Social media tips to turn heads!
It’s 2020 and Instagram is still the ideal platform to share your brand’s personality. Helping inspire your customer base to buy into your product or service and continue to engage a new audience.
One of the most engaging ways to communicate on the channel is through carousel posts. For those that are unaware – a carousel post is a creative way to get more content into a smaller space. You can feature up to 10 unique images, each with different headlines, descriptions, and URLs all within the same story.
With that in mind, influencers and brands still struggle to create engaging carousels. But don’t worry, by the end of this article, you will well-placed to create engaging carousels to help achieve your goals.
1. Boring cover slide
The first point of call for an Instagram carousel is always the cover slide. The cover slide will be the first thing a user sees when scrolling through their Instagram feed. The aim of a good cover slide is to stop the scroll! The visual should spark interest in the topic, giving readers no excuse but to read on.
2. Front-heavy carousels
Many carousels feature way too much information on the first few pages. This creates more work for the audience and increases the likelihood of them dropping off the post or zoning out. If you’ve got a lot of information, simply space the carousel out to 8 or 10 slides.
3. Not enough visuals
Instagram is a visual platform. People react better to posts that are engaging and visually pleasing. So make sure your carousel has simple messages with minimal text to help create engaging carousels. Sometimes, the most effective carousel can simply be a single image split into different slides. Something that everybody is capable of creating with the help of a photo editing app.
4. Weak CTAs
Strong calls-to-action are important on any platform. A value-driven CTA will help improve engagement from the user tenfold. Whereas a fake question to trigger comments will have little importance to both parties.
5. Believing they need to be static
Many believe that video carousels are difficult to produce and often, more time-consuming than static images. This is a common misconception, as most mobile phones are capable of recording high-quality videos ready for social in a fraction of the time.
6. Low-resolution images
Due to the nature of carousels, images used NEED to be a higher resolution in comparison to normal-post counterparts. It’s common for marketers to use a low-resolution image, reducing the quality of the content.