Social Media Experience. Growing by Going.

„Always go with your passions.
Never ask yourself if it’s realistic or not.“
Deepak Chopra

Recap and thoughts on optimizing my Instagram feed

That is what this post is about to be. My first two weeks are over and I am looking back on what I did to get my Instagram feed for by Christina Harms on track. The best part: Instagram changed to a new algorithm last week and I am pretty curious to see how that works out for me. If you want to know what changed, look here. Later explained it in detail. So in my last blog post, I wrote how unsatisfied I was with the look of my Instagram feed. I also wrote about the things I wanted to change. And as maybe there are some people out there who also love to give their Instagram feed an update I hope my experiences help you with your journey.

Oh, so many colors

The thing that bugged me most about my channel: The Colors. I was so unhappy with my color scheme. For my other Instagram channel Urban Wedding Photography the colors are coming naturally. As did the topics. It’s about weddings, it’s about traveling, it’s about telling love stories. So easy, and if you want to know more about my wedding & family photography follow this link. So yeah, it’s bright, it’s colorful, there is a lot of sunshine. But for by Christina Harms, it was way more difficult for me to find a color scheme. But after I decided to go with black, soft grey and dark blue the only thing I really needed to do was to go out and shoot. And remember to look out for these three colors and also for a bit of gamboge yellow or sand.

So far it worked. Due to the reduction of colors, my feed seems now to be a lot more chilled and pleasing to the eye than before. In other words: Sticking to the color scheme works for me and is just a matter of discipline. I am not saying that I do not like bright colors. I do. But magenta, lemonade yellow, crazy orange. You are just not for this Instagram feed. Sigh.

Growing by Going

After I sat down and decided which colors I wanted to use another problem presented itself. I needed new images and I made a list of categories that I wanted to take pictures of. Like portraits, cityscape, abstract or graphical pictures but when I sat down and wanted to write the captions for my new images I was pretty much dumbstruck. Remember my blog post from earlier this year about finding Connection Points and being relevant? I forgot how to be relevant. Good thing I had just finished reading Austin Kleons book „Show your work“. It was a huge help.

So together with his idea about showing bits and pieces of ones WIP (work in Progress) I came up with five to six different caption categories:

• Sharing tools, resources, and food for thought for personal growth
• Sharing my experiences with re-designing my Instagram feed
• Showing my work, mostly sharing images from photoshoots
• Telling more about myself and my opinions (I have been very shy about that so far)
• Make announcements like „hey, this blog post is online“
• And finally: Showing my personal Berlin (#Ilovemycity)

Finding the right key for my words

It’s one thing to have a clever caption but another to make people react to your caption. So I know which target group I want to reach but how can I find the perfect hashtags for that? What are the keywords that make people find my post and react to it? Because as every self-absorbed Millenial I want to have a bigger audience and reach more people. But of course the right ones. What I learned so far: My old approach, I only tag what you can see in my picture, was not really useful. Instead, I ended up with zero new followers. Okay. That’s a bit of an exaggeration but yeah. Tagging what people can see is kind of discribing in detail an incident to a person that has been there with you. So I changed this tactic a bit. I still don’t like to use a tag that doesn’t fit the content. But my definition of content is now a bit broader. It’s not just the image it’s also the caption. And if I tell something inspiring that I think might help people to grow personally I am now using for example the #womenempowerwomen hashtag. Or if I tell something about my personal Berlin, I tag #berlinbreeze and #ihavethisthingwithberlin. And it works.

Cliffhanger. Hang over.

There are two other very important things and one big room for improvement I want to share with you. But as this blog post is already suuuuuper long I save it for the next time. So the next blog post is going to be about the magic of Automation and Content Planning. And the big room for improvement? It’s definitely personal. Because we’re on s o c i a l media. Stay tuned.