Using Instagram to market your books

Monique, our bright-eyed intern was given the task of starting an Instagram account and making it work as something that added value and promoted our books. Here are some of the lessons she learnt:

Instagram for Dummies:

I created an Instagram account based on all things geeky called Geeksmack. I have been struggling with the question of how to make it successful and how to gain followers. So, I made a point of learning how to Instagram and how to do it well. Below are a few tips I have learnt along the way.

·           First of all you have to decide what you want to get out of the Instagram account you are going to create. You have to decide if you want to use the account to market a brand or just for personal use.

·           You need to create an interesting username, interesting short biography and post a picture on your account that depicts what you’re trying to convey to the users of Instagram.

·           The pictures that you post need to be relevant to your profile and its purpose. These pictures are a representation of what you're trying to put out there for other people to see and to essentially gain many followers.

Making Instagram successful and gaining followers:
To start you must post pictures that are of good quality, interesting, original and unique and that attract people to want to follow.

When posting hashtags on pictures, they must be relevant and categorical. If people search that particular hashtag, they will end up finding your posts. Do not over kill it with hashtags and write a short description, so people will be encouraged to comment.
It’s important to like and comment on other people’s posts. This is a good way of interacting and gaining followers through this. 

Ideally, in order to gain followers in Instagram you want to target people that are similar to what you are portraying on your profile. A good way to do this is to search hashtags under the categories you are interested in, for example searching #sci-fi. By doing this you can find people who have similar interests to you and follow them and gain followers in return. 

Follow the followers of the people who you are already following or are following you.


Monique De Nobrega is a 22 year old Journalism Degree graduate from The University of Johannesburg. She has a passion for writing with the hopes of one day fulfilling her dream of becoming the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. This all started from when she was a young girl and developed a love of books and reading. “I enjoyed reading so much that I never wanted to do my homework after school. Books were my enjoyment and entertainment growing up, so was writing every day in my journal.” Her favorite author out of all the books she has read is Jodie Picoult. “Picoult tells the story how it happens in real life and not the happier, faker version of the story”.  Besides reading and writing, she’s a huge animal lover and hates cruelty to animals.