This challenge is free for all readers of Too Much by Nicola Washington to join in with. This is the sixth of 7 short emails that will be sent out this week. If you do not want to take part in the challenge, feel free to ignore the series. Normal service will resume on Monday 2nd September 🙂
If you’re not a subscriber and you’d like to receive all of the tasks this week then make sure you hit the pink button. To read all of the WAKE UP posts click here.
Welcome to Day Six of the WAKE UP INSTAGRAM Challenge - a week-long series of 10 min daily tasks to ‘wake up’ your Instagram account and get you back in front of your favourite people after you’ve been on a break.
TASK SIX
Listen to the audio, or read the instructions below, to join in ❤️
Most of the time, one of my guiding principles of using Instagram to promote your work is that the content that you post to your grid should bear some relation to the themes and ideas that you write about. This way you can be confident your posts will appeal to an audience who will also be interested in becoming your reader. However, every so often, I recommend breaking this rule and creating posts that are more to do with who you are as a person, rather than who you are as a writer.
A ‘photo dump’ carousel is one way of doing this. The idea is that you ‘round up’ your activities for the month, as this is a super-simple way of connecting with your audience in a more personal way.
More personal posts tend to elicit greater engagement from audiences and as I keep saying, every piece of engagement is a signal to the algorithms that these people want to see more of your posts meaning they are more likely to see your other posts too.
High engagement also acts as a signal to the algorithms that your posts are valuable and appealing which means people who are not your followers are more likely to be shown your posts in their Suggested Content.
It’s also worth remembering that a swipe through your carousel is read as ‘engagement’ by Instagram so even though you can’t count it, it will help your post reach more people.
Round up photo dumps are a great way to ease yourself back into posting after a break. You can even add this post type to your content plan every month although it is my experience that engagement levels start to drop after a while as the audience becomes more used to them so use them judiciously.
What do you do?
Set a timer for 10 mins (this shouldn’t take much longer than that!)
Select 10 images (up to 20 if the recent update has rolled out to your account) from your camera roll that sum up your last month - the more candid the better. This is not the time to share your polished head shots or flat lays.
In the caption write a list that corresponds with the sequence of photos. You don’t have to add more context or make anything ‘mean’ something, just let the pictures do the talking.
If you decide to post a carousel, let me know by tagging me in the comments under your post @toomuch_social and I will come and see you on Instagram!
I hope you’ve found this useful - let me know in the comments if you have any questions or thoughts. I’ll be back tomorrow with the seventh and final task of the challenge and I hope you’ll join me!
If you’re joining this challenge late, you can read all of the posts here.
So you're a writer, but what else is going on?