Instagram is one of my favourite social media sites. Theres just something really pleasing about scrolling through your news feed and liking peoples photos. When I first started blogging I never really bothered to make an Instagram account for it because I rarely used my personal one. However I decided instead of making a separate account for my blog (because who has the time for signing in and out) that I would just merge my personal one with my blog one. What I like about using it is that it's almost an extra add on to my blog, and the photos that may not make it onto here will more than likely make it to my Instagram. Cheeky plug you can follow me here if you wish!


 Editing Instagram Photos 
For me personally I am a lazy person (there I've admitted it) so when it comes to editing photos on 59275 different apps before it making it's way to Instagram just isn't my style. (Hense why other peoples photos on their feed are much better!) The photos I upload are a mix of photos taken with my Canon camera and my iPhone 6 plus camera. When editing them I just use Instagram, I skip past the filters and go straight onto the Tools tab where things such as 'Brightness', 'Contrast', 'Saturation' and such other tools live.


In four steps I just adjust the Brightness to whatever I think looks decent which for me personally is normally around the halfway mark. I then move onto Contrast to add definition back into the photo that I may have removed, I normally stay quite low on this with the only exception being if I'm uploading a photo of my Guinea Pig! But for normal photos I usually stay around the 20 - 25 mark.  I then go to add a few Highlights into the picture. Now this just kind of brightens it up a little bit after the contrast and depending on what's in the photo depends on how high I go up with this. For the photo shown below I went up to 48 because the Bunnies are white it just made them look more vibrant, but for example I only went up to 8 for this photo here. Finally the last thing I do is Sharpen the photos and not going to lie I sharpen the hell out of them! I don't know why but once you start it gets quite addicting, and I really like the effect it gives the photos. Again depending on what's in the photo depends on how high I go but usually I either choose the 50 mark or all the way up at the 100 mark.


Hashtags
When it comes to Instagram, hashtags are a great thing to use if you want to get your photos noticed and maybe even get some traffic to your blog! Using the appropriate hashtags can get your photos seen and if people are interested they may just go onto your blog for a nosey. Hashtags that I find are useful for us Bloggers are just like the ones on Twitter such as #bbloggers #lbloggers #fbloggers and so on. Hashtags are there for you to use so don't be afraid to do so! Also another thing to do is if there are products in your photos tag the brands as sometimes they may like them and even re-gram them. Story time!!! Tanya Burr liked two of my photos and for the next 3 days I was getting so many notifications on them photos along with even gaining followers. It's also happened with brands such as Benefit, Zoeva and Makeup Revolution, so definitely tag brands along with using your hashtags!


Promoting
When it comes to Instagram it can either fall one or two ways for you, you'll either gain traffic from it or you'll gain 0 to none. The reason for this is because you have to click onto the persons profile to get their blog link because you can't have a clickable link in the photo description. So heres where people are split into two groups, and I won't lie I'm in the half that won't bother looking for their link I hold my hands up to that. Now the only reason I won't bother is because I follow all my favourite blogs on Bloglovin/Twitter so I will see the post one way or another. Although here is probably where I will say don't get hung up on numbers as you'll just stress yourself out! Instagram is a nice thing to have as an add on to your blog and to share pictures every few hours that maybe you can't do on your blog! Just make sure you do have a link to your blog in your bio for the half that do check it out!

I am in no way an expert on Instagram but these are just what I do / my views and I thought it would be fun to share them!
Do you use Instagram?