Tips on creating an Instagram page for your pet
Animal photos are undeniably as popular on Instagram right now as food, fashion, sports, and travel. Pet accounts now have thousands and hundreds of thousands of followers. Millions of people are scrolling through their feeds looking for videos and photos of funny animals to satisfy their craving for cuteness.
Therefore, if you are a happy owner of a furry pet and want to share moments of life with your four-legged friend with the world, our tips are for you.
1. Tell a story
Introduce your guests and future subscribers to your pet's story. How did you get the animal, was it adopted from a shelter, or is it a rare breed. Maybe your pet has an interesting fate or there are some features, unusual abilities, and oddities of character. What makes it different from others? Tell us about it in one sentence, because that's how much fits in the Instagram profile header. You should master storytelling as the most important tool for engaging your audience. This skill will be very useful for witty captions under posts.
2. Post only high-quality photos
If you've already created an account and shared your pet's story, it's time to populate your page with photos. Now, this app has entered the era of quality content. People love clean, beautiful, bright feeds, so we strongly recommend that you honestly evaluate the quality of your photos so that only the best ones get into the feed. Photos must be original, clean, and aesthetically pleasing. Try to take photos in natural light, look for a beautiful background that is not overloaded with unnecessary details, and use special programs for processing photos before posting them, the best of the free ones are: Snapseed, VSCO, and PicsArt. Try to take mostly horizontal shots (this applies to both photos and videos)
Converting your images from JPEG to PNG can also significantly improve their quality while maintaining the transparency needed for an uncluttered presentation on your Instagram page. There are numerous online tools available for this purpose, ensuring that your photos look their best when viewed by your audience.
For those who are serious about making their pet's Instagram page stand out, investing in professional dog photography can elevate the visual appeal of your feed to new heights. Professional photographers can capture the unique personality of your pet in a way that's difficult to achieve with amateur shots, ensuring your furry friend looks their best in every post.
3. Follow a consistent style
A uniformly styled feed is another important tool to achieve popularity. Try different filters, photo placement/sequencing principles. Be inspired by other accounts, but do not try to repeat them exactly. The same style cannot suit everyone. We advise you to think about the character of your pet and evaluate its color and other external features in order to determine the brightness, color scheme, heat balance, etc. that is right for you for settings when processing photos. It may take you a lot of time, but this is a necessary condition for creating a truly high-quality account, with a large number of subscribers.
4. Use relevant hashtags
Using the right tags will allow your posts to become more popular, as this way more users will see them, which is especially important if your account is still very young and has few followers. Do your own research. Which tags are most relevant to your pet? This will help you attract new audiences and get into established communities. Use both very popular tags, such as #photocats, and tags with a narrower audience of #oriental shorthair. Try to include tags in English, and also come up with your own tags with which you will sign each photo, which will make it easy to find you. But be careful! It’s also not worth overloading the post with tags, the Instagram doesn’t like this.
5. Connect with your audience
In order to have more reactions and a more active audience, you should be able to post at least once a day, preferably two, in the morning and evening. The best time to post photos is up to you to figure out on your own. Usually, it is morning and early evening. Don't forget to also like and comment on the posts of your followers and those you follow. It is a social network, so to be popular on it, you just need to be socially active. Pay attention to spelling and punctuation, and be polite and friendly.
6. Get inspired and fantasize
No matter how cute, touching and funny your pet is, the same pose in the same location or very similar shots quickly become boring. Look around. Maybe on your usual walking route, you come across interesting places: beautiful walls, cozy courtyards, or a “dog-friendly” cafe where you can take photos that have not yet been included in your photo stream. Or maybe your furry friend knows how to ride a skateboard or likes to dress up? Or maybe if you add some plants in the background it will add something new? This can also be an occasion for beautiful shots.
7. Analyze your niche
Animal blogs are not new to Instagram. There are accounts of dogs, cats, parrots, hedgehogs, foxes, and even hippos.
We recommend that you analyze competitors and find out which topics are the most common and which niche is free (your favorite can just occupy it). Pay attention to what page owners write about in their posts: what formats they use, and what content is most often in the TOP.
The information you receive will help you figure out which direction you should move in.
Collect props that look good on photos and set up a separate Pinterest board where you can post ideas that inspire your creativity.
8. Plan
Observing a pet, taking photos and editing, and keeping in touch with the audience can take a lot of time. In addition, you are unlikely to want to give up your habits for an extra hour on Instagram. Therefore, we strongly advise you to install a special scheduler application on your phone, which will allow you to upload and caption several photos at once, in order to guarantee you regular posts with the desired frequency without your participation.
