My new approach to Instagram
I have a confession to make, I suck at using Instagram.
I created my Instagram account in June 2016 and have posted 385 images to date, approximately one a week for 7 years. What’s worse is a lot of this was front loaded, I only posted 34 images in 2021 and 33 images in 2022.
The main reason for this is because I’ve lacked a plan, rather than create an Instagram strategy I’ve simply posted when I’ve remembered to, or during announcements.
It’s time for a change.
I would love to post to Instagram 7 days a week but when it comes to social media I believe it is important to set easy to reach goals and grow from there. Moving forward I plan to post a minimum of 4 days a week, but will be happy as long as I reach 4.
To help achieve this I have created 4 post types.
1. Discover the world. I have hundreds if not thousands of images from The City of Kings universe, many are found in my games but others have simply been created for world building. Each week I intend to share images from the universe and explore the lore of the world.
2. Cats in boxes. Over the past 3 years I have received thousands of photos from community members sharing their cats in The Isle of Cats box. I want to start sharing these and hope to make it a regular feature to encourage more photo submissions.
3. Games. I love playing board games, discovering new mechanisms and exploring game worlds. I’m going to remind myself to photo the games I play and celebrate the best bits on Instagram.
4. Lifestyle. Sometimes I forget that outside of The City of Games and playing board games my life continues and I do things that I could be sharing. While I expect the lifestyle images to be more sporadic than the other categories, I plan to show some of the other things in my life, such as the adventures of Yanna and Kuma (my cats), and my trips abroad.
By setting a goal of 4 images a week and defining these 4 categories to focus on, I believe I’ve created a realistic and manageable objective and I hope to be able to report back at the end of the year that my Instagram account has flown past 500 posts.
Frank West
Frank West is a gamer and designer based in Bristol, UK. He published his first board game, The City of Kings, in 2018 and now works on other games and organising events in the local area. His goal? To design and publish games focusing on immersive themes, fun mechanics and beautiful components. If you have any questions or would just like a chat, feel free to get in touch at any time!
2 comments
Wonmin
21st February 2023 at 6:55 pm
Instagram has also been heavily pushing their Reels feature to compete with TikTok. I am personally not sure how exactly to best utilize this feature, but I do know anecdotally that I get a ton more interaction / likes / views when I post reels instead of regular posts.
Frank West
22nd February 2023 at 10:00 am
That’s very much the case right now, Reels are blowing up and worth putting effort into. One of the more common uses I’ve found for them (outside of making my own content) is sharing other peoples posts. I’d certainly like to utilise them more moving forward but I’ll be taking a gradual approach.