Get fabulously Insta-savvy with Here Comes The Sun Blog

Hi everyone, it's Amanda from Here Comes the Sun. I'm here today to share with you a few of my top tips for improving and growing your instagram account. Here are some of the tricks that have helped me grow my instagram to 17,000+ and I hope they help you too!

• Think before you post: This is probably my number one rule. Not every moment of your day needs to be uploaded to instagram, so just pick the highlights. My personal rule of thumb is no more than two images per day and I space them out rather than posting one after the other. You don't want to overwhelm your followers - if i scroll through my feed and it's completely clogged up by one person, I'll usually unfollow them and I know other people do the same.

• Composition and balance: It's important to think about how your image will fit into a square and how to frame it up nicely. White space and balance are so important but it's also good to play around with cropping too. Unless you want every photo to look similar (which is fine, many people go for a 'look' they want their photos to fit with) it's good to play with the cropping and see what works for you. Sometimes a close up of a detail works better than trying to fit the whole image into the frame!

• Chill out on the hashtags: I'm personally not too fond of hashtags. If they're relevant to your image then sure, use them! But a paragraph worth of hashtags on every image just looks tacky and is a bit of a turn off. Not to mention it will heavily increase the amount of spam comments you get! If you want to use them, try limit the number (3 or less is a better look) and keep them relevant to your picture. Things like #instagood probably aren't doing much to help you grow anymore organic followers anyway, so what's the point? The key thing that will make people like your pictures and follow your account is the quality of your images, not the hashtags you use.

• Focus on quality pictures: My biggest recommendation for making your pictures look the best is to download the After Light app. It's great for being able to increase brightness, contrast & saturation on your pictures and can make them look as good as if they were taken with a DSLR. Other helpful tips for getting the best out of your pictures are: use good natural lighting, don't take pictures using the front camera on your phone (the quality is much lower and your pictures will have a lot of 'noise') and try to avoid taking pictures at night time or under unnatural lighting like tungsten bulbs.

Hope that helps and all the best with your instagram! Happy snapping! 

 ♥ All images are from Amanda's Instagram.