GROW your INSTAGRAM as a landscape photographer in 2020
Felix Inden on Instagram @felixinden
HOw to grow an organic following on instagram in 2020
Instagram is a hot topic in the whole worldwide photography community and in 2020 even the most reluctant landscape photographers (that were priorly very against IG to say the least) have surrendered and are trying to build up a following on this huge smartphone based imaging platform.
First things first: It won´t be easy to build up big Instagram followings in 2020, but… it´s absolutely possible, there are many people doing just that in this very moment while you read this blog post. Follow the tips i give you in this blog post and i am most certain that you will also have a great experience in growing your Instagram to show your landscape photography.
Oh… just because i got you here… Following me on Instagram is a suuuuuper good idea. Really…
Using Instagram with the expectation to have a growing following isn´t an easygoing thing.
For most people at least, unless you are already a superstar in the worldwide photography business.
BUT we are not one of those right (at least not me).
So for us it will be a decision that more than anything else will involve time spent on the platform and some changes to our imagery done especially to post them effectively on Instagram.
Spend the needed time
You might have read this often, but because it´s true you´ll read it again here: You need to spend time on Instagram in order to grow- „post and run“ does not work in the beginning. That means before you have found a base of people interested in you and your work that will be waiting for your new imagery, captions and stories (hopefully blog posts too hehe).
So prepare to have at least an hour, better two per day to spend „working“ on Instagram.
Engage with people that have similar interests and well running accounts. While it might be effective to simply like and comment whatever stuff you see, don´t do it. Choose images and photographers whos work you really cherish and like instead. I think that using bots and automation as someone who wants to be respected in a certain scene is never a good idea.
At least personally i just don´t like the cheaters attitude and believe that as always in life honesty will bring you forward farther in the long run.
After all you are trying to build a name for yourself and it´s important to stay true to quality. Once you build up your „name“ and you become a kind of brand, you want people to appreciate a like given by you, because they know it´s honestly telling them that they did something right.
Be Enganging in social media
Something people often overlook is that in 2020 every social media platform is extremely saturated. And this not only with many random users- even the amount of insanely good artists is very high nowadays. Therefore i don´t recommend you to rely only on your images when using social media. Use your personality, too. After all you are an artist and surely have interesting things to say, tell in your captions and so on. People love this stuff and often great real interactions get born just by you showing who you really are. I don´t mean that you should be doing ridiculous things all the time and if you are super introverted, avoid trying to be someone else. But definitly do explore the different options that we have for these tasks.
Instagram Stories and image captions are a great way to interact with your followers. This is what people mean by “beeing engaging” and this has two main effects for yourself:
It strengthens your relationships to people that already follow you and also makes it more likely that new people find your profile and decide to follow you once they found it.
“Find my youtube video on How to grow on Instagram as a landscape photographer further down the read in this blog post. In the video i show you many real life examples about different things you can do to be engaging on Instagram and basically across social media. ”
Image taken on the Faroe islands. Not a final edit, but shown for crop options
Here you see an option for vertical 4:5 crop, a format that usually works very well
Pimp the images with the inbuilt processing tools
It´s a good idea to post the images with a little higher saturation and contrast than you would normally do. Also enhance sharpness and structures slightly in the app.
Don´t go too far, but something like dialing in something in between of +5 and maximum +25 will do your images a favor as they will look more crisp. See the attached video to see the settings i used while optimizing images for upload inside of the Instagram app.
This video basically covers the topics from this blog post with me explaining stuff.
I´d love to have your sub and thumb on Youtube too if you enjoy the informations i give you!
Felix Inden on Youtube- smokin´hot tutorials, reviews and all things landscape photography.
Use #Hashtags
While it might seem obvious to most of you reading this, there are still some that post on Instagram expecting people to see their work, but have never really spent thoughts about why other people keep tagging their images.
In this huge ocean of posted images, hashtags are a way of getting your image seen by people with certain interests. But to use them to their full potential you need to understand how they work.
There are very popular tags that are used very often and others that don´t get used much. Using #landscape (144 millions tagged images), #sunset (255 millions) or #nature (543 millions) is not effective unless you are already getting thousands of likes on your shots in rather short amount of time. Your tagged image will dissappear from the tag list in seconds as so many images get posted with these tags.
Drop them in every now and then, but don´t make it a strategy to use them. Better look out for tags that have between 30k and a million tagged images- there you have the biggest chance of getting your image seen because of the used tag.
Also it´s not the smartest thing to use tags with very low tagged images, because it´s most likely that noone is interested in them (unless a promising new hub or company has just invented the hashtag- then try it. Keep an eye on which things you agree to by using the # just saying…).
While you can use up to 30 hashtags per post, it seems to be better to use between 10 to 20 at max- don´t ask me why this is the case. I just noticed it in the last years, according to some, using too many # tells the Instagram Algorythm robots that you are spamming. Same applies to where you drop the tags. I personally prefer to put them in the comments as my captions look more clean this way, but i don´t think that it has an effect on how the mighty algorythm ranks the image. My own personal opinion is that it makes no sense to spend too much time thinking about the algorythm and how it works. In the moment where you may have figured out how it works it will have probably changed again anyways. Just follow my tips here and the foundation of growth is already set as these principles of social media and Instagram will never change.
Conclusion
If you really want to use Instagram as a landscaper, tripod warrior or whatever you wanna call us, realize that it´s not the best idea to ignore the key factors that can make your work function on the app. Traditional landscape photography is not the ideal kind of imagery for this app- you see it when you look at other photographers that chose adventure/lifestyle photography. While it is totally a discipline of the big landscape photography realm too, these more action loaded images work better in small to stell a story about a place or a certain happening… Here they often place humans doing something or interacting with the scene in the frame and this way give scale and depth. I really love this kind of work by many artists out there when they achieve to create that strong feeling of wanting to get out into nature and gaze at the elements. Often i also find it rather boring when i notice that it was just done to have a potentially popular image.
While this style of imagery is definitly more likely to quickly gain traction i have never considered changing my style just for this fact. I think you shouldn´t do this either unless that is what inspires you the most.
We only live once- follow your own passion. Stay true to yourself. Be real!
