Instagram is often equated with visual content. That makes it great for highly visual industries like fashion, beauty, food and travel. But what if you don’t work in one of those fabulous-looking sectors? Does that mean you should give Instagram a miss?
Nope. It just means you might need to think a bit more about how you share your content. So here are some tips for how non-visual businesses can succeed on visual social media.
Use your staff or customers in images
If your product or services don’t lend themselves to pretty visuals, then enlist the human element of your business instead. Take images of your staff working to tell the behind-the-scenes story of how the business functions or at staff events to showcase your team’s personality.
Create videos
Videos can work even for businesses that don’t have a strong visual presence because you can use them to easily explain difficult concepts or give more insight into your brand and the people behind it. You can post them as Reels or on your grid. If you are camera shy, ask if one of your team members would be keen to do it, or create a video using a cartoon character or avatar.
Take an accountant for example. Videos could be used to explain how to deal with end-of-year taxes or what a client needs to supply to an accountant, to unpack a change in regulations or a money-related news item, or to do a question and answer session with an accountant for burning tax questions.
Use carefully curated stock images
Stock images often get a bad rap, but, chosen wisely and used well, they can be helpful if you don’t have a lot of your own images. Look for images that represent your business and have a Kiwi flavour. Add your captions to the images to convey your message and make sure the image matches what you are trying to say.
Take advantage of Instagram’s features
Instagram is always developing as a platform and introducing new features. Recent innovations such as stickers on Reels which can be used to run polls or for your audience to take a quiz can add an interactive dimension to your post. For example, our accountant could post a poll asking if people are ready for tax time, or a quiz to see how much people know about filing their end-of-year accounts.
Use emojis
Emojis can be a good way of brightening up an otherwise text-heavy post. Just don’t overdo it and use appropriate symbols. If you feel out of touch then it might be a good idea to consult a younger colleague, family member or friend to check what’s appropriate or could be misconstrued right now.
Invest in learning some good design skills
For the rest of your posts, you’ll need some good design software like Canva, a willingness to learn, and a bit of creative flair (or someone who can do it for you!). With a bit of work, you’ll be able to turn some of your word-based posts into visually appealing ones. Here are some ideas for doing that…
- Take the headline points from a blog post or white paper and create a styled list post
- Take the main points from a blog post with a bit more detail and turn them into a carousel post with one point covered on each slide
- Create infographics with charts or statistics
- Create a template for customer testimonials and post comments from your clients
- Create templates for events or key dates for your industry throughout the year and post when they come up
- Create step-by-step instructional posts with images if relevant
Let’s use our friendly accountant as an example again. They could post:
- The key things a business needs to keep as part of their financial records as a list post
- Top tips for getting accounts in order for the end of the financial year as a carousel post
- Key dates throughout the accounting year such as GST or tax return deadlines
- An infographic with stats
- A testimonial from a client about how their services have made accounting easier
- A post with screenshots or shots of a team member setting up accounting software with step-by-step instructions
When you are creating your designs you want to create a sense of cohesion and tie them into your other branding through your choice of colours and fonts and use of logos. That way, your audience will come to associate them with your brand. Plus, by keeping to similar templates for certain types of posts, your audience will easily recognise when you are posting, for example, about a key date in the year.
Setting up templates in software like Canva can also speed up your content creation because you’ll have a set of templates to use as a base, and you’ll just need to tweak them.
So even if your business doesn’t have obvious visual advantages you shouldn’t be afraid of giving a platform like Instagram a go. Plus, you can use those posts to help you stand out on more traditional platforms like LinkedIn too. Want more top tips like this? Our Content Creation for Social Media short course is the ideal way to get started.
