How to Beautifully Curate Your Instagram Channel

The world of Instagram has developed and evolved so much since its creation that it’s almost a completely different beast. It’s become a landscape scattered in “plandid” photography and paid for posts. We’ve reached a point where one Instagram account is not enough; lots of people find themselves needing one for personal posts, one to act as their portfolio and another for… their dog?

There is no arguing that the bar has been raised when it comes to the design and style of your ‘gram. It could be due to the huge influx of creative professionals and photographers scrapping traditional portfolios for the far more interactive and energetic Insta feed, or it could simply be that people have seen the money that can come from a large following and are therefore willing to put more effort in. Whatever the answer, it’s time to make your Instagram feel fancy as AF. And who knows, maybe it could become another source of income!

Content:

This might sound obvious in 2018, but the content your posting needs to be right for your page. Decide on the theme/niche and stick to it. If it’s a health and fitness account, don’t start posting photos of cars. That said, let’s move onto the different styles on content you can use.

Our client Sculptmode provides a great example of how you can vary the style of content while still keeping the grid consistent and beautifully aesthetic. We test a wide range of content styles to help us understand what their followers were the most engaged with.

A theme we’ve been exploring is three image rows of lifestyle images. The concept is simple, all three images in the row flow together to tell a story. These can be three images all taken in the same/similar location or a more complex combination of images that have a similar theme and perhaps a linking image or background

These rows give a nice organised feel to your grid and are a great place to start if you’re new to curating a channel. As you get more confident in your photo selection skills you can also combine rows together by switching the middle images, this triangle shape helps keep eyes moving down the grid. Although you can do this with any type of image, I think it works especially well with lifestyle images as they already serve the purpose of telling a story on their own, providing context and setting.

Although they don’t appear that regularly on Sculptmode’s Instagram, flat-lays are another style of content that anyone can create, and, done right they can be highly effective. All you need is a nice background, be it a wooden table or a roll of poster paper and your subject matter. This could be a coffee cup and some keys, or an entire outfit! Just stand on a chair or table so that you’re camera is pointing straight down and snap away.

The last style of content i’d like to discuss from the Sculptmode Instagram is the isolated yoga images. Although these are harder to create and require photo editing software, they are also some of the best performing images on the page. We took some spare pose photos, cut out the model, and combined them with urban textures and calming colours. It’s a great example of how you can create content to fit in your grid that wouldn’t have necessarily worked before. It’s also a great way to rehash content - cementing the brand in minds even further.

Colours:

When it comes to upping your grid game, people argue the colours you use are just as important as the content you’re posting. Some choose to follow very strict colour schemes for their pages, editing all photos to fit the colour palette; @stellamariabaer is a prime example of this. She has chosen a pastel pink colour scheme that works well with her art as well as the countless photos of New Mexico’s countryside.

Others choose to have a colour scheme that flows as time goes on, this could be seasonally or several times through the month. I personally prefer this option as it allows you to get the most out of your content. If an image doesn’t match as well as you’d like it can be saved until your scheme has moved on! Knowing your current colour scheme is a great place to start when it comes to planning the future of your grid and we’ve created a fun web app called My Insta Palette to help with just that! Simply log in with your Instagram account and it will pull through your most used colours, your colour personality and some cool information about things such as filter usage..

The best way to make sure your photos fit with your theme is by adjusting the saturation and hue of bright colours that aren’t included in your colour scheme to stop them drawing attention. Now you might be thinking, “But I just use my phone to edit and post, how can I get them to match?”, luckily for you, the recently updated Adobe Photoshop Lightroom app is a powerhouse of mobile editing and is very simple to use. One of it’s best features is the ability to tap and hold on a certain colour within the image to saturate or desaturate it (see below for example). This combined with the fact that the app has a camera that allows you to take your photos as DNG (more detailed than JPEG) makes it a no brainer.

Layout:

Although no one wants to do it, creating a content plan is the by far the best way to work out what you will be posting and when, which then helps you build a layout that’s going to work for you. There’s no point saying you’ll post a landscape every other day if you know you won’t be able to source/capture the images.

Gather all the photos you already have and work out when you will have opportunities to capture more. Start organising your photos, maybe you organise them into rows of 3, maybe you do alternate posting where you post a lifestyle image, then a flat-lay and then a landscape in a constant loop, it’s up to you to get creative here. Just don’t post lots of similar images one after another, keep it nice and varied.

Another thing you have to bare in mind when thinking about your layout is the crop of your photos. Although square photos used to be the standard, there has been a move towards using a 4:5 crop (this means you’re image is taller than it is wide). This crop has gained popularity because it takes up more real estate on the Instagram feed without effecting your grid. If possible always post in 4:5 or 1:1 (square). If you have images that aren’t suited to Instagram's crops, it’s not the end of the world, you can always take a leaf out of @Burberry’s book and use white borders to give your grid a very unique feel.

Now that you’ve learnt how to curate your feed, the world of Instagram is at your fingertips! If you’re worried about posting the wrong image and ruining your feed, why don’t you try using our free template to see how your grid will flow. Simply drag the images into the document and position them to find that perfect posting order. Or, if you’re looking to gain followers, why not check out our 10 Growth Hacking Tips For Instagram blog!