Last week I attended #LaterCon, an online social media conference put on by Later, which is a social media planning and scheduling tool. I attend a lot of free webinars online on the chance that I might walk away with a little nugget or two of wisdom. #LaterCon, however, blew me away!
One particular session by Jasmine Star was amazing: How to Accelerate Your Instagram Growth in 30 Days.
Jasmine is the founder of Social Curator which is just what it sounds like — a website/service that helps you curate your social media content. I recommend watching the full video of Jasmine speaking at #LaterCon (embedded below), but be sure to continue reading this post afterward. I’ll teach you how to apply Jasmine’s brilliant approach to your everyday posting routine.
My key takeaways:
- “Consistency is Queen” — Be consistent!
- “Categories are the types of photos that you can share on behalf of your business or on behalf of your account or on behalf of your message.” — Categories allow you to talk about yourself or your business and the things that are important to you so that you can naturally share your message without being pushy (read: annoying).
- Follow up video to watch (www.jasminestar.com/categories):
Jasmine teaches that you should have 9-12 categories for your content. She specifically mentions the following categories:
- About Me
- Personal Insights
- Behind the Scenes
- My Why
- Inspiration
- Benefits
- Product/Service
In the Facebook video she discusses photographic topics and she lists the ones she uses:
- Coffee
- Her Husband
- Her Dog
- Business Owner
- Cali Life
- Quotes
- Photographer
I spent some time thinking through this and how I would apply it to the Instagram feeds that I manage. I also wanted to come up with a way to organize this because, for me, while it all sounds amazing, the application piece is where it started to get fuzzy.
Practical tip on how to apply this approach
I took Jasmine’s photographic topic ideas and created a Google Sheet where I could keep track of the topics I wanted to be sure to cover in my posts. Below is a screenshot of the Instagram Content Planning Template I created. And here’s a link where you can access the template in Google Sheets. Be sure to check the other tabs in the spreadsheet to see some sample categories.
How to organize your photos
Now that I had a way to organize the flow of my posts, I also needed a way to organize my images.
I use Later to schedule my posts, and Later has a “label” feature. It was super easy to go in and create labels for each of my different categories and then apply those labels to my photos. Now when I want to schedule a post for a specific category, I can use the filters in Later to filter by that category (and by “unused”) and voila! I can select the image I want to post, create the message, and schedule it.
If you don’t use Later, you could also create a folder system to store images by the category names.
I am so glad that I attended #LaterCon last week. If you missed it, you can watch the replay here: https://later.com/latercon/.
