Crush Your Social

Welcome to the Crush Your Social podcast, where we make social media simple. I'm Toni and together we're going to crush it. The topic today is the 10 parts of Instagram. What are they? Where are they? And how do you use them?

So, if you are a brand new Instagram creator or a business owner who is terrified of Instagram like I was when I started, this podcast is for you. If you are advanced, you still might want to stick around because there's some pretty cool tips at the end that might be things you don't know. First of all, what is Instagram? We know that it's a social media platform and for business, the goal of it is to build your credibility and your legitimacy online. If you are driving in your car today, you're going to want to listen to this one later. Take your home, grab a drink, sit back, and you're going to be opening up your Instagram. I'm going to take you step by step through the 10 parts of Instagram today. Just as we get started, I want to have a little caveat that we're recording this in 2024 and things change daily on the Instagram platform. If things don't make sense or some of the icons aren't exactly where I said they were, there's probably a couple of reasons. Maybe something changed or your account might look different than mine. My account's been around a little bit longer and I might have different buttons. It's pretty general and most of the things should be pretty easy to find. Here we go. When you open your Instagram, it will open up to a photo, probably from someone who is following you or who you're following. That's called feed. Every time you open the Instagram app, that's where you'll go. A lot of people are like, "What do I do? How do I get out of the feed? What else can I do with it?" That was me in the beginning. I was so lost and I was terrified of Instagram, but I decided to choose Instagram because it's the hardest platform to learn, but it's also the one that has the most value. When you look at the page, you'll notice if you scroll, you'll see content. This content comes from people that you follow and ads. You'll get all kinds of content, but most of the time, it's only people that you follow. If you look at the bottom, there are five icons. On the left, there's a little house and then there's a magnifying glass next to that. In the center is a little box with a plus sign. Next to that is a icon that looks like a video. On the far right is a circle with hopefully your picture in it or maybe it has your logo.

You'll notice that the little house on the left at the bottom is filled in. Well, we're going to change pages so that you'll know whether you're on the feed page or somewhere else. What I'd like you to do is tap on the little circle at the bottom right. It should have your picture or your icon. Once you tap that, look down and you'll notice that the little house isn't solid anymore. It's an outline. Now you know you're somewhere other than your feed. Your feed is just like Facebook and just like LinkedIn. It's the content that people put out there that you get to see. When you tap to your profile page, this is your page. This is where people will come to learn about your business and you. Now we're going to go to the Explore page. On the bottom, there is a little magnifying glass. Tap that. The Explore page is mainly content from people that you don't follow. It's also content similar to other kinds of content that you've interacted with. If you are a creator like me and I interact with a lot of content that is around marketing, I will see a lot of marketing content in my Explore page because Instagram knows that I'm in the marketing industry and I'm looking at that kind of content. Whatever you're looking at, you're going to find more of the same in Explore. Now if you look down at the bottom in the center page or the center icon with the little plus sign, that's where you can produce a new reel. The icons tend to move around depending on the updates, so it may not be the same in yours. If you have the plus button, for now, that's how you make a reel. If you tap the button next to it, which is a video, you'll see that's your reel's feed. Like you have a post feed where people that you follow will send content. The reels feed will be content from all kinds of people. It will be people that you follow, people that you don't follow, and it's kind of like the Explore page where it's the kind of content that you're interacting with, but it can be a random group. It's just based on what you like, so it's topics and videos that you like. That takes us through the bottom buttons. Let's go back to the little house button. Tap the house button at the bottom and you'll go back to your feed page. From there, you'll notice at the very top is a little heart in the right-hand corner. That is your notifications. Anytime someone comments on your content, you'll see the notifications there. Pretty self-explanatory. There's another button next to it. It looks almost like a text box. Tap that and you'll see that you go to the DMs. The DMs are direct messages people send you, and there's four different sections within the DMs. You have your primary DMs, which should be people that you talk to a lot, people in your community, people who are friends, clients, maybe prospects if you're talking to any of them. They go in your primary because you don't want to miss a DM from them. Then you have your general. For the general, I use that for putting requests from people that I don't know very well or people that I've just recently met or people that I've met in the real world that want to connect with me on Instagram, but I'm not sure if they're going to be interacting with me a lot so they don't get into the primaries until we're talking a lot on the platform. Then there's something called channels, and you won't see that if you're not subscribed to any. If there's a subscriber that has a channel that you can subscribe to, you can sign up for it either free or paid, and information will go in the channels section of the DMs. The last part of the DMs or direct messages are the requests. Now the requests are direct messages from people that you are not connected with in any way.

I always look at them with a little trepidation because there's a lot of people out there who are going to try to sell you things that don't know you, and you'll see them in your DMs. There's a couple different sections. There's all, which is where all of them go. There's story replies. So if somebody replies to one of your stories, which we'll get to next, you'll see their comment there. Then there's hidden, and the hidden ones are ones that Instagram thinks maybe are spammers or maybe you don't want to hear from. So be careful with responses because if you respond to them, then they can see that you've responded. They can get into your DMs and they can talk to you. So with DMs, delete the ones that look like they aren't legitimate. If they are friends, then go ahead and put them in the general section. You can save to general so that later, if you become better friends with them, you can move them to primary when you're having more communications. So let's take a back arrow out. So go to the top left corner up by your handle and go out there, out completely. You're at the home feed. If you'll notice at the top of the home feed, there are circles and the circles have like a rainbow around them. The reason they have a rainbow around them is because somebody recorded a story. If you have recorded a story, if you look at the top left where your picture is, you will have a rainbow around your picture. If you have not recorded a story that day, then there will be just a gray circle around your picture. So the story section are people who you follow. When they make a story, you'll see it at the top. So you can scroll to the left and see lots and lots of stories of people that have made stories that are in your community. So that's where they're held. A story is, and there'll be another podcast on the difference between all the different kinds of video, including reels and stories, but for today, a story is a photo or a video that can be up to one minute long and they are meant to nurture your audience. So you can also sell in them. But anyway, that's a topic for another day. So that's the stories. So now let's go to the profile page. You're going to click the bottom right hand corner where your icon or your face is and go to that page. So that is the page where all the magic happens. And we're going to have a whole podcast on just the profile page and how to optimize it. But for today, I just want you to know kind of what it is and how to use it. So this page is where people will come if they're interested in your service. So you want to optimize it. And again, that'll be another day. But at the bottom of that page, you'll see some circles. Well, maybe you won't see circles because if you don't have highlights created, you won't see them. But go ahead and go to my page, crush your social, and you'll see at the bottom of my bio page, there are a bunch of circles there. And those circles are saved stories. And you can create little sets, groupings of content for people that kind of turn your Instagram page into a little mini website. You can have a start here highlight, which is just a video of you talking about what you do best and why people should follow you. You can have testimonials if you're featured, if you do speaking, if you have products and services, you can create stories for all of those things and then save them into what's known as highlights. And those are really valuable if you're a business owner. If you scroll down a little bit, you'll see your content. That's the content that you create. That's the content that people will see when they come to your page. If you notice, there is a little box above on the left, just above your grid. There's a little, looks like a tic-tac-toe box, three and three, so nine little boxes. That tells you that you're on the grid page and that page is your content. You'll have photos, infographics, video, all kinds, any kind of content that you put out for your feed will go there. Also though, there's another little button you can hit and it's called the Reels feed and it's your Reels feed. So next to the box that's all of the little grid in the center is another little video box and if you tap that, then you will be brought to your video grid. So your Reels, every reel that you put out goes there. It can also go on your grid box, but you can remove it and only have it shown on your Reels page. Every time I removed all of my videos and only kept them on the Reels page until people in the real world started saying, "Tony, you should make some Reels. You should make some videos." I'm like, "I have like 200 of them," but they didn't know that because they didn't know that they had to go to my Reels page in order to see it. So now I'm starting to leave my videos on my feed so that when new people come that don't know about the Reels feed, then they'll see my videos. So that was a lesson I recently learned that people thought I didn't make videos and I make a lot of them. The most important part of the Instagram platform for me as a data analyst are the insights. And the insights give you the data that help you to build your page and build your business online. They help you to understand what your audience wants to see from you and they help you to see what's working so you can repurpose it like four different ways, which is also a topic for another podcast. So how do you find the insights?

Most people will find them through what they call the hamburger at the top of the page. So if you're on your profile page still, you look up at the top right corner. There are three lines they call it the hamburger. I don't know why, but they do. Tap that and it will bring you to something called settings and activity. If you scroll down on that page under for professionals, you'll find something called insights. If you tap that, it will take you to another page where you can filter different kinds of information. You'll come right to the overview page and it's automatically set up for the last seven days. But you can change that by tapping the button at the top left that says last seven days. You can change that to last 14 days, last 30 days, previous month, or the last 90 days. And you can update it in the right hand corner. Once you decide what your time span is and you can look at how many accounts you've reached, how many accounts have engaged with you and your total followers. If you tap any of these, it will give you even more information, which we will do a whole podcast on insights and I'll take you through each of them and what they mean. But for today, you can see that you can look at all of the numbers that are related to your profile page. And if you scroll a little bit down, you'll see content. This is where you can look at the information on your content. So there's posts, stories, and reels. If you tap posts, you'll come to a page that says accounts reached. If you want to change that, it's super simple. At the very top, look at the posts, last seven days, and then there's a little kind of a squiggly line thing on the right hand side. It's an icon. If you tap last seven days, you can change it to the last two years. Instagram only keeps data for two years. Usually I'll be using like the last three months, the last six months when I'm doing my own content evaluation or contents for my clients. If you tap the little squiggly line, you can look at different metrics. So just know that they're there and that's where you find them. And so you can tap any of them, comments, follows, impressions, profile, all the things. They're there. Just take a look at them and you'll be able to see what you want to look at. So I gave you a lot of information for one page, but it's the 10 parts of the Instagram page. It's the feed, it's the direct messages. And remember you have four different kinds. It's your stories. It's the profile page. It's the highlights. It's the content grid. It's the explore page. It's the reels feed. It's the reels grid and it's your insights. All of those are the parts of the Instagram pages that you're going to need to know if you're a business. And I know it sounds like a lot, but you can take them one at a time. And I'm actually going to take you through all these things so you'll understand all of them within a few podcasts and you'll know kind of how to use them. Now onto the three tips. The first tip I have for you about your account is to not use your personal account as your business page. You'll want to go into your Instagram and I can teach you how to do it later. You're going to want to set up either a business or a creator page. And there's two reasons you want to do this. The first reason is that you don't want to be pushing your business content out to your personal friends and family. They don't care about your business and they aren't going to support it. The second reason is there's a ton of algorithms. There's actually 10 different algorithms that are going to be tracking all of your interactions on Instagram. And so you want that business page to be extremely focused to your industry and your niche. So you'll need to have it separate from your personal page. The second tip is to delete spammers. If someone is sending you DMs and they either spam you right away and try to sell to you, delete and block them. Or if they act like they're nice to you and they have a conversation with you and then they go right into a sales pitch on the second conversation, delete them because they're not interested in being part of your community. The whole point of Instagram is to build a community of people in your industry that will validate your knowledge and your thought leadership so that you can build your credibility and your legitimacy. And you don't need spammers mucking things up with the algorithms. The third tip is to be very strategic when you're searching on the Explore page. That was that little icon that looked like magnifying glass. If you're searching for things that are unrelated to your business, it affects the algorithms and it will affect your content reach. So if you're looking at kittens, puppies or bikinis, do it from your personal page because you don't need that again, mucking up your algorithms. Everything you do is tracked. Every like, every comment, everything you look at is tracked by an algorithm. So you want to make sure your page is really focused on industry and clients. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Crush Your Social podcast. If you like what you've heard, share it with your business besties. And while we're talking about sharing, why don't you take a selfie of yourself listening to this podcast and share it to your Instagram stories. Don't forget to tag me at Crush Your Social so I can share my stories and my community can cheer you on too. Until next time, let's crush it.