Instagram is a great place for churches to engage with their current congregation and a younger audience.

Users are increasingly focusing on brands’ ‘grids’, the section where all your account’s posts appear, as a factor in deciding whether or not to follow accounts. Maintaining consistent content on Instagram will appeal to prospective followers and will also help your established audience to know what to expect from your account. By ensuring that your Instagram posts are consistent, you allow your audience to feel familiar and comfortable with your church’s content, in turn increasing engagement and brand closeness.

Creating a curated grid that appears carefully thought-out is surprisingly easy, and, with a few simple steps, will help your Instagram account to grow and all you to use the platform as a part of your church’s ministry.

Filter 

Consider selecting one filter to apply to all your posts. While ensuring a consistent feel and tone, using the same filter will make sure that each of your photos has similar tones. 

Instagram offers a variety of in-app filters that can be easily applied to each photo, with options to increase and decrease the strength of the overlay. 

To apply a filter natively: 

  1. Open the Instagram app and click the ‘+’ icon at the bottom of the screen 

  1. Select a photo from your library, or click ‘photo’ to take a new shot 

  1. Scroll along through Instagram’s filters and select one 

  1. Click the same filter again to adjust its settings or use a frame. 

If you don’t feel that any of Instagram’s offerings work for your church’s account, why not make your own? There are plenty of add-on apps offering customisable filters, such as VSCO, where you can play with different tones that suit your brand. 

 

Palette 

Happy with filters? Take it a step further and think about your overall palette. 

Think about your church’s branding, or even its building. What colours have you naturally been posting the most of? See if you can identify some key colours or shades and consistently incorporate them into your grid. This will help your church’s account to establish a strong identity, and will take your grid to the next level. 

 

1 in 5 Rule 

While consistency is key, keeping your content engaging and varied is essential to retaining followers and ensuring success. 

Have you heard of the 1 in 5 rule? 

For every promotional post, publish four other posts – behind-the-scenes, stories, did-you-know, on this day etc. Constant promo can feel spammy and may discourage your audience from engaging with your account and following the call to action.  

 

Caption Formatting 

Have you thought about your caption? 

Your content should be fresh and new, but the format of your captions should be consistent, so that your followers become familiar with your account and know where to access information.  

Consider whether incorporating hashtags in your caption or first comment works better for your church’s audience, and whether emojis should be part of your brand or not. 

If having one format is too restricting, create a different format for each type of post – identify your post types and create a template to follow in each caption. 

 

Timing 

Does your audience know when to expect a post from you? More importantly, do you know when your audience is online? 

If you use an external app to monitor and post to Instagram, you may have access to your account’s statistics through there. If not, you can access all sorts of analytics and insights right in the main Instagram app as a business account (it’s free, switch your account now with the help of this blog!). 

Explore your account’s analytics and get to know your audience – are most of them checking Instagram before bed or do they prefer to check first thing every morning? 

Experiment with different posting times and see what works best for your account.  

 

Let us know which tips you’re going to implement for your church’s account – we’d love to take a look and repost your photos! 

Iso Neville
Social Media Officer

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Source URL: https://www.churchofengland.org/resources/digital-labs/blogs/creating-consistent-style-instagram