Curating your aesthetic Instagram feed can be tricky, but it doesn’t have to be. As your fairy blog mother, it’s my job to prepare you the best I can, and establishing what type of aesthetic you want for your feed can be the biggest setback.
So today we’re going to talk about how to curate an aesthetic Instagram feed by breaking it down into 5 simple components — first things first, you should already have a ‘creator account’ by now. Going public makes you not only discoverable but shareable. You can utilize your own ‘professional dashboard’ to access information on your engagement, stats on posts as well as access to tools available to creators.
Now, let’s dive in…
Establishing your niche + pillars
The first step in curating an aesthetic Instagram feed is to establish your niche… period. It sounds so cliche and outdated but I consider it to be the foundation for any type of feed/brand you’re trying to curate an aesthetic (Instagram) feed for. Whether you’re starting from scratch or rebranding yourself, understanding your followers is critical because it allows you to understand WHY you’re followable and WHAT you’re being followed for. So how the fuck do we do that??? — you can start by heading into your dashboard to access information like; where the majority of your followers are from, the average age range, etc. You can also see what posts have performed best to understand what type of content your followers like.
What is a niche?
Your niche is simply a group of people with similar interests that you can target with your content. So when establishing your niche, or rebranding it, you have to think about what you want your content to convey, who you want it to target, and what you want it to reflect about you.
This is where your pillars come into play. Your pillars are ultimately what makes you, you, and help to form an aesthetic feed. I suggest working with 3 or 4 main ones. Your pillars should be attainable for content and reflect who you are. Meaning, if you don’t resonate with it or aren’t passionate about it then it shouldn’t be considered a pillar. Examples: a fitness trainer’s pillars might be: DAILY WORKOUTS, MEAL PREP, ATHLEISURE LINKS or a lifestyle content creator’s pillars might be: OOTD, TRAVEL, or BRUNCH.
Brainstorming your aesthetic content
Now that we’ve established your niche it’s time to brainstorm the type of content (aligning with your pillars) that you want to curate for an aesthetic Instagram feed.
Brainstorming should be the most fun part… be bold, be adventurous and stay curious. Whether you’re a canva vision board enthusiast, paper and pen gal, or a fan of Pinterest pinnin’, having a place to collect and draw inspiration will make capturing content at the moment seem more feasible
Chose your editing apps
When we say ‘editing apps’ we don’t mean FaceTune…. We don’t condone that shit. What we mean is the tools that help turn your visions into “post-worthy” art. Choose apps that allow you to use filters for maintaining a color theory, add effects to photos/videos, or organizational tools for pre-planning your feed and scheduled auto-posting. Here are a few of our favorites: VSCO, SnapSeed, LightRoom, Tezza, VN (for reels), CapCut, and Preview (for the feed)
Posting Schedule
Consistency is key. Whether you’re looking to grow your following, connect and collaborate with other creatives, or even land brand deals posting consistently is your answer for everything. It’s the only way you can allegorize yourself onto the explore page (for follows), pop up at the top of people’s feeds, (for likes), and create a narrative for yourself/brand. With so much content being pushed out daily by millions of users, creating a schedule for yourself will make all things more attainable. This is why understanding your niche and followers as well as creating pillars is so pivotal.
So how do we create this schedule? Firstly, you must know what type of content people love on your page or why they follow you. For example, if you’re a stylist, maybe every Monday you post a reel recapping your outfits from the week prior. If you’re a fitness instructor, you might post your weekly teaching schedule on Sunday morning. Regardless, providing your followers with a sense of security, information, affirmations or inspiration is going to help.
After you’ve figured that out, head into your professional dashboard, and go to “insights”, and “total followers”, at the bottom you should see a graph mapping out the time and days of your highest engagement. This right here is a great place to start when figuring out what days to post. If you haven’t had luck with the suggested times or are in the early phases of becoming a creator, there might not be as much information to access, so don’t be afraid to experiment by just posting. Pop the new post on your story and see how it does, you might just trailblaze your schedule.
Curating REAL content
We don’t just like you, but we LOVE the real you! Creating content that is authentic, and real and speaks to who you are is always going to be the content that performs best! You’re the main character of your page so don’t force yourself to change what doesn’t align with you and most importantly, don’t overthink just snap away!
We’ll see you on the explore page…. @soigne__studios