Lots of people use social media to discover new brands and get inspired. And, that trend is only increasing. The impression your brand’s social media presence leaves on potential customers is critical. For so many social media users, the discovery process begins with scrolling through their Instagram feed.
Since Instagram is one of the four biggest social media platforms in the world, it’s an ideal place for customers to get a sense of your brand identity. You can use your Instagram feed to excite viewers with engaging visuals, expose them to your brand’s voice, and encourage them to engage with your company. Here’s how to use your feed to share content that drives follows, shares, and sales.
What is an Instagram feed?
Your Instagram feed is the endless scroll of all the posts and Reels from all the accounts you follow on the platform. It’s what you first see when you open the app.
Your brand’s profile grid (also referred to as your personal feed) is the grid of thumbnail images of the photos and videos you’ve shared. For business accounts, this grid acts as your storefront, shaping whether visitors follow, shop, or scroll past. As such, it’s an ideal spot to create a comprehensive picture of your business’s visual identity. Aside from any important posts you pin to the top of your profile, these images will populate chronologically from newest to oldest from the top down. Rather than allow your profile feed to become a Jackson Pollock–style hodgepodge of random images or videos, use it as an opportunity to showcase a consistent aesthetic.
What makes for a good Instagram feed?
The visual elements of a good Instagram feed will cohere instead of clash. Your individual posts should be a strategic part of a larger theme. At the same time, you don’t need every photo and video to have a near-identical appearance. You can manifest a clear brand aesthetic while still displaying unique images or pieces of information and introducing variety to keep audiences engaged.
When defining what your Instagram feedtheme should look like, start by reflecting on how you want to represent your brand visually. There is a wide array of tools and Instagram feed ideas you can leverage to tie your posts together. Experiment with a combination of accent colors, filters, typography, and overall style of photography and video content (such as lifestyle versus sculptural still lifes) to make your Instagram feedtheme evident. Your Instagram feed represents your business, and customers should get a feel for its brand voice and identity just by scrolling through the grid.
Instagram feed tips and ideas
- Incorporate brand images and colors
- Use consistent templates
- Use a variety of content types
- Color-coordinate the grid
- Stick to the same filters
- Organize the entire grid
Searching for some inspiration for your own grid? The best Instagram feed ideas allow you to customize your feed to suit the needs of your business, while also tying your grid together visually. These tips are a great place to start when it comes to ensuring your brand’s theme and voice come through on the platform:
Incorporate brand images and colors
Because your grid should ultimately be a reflection of your brand’s personality, it’s important to incorporate brandimages and brand colors throughout your posts. These could be product or service images intentionally shot for your Instagram feed, or repurposed marketing assets. Regardless, they should be high quality and suitable for the 3:4 rectangular cropping Instagram applies to all image previews.
Integrating brand images is also the easiest way to engage users with Instagram Shopping, which lets them shop directly through your shared images on social media. If you haven’t created a shoppable store on Instagram yet, Shopify Starter makes it easy to set one up within minutes.
Take a look at Hiut Denim Co., a brand that uses lifestyle photography in a way that’s well-suited for Instagram but still features its products.
Use consistent templates
Established graphic design templates will not only contribute to a cohesive style across your Instagram feed but also make creating posts much easier. If you want to add a white border to all images or frequently share quotes and inspirational messages, you can create a template to make producing these assets easy and uniform. Templates also present an opportunity to incorporate your brand’s colors and chosen typography throughout your Instagram grid.
Adored Vintage presents one great example of this, with stylized templates that align with the mood of its entire feed. These make it easy for the brand to share quotes, engaging prompts, or other text-based messages in a cohesive way.
Use a variety of content types
An Instagram feed full of the exact same type of content—such as professional photography that features your product—will look seamless and coordinated. However, it won’t encourage users to engage with or follow your Instagram account, because your audience will feel like they can’t expect anything new or different from your feed. Instead, continue to introduce a variety of content types, such as user-generated content, videos, playful images like screenshots of tweets, professional product shots, lifestyle imagery, and graphic or text-focused images.
Beauty brandAbsolute Collagen manages to keep the content in its grid diverse, with a mix of product shots, reels, and text-focused images, while still sticking to a consistent aesthetic and color scheme that reinforces a cohesive looking feed.
Alt-text: Instagram grid for Absolute Collagen featuring images showing people using collagen skin products, product photos of collagen drink packets, and plain backgrounds with text sharing information about collagen.
Caption: Source: Absolute Collagen
Color-coordinate the grid
Tying your grid together with a harmonious, color-coordinated theme is one of the easiest Instagram feed ideas for making a profile look great. This doesn’t need to be overt and most often relies on subtle touches of color, either through text, graphic elements, or items within photos, that hint at the overarching color palette.
For example, perhaps you’ll opt for a pastel theme with two or three colors like baby blue, pink, and yellow. Or maybe you’ll use vibrant colors in bold patterns. Both are popular options for a color-coordinated grid.
You can also make your Instagram feed change colors intentionally, with blocks of posts displaying different color-coordinated themes, creating a gradient of colors, or even developing a rainbow feed over time as the colors change. French beauty brandNuxe uses this idea to highlight distinct products while still giving its feed a beautiful appearance.
Stick to the same filters
Applying the same filter to your Instagram images can help make them feel like a cohesive story even when the assets display different subjects. Filters are often subtle, letting you apply the same levels of contrast, saturation, and brightness across all your images. DÔEN demonstrates how to employ this approach with nuance, with warm tones and low lighting across its photos.
If you’re a chic, elegant fashion brand, maybe you’ll only share images in black and white. If you’re selling antiques or vintage clothing, you can apply filters that give your whole feed a slightly vintage feel. Users may not even be able to put their finger on why your pictures have such a timeless, vintage style, but they’ll know they like looking at them.
Organize the entire grid
You can also use a host of individual posts to create a larger visual spectacle. For example, on mobile phones, your Instagram feed will present as three columns of thumbnail images. If you want to employ a vertical lines theme, you can intentionally post the same type of image in a specific column. The second post on each row could be a quote on a colored background, creating a vertical line down the center of your grid.
Alternatively, you can try a checkerboard theme, which alternates two different types or colors of images to create a checkerboard pattern across your Instagram feed. For small businesses that are launching their Instagram from the ground up or about to introduce a new product or service, a puzzle theme is an excellent way to build suspense. This organizational Instagram feedtheme uses each post as a piece of a larger puzzle, so that your grid displays a complete image made up of separate posts.
Athletic sock brand Near Earth leveraged this technique to establish its brand aesthetic and introduce its products when building the first line of posts on its Instagram feed.
Instagram feed ideas FAQ
What is the new Instagram feed layout?
Instagram has shifted the layout of its profile grids from a square, 1:1 format—which displayed square thumbnails for images and videos in your feed—to a taller 3:4 feed layout. This new, vertical format aligns with the taller assets that users are uploading now. As a result, the platform automatically crops your posts into a 3:4 ratio for the thumbnails on your Instagram grid. This change is relatively new and still rolling out, so you may not see it reflected in all Instagram feeds yet.
What is the 4-1-1 rule on Instagram?
The 4-1-1 rule is a guide for the type and frequency of posts that brands should share on Instagram to balance a successful marketing strategy and keep followers engaged. This rule recommends that for every six posts on Instagram, four of them should focus on providing entertainment or educational information to audiences, one should be a “soft sell” of your brand or product, and one should be a “hard sell.”
How do you make an Instagram feed interesting?
Building an interesting Instagram feed is all about balancing a consistent aesthetic with enough visual variety. Make sure you use a variety of assets, like product shots, lifestyle imagery, quotes, and user-generated content. Upload photos that show a diverse array of subjects, incorporate graphic design elements, and create videos to keep the appearance of your feed varied, too. Ultimately, ensure everything aligns with the overall Instagram feed theme you’re working to cultivate.
