It is not enough anymore to post pretty photos on Instagram to reach engagement. Sure, it helps. Honestly, it helps a lot. However, there are so many other smaller things that could help you out. From interesting captions to the actual look and feel of the feed. Some photos will look better next to each other, some captions will attract more comments, some styles will work better than others with your personality and brand. 

Before creating new content get inspired on Pinterest. There’s so much great content on locations, poses, shooting angles, and outfits ideas. When taking photos, make sure that you mix up the poses. An Instagram feed with the same poses will not look good. Nevertheless, that isn't the only reason. I have noticed that with myself that in order to have a better sense of style you have to inspire yourself. Also, seeing all of those gorgeous photos makes me want to do a photo shoot. I use Instagram for that as well. I simply save other account photos and check them out before a photo shoot. 

Whether it’s photo shoots of caption creation, dedicate time to create them in bulk. You can achieve more than you think over a busy weekend. You’ll be able to shoot during the morning, lunch and evening. All of this means different lighting settings. That being said, it all depends on your Instagram account. Some people choose to post photos that are only taken during sunset. This definitely helps.

However, if you do not have most of your evenings free, do not worry. You can easily get away with slightly different lightning settings by using presets or reorganizing your feed in a way that it has one morning, one midday, and one evening shot. Feel free to be creative.

When it comes to captions, creating them can definitely be a challenge. Especially because currently, the longer captions are more interesting to people. 

The most important thing is that you have some kind of rules and stick to them. See, when you create 100 captions in two days, you really get into your creative mode. Also, you are able to structure them better. Feel free to spend some time just being in your creative zone. That’s where the magic happens. Either way, creating content in bulk saves a lot of time.

Whether you will use an app to plan your posts or a fake account, it doesn't matter. However, before posting photos on your Instagram account, try them out. Instagram is a highly visual platform. This means that every detail matters. The truth is that some photos will look a lot better next to each other than others. There are many multiple factors for that such as theme, composition, lighting, presets, etc. So putting them next to each other and trying different variations are key to create a stunning Instagram account. 

Some people call it a mood board. The main idea behind it is to gather photos that you actually like. The truth is that choosing your brand style and colors is a difficult task. However, this helps you determine which style you like more. All you have to do is to gather different photos from Instagram and put them in one place. By doing so for a week, you will definitely see which colors look more pleasing for your eye. There's no right or wrong answer here. Both colorful and faded feeds could work. Once you have your style board set, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I prefer a darker or lighter style? 
• What kind of colors are dominant? 
• Which captions stop me at least for a second? 
• What kind of clothes attract my attention? 
• What kind of posing looks more interesting to me? 
• Which lighting do I like the most? (e.g. Morning, afternoon or evening) 
• What type of composition attracts my attention? 
• Which locations look the most beautiful? 
• What props or accessories help the photos look better? 
• What type of feelings do I usually prefer to feel while looking at the photos on Instagram? 

Most people think about colors while organizing their photos. I have to agree that it is important and Lightroom presets can help you with that. The thing is that colorful photos simply work better on Instagram than black or white. It's just that editing colored photos is more challenging. However, with the presets, it's just one click edits. Hence, I would like to focus on something else: you need to choose your topics. An Instagram feed which posts have topics will work better than the one that doesn't. The topics can be as simple as one photo is a selfie and another one is the whole outfit. They can also be more complex, for example, you could have a feed in which one post is a quote, another an illustration, another one a diagram, and etc. The choice is completely yours.