A price tag still hanging on the sweater. A coffee cup that I sip from – but it is empty. Sounds simple, but it makes a difference, is more interesting for your community and increases engagement many times over! But also beyond the B-roll clips: try new things. Dare to break out and be different from the competition. By the way: the more concrete and approachable, the better! An example: Don’t write “And then you’re upset because you’re losing followers,” but instead address your followers’ emotions directly, for example like this: “You’re in a fit of crying because 15 people unfollowed you.”
You can also assume that users’ attention spans will become shorter. One more reason why your hook should be really strong at the beginning of a video. The first 1.5 (!) seconds are crucial. An example:
At 25 I earned my first million.
This variant, on the other hand, is weak: “I started making money with Instagram in 2014, and five years later I earned my first million.”
Use a viral hook to gain reach, but then motivate followers to take an action that will positively impact your business success. So when creating your content, think carefully about what you want your post or reel to achieve: Do you want users to book a free consultation? Coming to your sales page? Attend a webinar? And then pitch this offer in your creative and/or caption!
Using AI for Instagram: Seven ideas
Everyone is talking about AI right now, and rightly so. It can be used very well for Instagram, so you can save a lot of time and effort. Below are a few possible uses that have proven very useful for me.
- Create a content plan: Have your content plan created by an AI. To do this, you have to feed ChatGPT or a comparable AI with the content and topics of your account. On this basis, she can create a plan that you can then use as a basis for your content planning (as always with the use of AI: the results are rarely perfect and can be implemented 1:1, but they are a very helpful basis). Many people are afraid that only generic texts will come out when working with ChatGPT. But the fact is: If you feed the AI your content and give it feedback – like you would an employee – it will get better and better and deliver really strong results.
- Topic research: The classic when you can’t think of anything good – let an AI like ChatGPT do a little brainstorming. She doesn’t always have extremely good ideas, but she does have a lot of ideas that can be refined with skillful prompting. This is especially helpful when you’re having a creative slump or feel like you’ve already covered all the relevant topics. That is rarely true!
- Have captions written: ChatGPT and other tools can write captions for your posts – provide them with your Reel or Carousel scripts. That’s enough for a meaningful caption in seconds, which you then just have to fine-tune.
- Scripting reels: You can have an AI write not only the captions, but also the reel scripts. To do this, you have to feed them your topic idea for the reel in as much detail as possible.
- Customer communication: One of my favorite areas of application for AI! If customers complain to you via DM, have ChatGPT write a de-escalating response. You benefit from the fact that AI has no feelings and is therefore more diplomatic than you in case of doubt, even if the other person’s tone is wrong.
- Generate new content from existing content: If you’ve been active with content for a while, you’ll eventually have a treasure trove of content that you should use again and again to create new content. AI also helps with this: For example, if you already have a blog or newsletter, you can share the content from these channels with ChatGPT and have new Instagram content created from it. From carousels to reel scripts to posts, anything is possible here as long as your instructions to the AI are clear.
The following applies to all of this: teach the AI your tone of voice. The better you do this, the more authentic the content she creates for you will be and the less work you will have to invest in the end so that your content is really good.
Work more efficiently with the new ChatGPT reply function
© Rolf van Root – Unsplash
Instagram Reels vs. TikTok: Which platform is the better choice for your brand?
Both TikTok and Instagram Reels have their place and can be very valuable for your social media marketing. TikTok continues to experience impressive growth and not only appeals to a young audience, but is also increasingly gaining the attention of the 25-40 age group. This development makes TikTok particularly attractive for companies and solopreneurs. Creativity and ingenuity play a more crucial role here than the sheer number of followers.
Instagram, on the other hand, relies more on high-quality images and visual storytelling. If you’ve already built a significant community on Instagram, focusing on this platform and Instagram Reels could prove strategically smart.
Instagram is also one of the best-selling platforms in Germany. With various formats such as carousel graphics, single graphics, reels, lives and stories, Instagram offers a wide range of opportunities to convey knowledge in different ways. The platform is heavily focused on building community and engagement, making it a powerful sales channel.
TikTok, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on short, entertaining videos. The most important thing here is the immediate catching power, as users quickly continue scrolling if the content is not immediately convincing.
So the choice between Instagram and TikTok depends on various factors. While TikTok stands for creative storytelling and a broad age group, Instagram scores with high-quality images, a wide range of formats and a strong focus on community building and retention. It is therefore important to take individual goals and the presence of your own brand into account in order to choose the optimal platform for an effective social media strategy.
What else should solopreneurs and SMEs consider?
Finally, a few tips that can make your life a lot easier: Solopreneurs and SMEs don’t have the resources that larger companies do. This means you have to be particularly efficient. Good time management and automation are your best friends. There are many options to increase your efficiency. The use of AI, for example Chat GPT, as already described, is one of them.
Equally important: set up structures and processes that make content planning and creation as easy as possible for you. Work with tools that suit your needs, there are so many of them today! For example, the Meta Business Suite (to plan the publication of your posts), Notion (for the editorial plan), Canva (to create graphics) and CapCut or Captions.ai (to cut Reels and add text). Also, create high-quality, multi-purpose post templates as early as possible. It’s more work at first, but you’ll benefit from it for every single post in the future.
Structure and standardize your approach to creating content. Instead of starting from scratch every time, develop a modular principle for different formats that you can then use again and again. An example: A reel format that always follows the principle of “hook – short explanation of the topic – call-to-action”.
Work in time and topic blocks. In other words: In a reel block you produce several reels instead of just one. The same applies to topic planning, performance analysis and so on. Every recurring task should have fixed blocks of time in your calendar. This will help you structure yourself, become more efficient (because jumping back and forth between a thousand tasks and ideas almost never makes sense) and you can also make sure that no important area of responsibility falls behind.
And finally, two important points that are often neglected: Recycle your content as often as possible. Nobody can reinvent the wheel every day, and neither should you. And second: not only produce and publish content, but also analyze its performance. Look at why the top performers were so successful, and then optimize them further. You also have to look at the flops because this is the only way you can avoid them in the future. Measuring success is a factor that is far too often overlooked, especially among smaller companies and solopreneurs. It is one of the most important moments of success and the basis for continuing to improve.
Instagram’s Gen Z trends for 2024:
Fandom and independence in focus
© Lance Matthew Pahang – Unsplash
2023-12-22 10:57:26
#Instagram #roadmap #solopreneurs #SMEs #OnlineMarketing.de
