Hey there, I’m Gina! I help bloggers take their businesses from half-ass to BADA$$
Lightroom Mobile Presets – they’re a beautiful thing! I’ve shared before how to download, import and install them onto your phone, so now it’s time to teach you how to use them to make your phone photography editing a snap tap! First you need to make sure that you have Lightroom Mobile on your device […]
Lightroom Mobile Presets – they’re a beautiful thing! I’ve shared before how to download, import and install them onto your phone, so now it’s time to teach you how to use them to make your phone photography editing a snap tap! First you need to make sure that you have Lightroom Mobile on your device (it’s free, ya know?) After that, you want to make sure you have a preset or two on your phone to use them.
Now that you’ve got some Lightroom Mobile presets all ready to go – let me show you how to use them so you can get those photos picture perfect in about 3 seconds! (Thanks goes out to my friend Dawn for letting me hijack her phone to show you since mine already had 57 billion photos in LR – ha!)
First, open up your app and go to your library.
Next, click on the left hand side of the button in the bottom right corner so you can add photos to your album.
After that, choose the photo you’d like to edit with your preset and tap on it. Then it will open in the editing area of your Lightroom Mobile app.
Once you photo is loaded into the editing area, then use the bottom slider and go all the way to the right and you’ll see PRESETS. Choose that to open them.
Once you have the preset you want, then tap on it to add it to your photo.
Then click the checkmark at the bottom to save it and you’re done!
Of course, if it’s a little too bright or dark – you can still adjust the photo a tiny bit using the controls at the bottom of the app on the slider.
And that’s it! It’s so easy to put these presets to work so you can make the most of your photos. Want to see more dramatic before and afters?!? Here are a few of my own:
Want to snag these presets for free?!? Just fill out the form below and I’ll send them straight to your inbox!
Ahhhh…. Instagram engagement. It’s the one metric people don’t talk about very much – however it means EVERYTHING. It literally means how much your audience values what you have to say, and it’s the only way to tell if they’re really listening.
Whether you have a huge audience or a tiny one… Instagram Engagement is a far better predictor of the number of people you’re actually influencing versus how many people have clicked on the “follow” button. So let’s chat about what it is – why you need it – and how to get more Instagram engagement.
Before we get started, I’m going to be 100% honest with you and tell you that you need to have a BUSINESS account on Instagram to see any of the information you’ll need to accurately figure out and improve your Instagram engagement. It’s free, only takes a couple of seconds in the settings of your account and then you’re good to go. Now… let’s get to the good stuff…
Instagram engagement is the combination of how many people take action on a post you share on the platform. So likes, comments, saves and views all count as Instagram engagement. Some actions carry more weight than others. Since there are multiple ways you can post on your feed (not stories, IGTV or lives – we’ll get there in a second), let’s take a peek into the Instagram engagement actions:
All of these actions add up to create your Instagram engagement. Any of them count, just as long as your followers are ENGAGING with your content.
We all love it when we get that double tapped feeling, right? When someone gives you a like, it’s like your account gets a little hug. But beyond giving your photo a quick heart – if your people are highly engaged, then they’re leaving comments, interacting with you in the stories feature, even watching you when you go Live. There’s a lot of layers on how engaged they are.
But if you see the same people popping onto every photo with a quick comment or replying to your IG stories, those are the people who are truly the most invested in you and your feed. Those are your loyal “Super Fans” that will stick with you through any algorithm changes that might come your way. These are the people you want to cultivate and love on – and they’ll become fans for life.
This is such a commonly asked question – and with good reason. We all want to know what metrics we can use to see what’s “successful” on Instagram. And if you’re going to freak out over some number on the platform, please for the love of all things pretty, focus on your engagement ratio.
Simply put, it’s the amount of engagement you get on your account versus the amount of followers you have. So if you take the average follower amount for any given week, then divide it by the amount of engagement you received, then you can get a quick glance at how your performance was.
At the bare basic, you can look at the amount of followers you have, then the amount of interaction a post in your feed got, then do the quick math. If you have 1,000 followers and you got 100 likes on a photo, then that’s roughly 10% of your audience. If you got 65 likes, then you have 6.5% engagement on that photo.
Now… a lot of factors can go into that engagement ratio (and more on diving into analytics in a second), but it’s a super easy way to kind of do the math in your head to see if the photo performed well.
Most experts agree that 10% is the bench mark for a highly engaged account. Have higher than that? Then SWEET – you’re right on target! Have less than that? Don’t worry… I’ve got a few tips to help you out later in this post.
If you get nothing else out of this post, please take this away: The number of followers you have is just for vanity’s sake. The number of ENGAGERS you have is everything. If you’ve ever hosted a giveaway, I can guarantee you that you have followers who aren’t true fans. And even if you haven’t, then you have a crap ton of people who followed you in hopes that they would follow you back (please don’t play that game…. it doesn’t build a legit fanbase at ALL!)
A lower number of followers is actually a GOOD thing. It means you’re slowly building a steady stream of people who get you and love what you do. No crazy tactics involved. Just authentic growing at the right pace to keep your Instagram Engagement up and keeping the ratio high is soooooo much more important than trying to get numbers just to have a fancy “K” after your number.
So… now’s the time where we play the comparison game against it’s sister app, Facebook. Instagram is community driven, far more than Facebook ever has been. Where as Facebook makes it easy to leave the app with linking to other sites, Instagram wasn’t built that way. There’s a rumor that it’s coming, but honestly it’s always been about engagement from the get-go.
The main way to interact with people in the beginning was the ability to like or comment on another person’s posts. Then they added private messages, then stories, then IGTV, and I’m sure they’ll add more features as time goes on… but every one of them are built to keep you directly on IG. And the engagement rate has ALWAYS been better on IG.
Take for instance my Gina Luker Facebook page. It currently has 825 fans. It took me 3 years to get it to that point. Whenever I share a post, the most interaction it ever gets is 8-10 likes (unless I share it elsewhere.)
Then take a look at my Gina Luker Instagram. The account is less than a month old (at the time of writing this post), it has 650 fans – and averages 80+ likes on any given post. Some posts have well over 100 likes. Without even looking at the comments and saves, you can see that even with about 75% of the amount of FB followers I have, the Instagram engagement vs Facebook engagement ratios are MASSIVELY different. about 1% versus 10%. Even on my larger accounts (The Shabby Creek Cottage) the ratios are still about the same.
Now that we’ve discussed what it is and why it’s important, let’s look at how to find Instagram Engagement rate for your account. First, let’s take a peek at posts. Remember you HAVE TO HAVE A BUSINESS ACCOUNT to be able to see insights. So at the bottom of each post you’ll see “VIEW INSIGHTS” – if you click on that you’ll get a popup with basic insights, then if you click on that you’ll see more in depth insights on that individual post.
For instance, with my 650 follower account, you’ll see that 419 people saw that post. It didn’t get me any new followers, but it did get 126 likes, 13 comments and 4 saves. So overall, if you add that up, it got 143 engagements, which basically works out to about 30% engagement rate. That’s HUGE! If my goal is 10% on each post, then I’ve tripled my goal.
Now, to see it on the full account, go into your account, up at the top you’ll see “### profile visits in the last 7 days,” and if you click on it, then it will take you to your account’s insights. Inside there, you’ll have info on in three separate tabs:
Ok, my friend. This is the part where we get to have a little heart to heart. Instagram is possibly the most social platform of any social media. And there’s three big reasons why your Instagram Engagement is suffering.
There’s a few of them, actually. But honestly, you’re going to have to test and tweak and see what works best for your audience.
In case you haven’t heard the news: BoardBooster is closing up shop on June 27, 2018. (And I just heard the cries of thousands of bloggers who are frustrated with yet ANOTHER change in the blog world.) So I’m guessing you have lots of questions – because I did, too. I’ve got to admit that I made the move off of BoardBooster mere weeks ago, so I’ve been exactly where you are in very recent times, however I didn’t do it with the pressure of a looming deadline. But never fear, I’ve got your back.
See, I was an avid user of Board Booster for years. I used it faithfully month after month, year after year, knowing that all of my pins were going out into the pin-iverse and it was smooth sailing.
But a few months ago I heard light rumblings about Pinterest not being happy with BoardBooster – however it didn’t seem important enough for me to bother switching. Fast forward to the beginning of June 2018 and those rumblings got much, MUCH louder.
Now let me say that I don’t freak out much about blogging. I’ve been at this gig for about 12 years now, and I can tell you that it takes a LOT to rattle me. Like a metric shit ton. But for some reason, all of the chatter I’d been hearing about the possibility of Pinterest suing BoardBooster hit me like a ton of bricks. I heard about it early one morning and by lunch time I had figured out how to pin easily on Tailwind, got it all set up and deleted my BoardBooster account. Like within 3 hours. It was a ton of work to figure out how to navigate, which is exactly why I’m going to walk you through it on a super detailed, real time video at the bottom of this post.
Before we get to that, though, let’s take a look at the results I’ve seen since making the switch just three weeks ago.
*all links to Tailwind are affiliate links*
Traffic: I can’t tell you that I’ve seen a MASSIVE difference in my traffic since switching to Tailwind, but I know that’s because it takes time to build momentum whenever you change your Pinterest strategy. You definitely won’t see traction overnight unless you’ve never ever used Pinterest then start all of a sudden. After 7 years of consistently using Pinterest to promote my blog, I know that it takes time for the changes to take effect. I’ve seen a tiny uptick – but not worth documenting on an epic proportion.
Monthly Viewers: There’s a relatively new metric on Pinterest that you can see on your profile called Monthly Viewers. Basically it’s an accumulation of all the pins all the people have seen across Pinterest that you’ve pinned. At one time my MVs was up to about 11 million – however it had dropped down to 9.2 million (that’s a drastic drop, my friends.) I’m happy to see, though, that after just a few weeks of using Tailwind, that the MVs is making a comeback and is now sitting at 9.6 million. Not quite where I was, but hey – it’s upward movement and I’m always glad to see that.
Follower Count: Depending on what Pinterest “expert” you talk to, some believe big in the power of your Pinterest followers and others not so much. I’m about 50/50 on the issue, because while I think it matters a lot, it’s not the end all, be all of Pinterest success. What I do think is that if you create an awesome account full of pins that people find via the search feature (because Pinterest is a search engine, after all,) then you kind of hit that magic sweet spot. In the month of May, I averaged gaining around 30 new followers a day, but since switching over to Tailwind I’ve seen an increase of over 100 followers a day. That’s a huge plus for me. In my mind, the more followers I have, then the more people are likely to stumble upon my content. I’m pretty convinced it even helps in searches (although that’s a complete guessing game!)
Want to harness the power of group boards? Be sure to check out my post on Finding the Best Pinterest Group Boards.
