In the midst of all the new website and brand launch chaos, we also squeezed in a small hosting of the latest Ladies, Wine and Design Sheffield.
Once again The Roco proved to be the the ideal setting on a drab Thursday afternoon, warmly lit rustic with a favourable amount of plants and copper trinkets.
The topic of this month was Social Media and Design, something which excites us and occupies us a lot during our day to day work. All though we don’t consider ourselves experts in the field of ‘Social Media; (we’ll leave that to our client Digique!) we know a fair bit about creating a consistent look throughout ‘the grid’ and how to style a well lit pic, with a caption that excites, educates or entertains.
The evening discussion points centred mainly around Instagram (in hindsight, this post should probably be called Ladies, Wine and Instagram.. but anyway…) being designers or creative types this is definitely the platform that speaks to us and pleases our designer eyes. We can scroll endlessly through visual content, square after square.
Tone of Voice – establish a consistent ‘voice’ for you or your brand (lets not forget here, YOU are your brand) I know I always try to keep it real and it’s got to sound like something I would say; I want my gram to be an extension of me.
Schedule – Create a POA for the week or weeks ahead. If you’re going to post one top quality insta a day, what will it be and what will it say? Having a plan will help you to visually plan the week, and make sure the visual theme stays on point, and the message tells the right story.
Pillars of Content – Leading nicely on from the last point, I found this one really useful. Can you establish 5 key themes, or pillars for your brand? And stick to them? It doesn’t have to be rigidly ordered, but if you can ensure you’re hitting one of those themes on every post then you’re creating content that is aligned to the brand and is telling the right story.
Content is Queen – It may sound obvs.com but if you don’t create regular, consistent content then it’s not going to work. We’ve found that our Personal Projects are a great way of creating additional content that allows to share different things to the usual work-life but is still relevant.
The ALGORITHM – Now this is serious biz when it comes to insta. The gram is super clever and a bit sneaky, it knows a lot about your posting tactics and favours those with lots of likes. Have you ever noticed that your likes or followers suddenly spike? You’ll probably find that this happens after you’ve had a particularly successful post, this means you’ll get featured higher up the feed and therefore more exposure.
Top tips for handling the algorithm :
We hope that was helpful! We’d love to extend our thanks once again to Digique for sharing their knowledge! And to Jess for bringing the opportunity to us; the LWD series is a great way to share and create a community, something which Tonik feels very strongly about.
Here’s a small collection of our favourite instagram content creators:
Brand Lifestyle / behaviour accounts: @thebeachpeople @veuveclicquot@sangrialolea @anthropologie
Design appreciation: @inspofinds @rowanmade @mindsparklemagazine @visualgraphc
Managed by females: @jasminedowling @jessicavwalsh @allthatisshe @corinanika
So then.. I probably need to plan the gram if I’m going to reach 1000 followers by Christmas (hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere!)
Laura (@laurachop , in case you were wondering)
Check out @tonik.studio to see how we’re doing!
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