The importance of an Instagram aesthetic

An Instagram aesthetic is important in ensuring your brand is recognised on the social media platform. It refers to the look and feel of your feed, sometimes known as an Instagram theme, and is important in increasing brand recognition. Your feed is the first thing potential customers see upon looking at your profile, to turn followers into customers they must like what they see. Your Instagram feed must accurately represent your brand, convey your brand personality, be instantly recognisable and promote your products or services, but above all to increase your following and potential customer base your Instagram feed must look good.

Having an Instagram aesthetic makes your page instantly recognisable. Your audience should be able to see your post on their feed and without looking at the account know you uploaded it. It increases brand recognition while also showing off your skillset or products in a creative and interesting way.

What Makes an Instagram Aesthetic?

An Instagram aesthetic is created by ensuring you have a cohesive look and feel to the items published to your account. You can do this by creating a consistency across the following elements:

- Photo filter – Using the same filter or preset across all photos.

- Photo editing – When editing your photos, you should stick to a routine, adding similar aspects to each photo such as backdrops and props.

- Colour theme – Whether you are creating graphics or taking photos using your brand colours in images enhances brand recognition.

- TOV – It is not just about the photos you share but the tone you use when captioning them.

- Typography – If you create graphics using type face this should also link back to your brand and the fonts you are recognised for using elsewhere.

How to Create an Instagram Aesthetic

You do not need to have a master’s degree in Photoshop or know your way around Lightroom to create a cohesive Instagram feed. The main component is making sure your photos all look good when put together on the feed as well as looking good as solo images. To do this, you can make your feed before you break your feed - take the images you have planned to publish on Instagram and put them together in a 3x3 replicant of your Instagram feed. Looking at your feed like this can help you to reorganise the order in which you will publish them and make any small changes to the smaller set of images to ensure they look good once put together on the feed. You can do this using an editing application such as Photoshop or Canva or using an app which provides you with a version of your feed such as ‘VSCO’ or ‘Grid and Square Maker’.

Creating Cohesion throughout Instagram

The best way to enhance your brand recognition on Instagram is to have consistency across the entire app not just on your feed. Despite your feed being the most important aspect, you should remember other elements of the app are important too. Upon logging onto Instagram over 60% of millennials use Instagram stories daily, while tools such as IGTV and Reels have grown in recognition and use in recent months. By using the same filters, fonts and colours throughout your feed, stories, IGTV and reels you will ensure that you create a cohesive look and increase brand recognition.

Deviating from Your Theme

Creating an Instagram aesthetic or theme is beneficial to the brand by increasing brand recognition, but there are certain times and reasons you may deviate from your theme and post something which does not fit the look and feel. You should always be careful of how often you deviate, one post every 6-9 posts can give a little break in your feed, while posting 3 posts in a row which deviate create a messy and unorganised look. Deviating from your theme is particularly impactful when done to make a statement perhaps for CSR reasons or making a political or social statement. Another reason may be to create a subtle step into a new theme or aesthetic route you wish to take.