5 Instagram Community Building Tips for Teenagers
With around a billion active monthly users, Instagram sits at the top of the social media food chain. Communities built in and around Instagram enjoy the leverage provided by the image-based platform’s apparatus and can accumulate staggering amounts of success. Even among teenagers, personal brands have found good traction, paving the way for one of the most interesting phenomena of the 21st century — the influencers.
While big brands tend to choose platforms like Twitter to market themselves, the community building potential for teenagers on Instagram is the real deal. So let’s cut straight to the chase — if you’re a teenager who wants to establish a successful profile on Instagram, here are 5 things to keep in mind:
1. Clarity
Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Discord, Instagram is predominantly a visual platform which means that if you’re out to grasp your audience’s attention, you need to do it the first few microseconds of them seeing your images. In that respect, one should be absolutely, irrevocably clear in their design choices (colour schemes, font, feed appearance et al). Attention is fickle among teenagers, so consistency is also key here. Hence, maintaining a strict schedule of uploading stories, posts, reels and guides is also immensely important for teenagers looking to build an Instagram community.
2. Understanding the Purpose of Each Feature
From reels, stories, live streams, chats, posts, videos, IGTV and guides; Instagram is positively brimming with features which are very tempting to dive headfirst into. Here’s where you must understand the focal point of your profile. What is the purpose of your profile? Is to be an ancillary to the brand, or to direct the audience to a website, or is it simply to engage? Use these features according to your aim.
E.g. Say you’re running a writing blog and you want to direct some of your teen audience from Instagram to your website. You can make effective use of stories embedded with a link.
Moreover, Instagram’s algorithm is such that different features gain a different value over time. Earlier the metric of success was ‘likes’, right now it is ‘saves’. Any teen looking to build an Instagram following must keep this in mind and check the content metrics regularly to track progress.
3. Birds of a Feather
Teenagers love to search Instagram using Tags, and any teenager trying to build a community on Instagram would do well to use them. The other brilliant thing is tags allow teen users to find and follow like-minded teens. You can learn, grow and look out for emerging trends inside your domain. If you’re a lifestyle blogger, make sure to follow other lifestyle influencers. Most successful teenagers on Instagram make use of mutual shoutouts and takeovers to help each other out. Remember the key here is in cooperation instead of competition.
4. Interact
One of the tenets of online community-building is genuine human interaction. As soon as you’ve gauged a particular audience, get to know them on a deeper level. Any teen trying to build an audience on Instagram needs to understand exactly what kind of content other teenagers would expect and appreciate. Some methods of doing this are through live streams, group chats, and polls on stories. This is something that popular meme pages do regularly. Make your page personable and accessible.
5. Plug when it matters
Here’s the thing: If you don’t promote yourself, nobody else will. Most teenagers are not fans of self promotion, but looking to build a community on Instagram requires it occasionally. Any personal product placements and sponsored advertisements will not harm the brand you’re trying to create. The shop options on Instagram are useful too if you’re a teenager in the business of retailing. A big part of growing your brand comes from promotions, so don’t shy away from it.
That’s all you need to know as a teen building a following on Instagram. Keep these pointers in mind and you’ll have a successful audience well before you’re out of your teens.
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