Everyone desires acknowledgement for their efforts, everyone craves recognition for achievements, everyone wants to be somebody. If you're a budding creative entrepreneur lady boss, your brand persona is an extremely important element to building your business. Social media marketing affords us a tool to share our brand with the masses to gain client and fan loyalty.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of Instagram. I like the easy scroll of Instagram and for me, it doesn’t feel as crowded as Facebook and Twitter. Having a quick visual peek into people’s lives used to feel like the behind-the-scenes content that was missing from other social sites.
Initially, when I began using Instagram I didn’t feel bombarded with text and links everywhere. The ease of Instagram is still attractive to me, however, in the last 5 years or so, there’s been an increase in web tutorials and how-to blogs for creating branded content for social media accounts.
Mostly, I agree that a branded and organized social media account can be far more attractive than one that just throws anything out there, as in sharing photos of your every meal and selfies every 5 minutes, but how much branded content is too much?
Profiles that boast photo filters of gaudy, unrealistic colors, strange typography, and quotes without context don’t feel real to me, instead, they feel fake, forced, and stale.
Take a look at Oprah’s IG, does she have patterns of color blocks in every other tile, overly-styled quotes or photo filters? Nope. Why? She’s already a somebody, a big SOMEBODY. Oprah has no need to wow her audience with branded content because we’ve already bought into her brand. Oprah has the content to back up any and everything that she publishes through social media accounts.
In all of the hub-bub of how to succeed with social media marketing it’s easy to forget that the tactics don’t matter as much as having the content. I’m sure that feels like a catch-22 but your social media will only be as good as the content that drives it so focus on creating great content first.
Granted, if you’re reading this it’s highly likely that you’ve yet to reach Oprah status so until that infamous day arrives, let’s also consider if perhaps our Instagram accounts are wound too tightly.
Are you spending gobs of time putting filters to photos?
Are you spending gobs of time organizing and planning your IG feed and stories?
Are you spending gobs of time searching for quotes to fill in gaps where you lack content?
For my personal blog Instagram account, I’m playing with mixing things up with personal quotes, stock photos, and a color palette that compliments my Becoming Jae blog.
I spent a few weeks publishing mostly photos, however, I intend to go back to using text in some of my images because as a writer I invest time to write blog titles that are engaging and sometimes funny, I think this can get lost with posting photo-only posts.
I don’t share many personal photos because I literally don’t have a life. I’m an introvert and I spend most of my time in front of my computer. I will not force myself to take photos of a personality that doesn’t exist.
The SHINE Media Co Instagram account is a work in progress, you’ll have to stay tuned to how that evolves.
My advice to you, don’t shy away from showing who you are, you’re authentic self without the confines of overly done images and fakeness prevalent on Instagram.
Find a healthy balance between sharing branded content and keeping your Instagram brand persona fresh and authentic.
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