Hi there guys. My name's Ali and I'm from That Light Bulb Moment. Boroondara Council have invited me here today to share some tips with you on setting up your Instagram account and also putting up your first post. The reason that you might be watching this is because maybe you're going to attend a workshop with Boroondara Council soon on Instagram and want to get yourself up and running or maybe you just want to set up an
account for yourself and you know you'll find a few tips and tricks in this very short video.

So a little on me. I did set up a business 12 years ago and marketed it mainly through social media and since then have done a lot of mentoring and also helping other small businesses with their social media so I'm sure you'll find a lot of help in this video. Let's get started. So what you're going to do first of all is obviously open your App Store and search for Instagram and download the App to your phone and when you open the app you can either continue with your Facebook or you can sign up with an email address or phone number. 

Then I'm going to sign in with my full name and a password and again you can find Facebook friends to follow or you can skip that option as well which is what I'm going to do. So what we do to set you up on Instagram first is at the bottom right hand corner you can see like a little head in a circle that's where you're going to find your profile to edit it. Underneath the 0 posts 0 followers and 0 following you can see edit profile I'm going to click on that one, and here you can change your profile photo so I can click on this and I can import one either from Facebook or from my Gallery.

Name at the moment of obviously just using my name however if it's a business account you can change that to your business name and the user name can obviously be the business name as well. Website you might want to put your web address in here and bio is basically a breakdown of your business what you offer. Try and think about writing the bio in terms of the problem that you solve for your clients or the benefit that you bring to them. Remember that simply saying that for instance you're a life coach in Hampton probably isn't as compelling as someone that changes lives. So, definitely think about writing your bio in terms of what's really going to draw people in.

The other thing that I always like to remind people as well with bios is also think about using descriptive terms. You can say you're an amazing life coach.You can say you're a calming masseuse and what it does is it really sells to people just that bit more what it is that you do as opposed to just simply you're a life coach or you're a masseuse. You also can pop in your email address underneath that and also your phone number then once you're done that, we click the pic. The other thing that you can do with your bio is you can add in hashtags. 

As you can see underneath the description here we've got hashtags there three hashtags. The reason that you might want to use hashtags in your bio is because then when people are searching on Instagram your bio will also be searchable so think about maybe the top two or three things that people might search for to find your business and then use two or three of those in the bio. So for an example I'll show you a little way of searching so if you type in like if you're a jewellery designer or something like that we can type in jewellery and then at the top we're going to click tags. What that's going to do is that's going to give us a hashtag and how many posts are actually featuring that particular hashtag.

So here we've got hashtag jewellery, hashtag jewellery maker hashtag jewellery blog hashtag jewellery lover and so on and so forth. What you really want to look for is a good mix of popular posts so for instance twenty point nine million posts that's very popular forty six point three thousand that's even popular. Obviously once you get down to like you know two hundred posts that's not a popular hashtag so you want to go for popular but you also want to go for those that are more specifically you. So hashtag jewellery means you're going to be lost within 50 well as it says here 20 million other posts on jewellery but if you are a particularly someone that makes jewellery that's what people would probably search for so you might be better off using hashtag jewellery maker in that respect because it's still popular but also more specific to you and gives you more chance of being found.

Another good opportunity in your bio is actually uploading under the link option instead of just say a link to your website, you might want to actually utilize this program which is called Linktree. You can actually open it up on your computer you're required to sign in as your Instagram account and then it will give you your own vanity URL. The reason Linktree is so helpful is because on Instagram you only have the opportunity for one clickable link and what Linktree does is it gives us the option for many more links at any one time on Instagram you might be promoting several things and actually need several links to be live.

So we can be putting up a different Instagram post every day directing people to a link in the profile and we don't have to keep changing that one link over in the bio every single time. So what we're going to do now is you've got your bio all set up, we're going to go to upload your first post.

So to upload a post, what you do is you just click on the plus just here and basically that gives me an opportunity for accessing my gallery. Okay, so I've got my gallery here that I can access or I can click on photo and actually take a photo or I can click on video and take a one minute video max. I'm going to select gallery at this point though and as you can see I can minimize and maximize this photo and move it around to make sure it fits perfectly then when I've got the photo that I want I click Next.

You actually have a whole lot of filters here that you can utilize so if you can see I can just change the look of the photo simply by clicking on the filters and there are actually a lot of other options in edit which you can explore at any time and see how that might change your photos as well. So I've got the filter that I want so then I'm going to click Next again.

Then what you do is you would write your caption in here where it says write a caption. If you're using 2 or 3 hashtags with your post you could absolutely look at using those in the post because there's not that many hashtags that it's going to be distracting. However if you're one of those people that likes to utilize a lot of hashtags, up to 30 hashtags, then you're better off waiting until you've posted your post and then actually go to the post in the feed and put the hashtags in the comment and I will show you that in a moment.

Here, if we click tagged people you can tag people so if this is someone that's actually on Instagram I could have a search for them let's just pretend it's Katy Perry I don't know why but I always like to do that so I'm going to search for Katy Perry and I'm going to tag that's Katy Perry.

Okay, so that's how you tag people and I'm just going to delete out of that one add the location you might want to add the location of your post. Definitely posts with the location added generally get 12% more engagement than one without a location. However, if it's at your home and you don't want people to know where you live then don't select your location. Then what you do is click share in the top right hand corner. One thing that you don't want to do is you do actually get an option here to also post to Facebook if your Facebook is connected. I would recommend that you don't post at the same time.

The reason being is that if you have the same content going at the same time on both channels and it can be very annoying for people you may lose followers and also Facebook and Instagram are set up differently so you're probably better off posting directly into Instagram and into Facebook. If you want to use the same content, I would recommend leaving maybe a couple of weeks difference and then even maybe utilising sometimes a different photo for Instagram just to try and keep things mixed up a little bit.

So if I share that one it's just finishing up now and then like I said before, if you have a lot of hashtags you click on the comment which is just here underneath the photo and then you would put all of your hashtags in there and click post. So that's it for now.

Thank you so much for watching I really hope you got something out of this video. If you'd like to join us for an upcoming event or workshop then simply sign up to the Business Boroondara e-newsletter and we hope to see you soon. Thanks. Bye.