth.
- Beginner-friendly topics can make a good introduction to your company. The posts themselves could all be on different topics, but you can link them together by having them aimed very much at beginners.
- Industry news is always low-hanging fruit for an ongoing series. Every week, you could do something like, “What You Need to Know About Industrial Design this Week.” Just spitballin’ here.
Plenty more from Problogger in this one. Dive in to get the full deets on exactly how to structure and interlink the posts in the series.
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Fred’s World
Serious question for y’all…
What are your thoughts on the impending humanoid robot invasion?
Okay, that’s not a serious question. It’s just one of the creepy queries Now TV’s new robot asks the unsuspecting public in a promo for Westworld season 2.
Now TV, who streams the series in the UK, created a pretty realistic robot and had him (it?) interact with unsuspecting people in a pub. Aside from the question above, the robot, named Fred, also asks if people are “ready to meet their maker,” and talks about how useless humans are.
Yikes.
Fred is just unrealistic enough to be unsettling. We’re guessing that’s by design since Westworld itself has a certain creepiness to it.
“Conversation with customers will increase sales, even if the product or service is never mentioned.”
George Farris
