In episode 23 of Mompreneur Mastery, Instagram strategist Sydney O'Brien shares the top Instagram strategy trends for 2024, tailored for busy mom business owners.
With a focus on authenticity and connection, Sydney discusses the shift towards less polished and more authentic content, the evolving role of hashtags, and the crucial impact of outbound engagement.
Emphasizing the importance of connecting with followers and nurturing a community, she provides actionable insights for leveraging these trends to save time and drive sales.
Tune in to discover how to strategically plan content, elevate outbound engagement, and foster meaningful connections to elevate your Instagram game as a mompreneur in the upcoming year.
In episode 23 of Mompreneur Mastery, Instagram strategist Sydney O'Brien shares the top Instagram strategy trends for 2024, tailored for busy mom business owners.
With a focus on authenticity and connection, Sydney discusses the shift towards less polished and more authentic content, the evolving role of hashtags, and the crucial impact of outbound engagement.
Emphasizing the importance of connecting with followers and nurturing a community, she provides actionable insights for leveraging these trends to save time and drive sales.
Tune in to discover how to strategically plan content, elevate outbound engagement, and foster meaningful connections to elevate your Instagram game as a mompreneur in the upcoming year.
If you're not doing this, make sure you are doing it because you will see a huge increase in your follower growth, but make sure you're doing it authentically. The whole takeaway here, I think with these trend shifts is authenticity and connection welcome to the Mompreneur Mastery podcast, where we share actionable Instagram strategies that fit into a busy mom's schedule so that you can get more engagement, more leads, and more sales and less time so you can spend more quality time with your family. I'm Sydney O'Brien, an Instagram strategist who started my business with three kids under five and found a way to do it without sacrificing quality time with my family and only working two to 3 hours a day. I love helping other mom business owners find that seemingly impossible mom work life balance instead of spending too much time creating content that isn't getting them the results they want. If you're an overwhelmed but very ambitious business owner and you want to strategize the heck out of your Instagram account so that you can save time and make more sales, you're in the right place. Hey hey. Welcome to episode 23 of Mompreneur Mastery because we are getting close to the end of the year and the beginning of 2024. Not entirely sure how this is possible. It seems a little fake, but we'll go with it. I want to talk about Instagram strategy trends for the upcoming year. I'm going to give you some strategies that you need to adjust for the upcoming year, and then I'm going to explain how my personal Instagram strategy will be changing in 2024, just to give you some ideas of what to look for in your own content. So another year on Instagram means a whole lot of updates to the platform itself. New features, new updated algorithms, all the things so big trends that I am excited to see in 2024 is less polished feeds there was a big increase in broll reels and focusing more on connection than these perfectly curated, excellent transition, tons of outfits for reels types of things. And I love the authenticity that is continuing to show up more and more in Instagram content, especially as a mompreneur who just doesn't have the time to set up these difficult transitions and go through a million outfit changes for reels and worry about the aesthetics and all of the things all of the time. I mean, some aesthetic. Yes, you need things to be readable and eye catching, but if I'm recording a reels or a story, I don't want to have to worry about cleaning a whole bunch of stuff and making myself look super presentable to do it. I love seeing that there's more authenticity, more connection happening on Instagram, putting the social back in social media. It's also great. The B roll trend is great for batching. Know when I'm out with my kids or walking my dog, making some coffee, I can easily grab some video and use it for a reel whenever I need to and schedule it and be done. It's super simple and also a great way to show kind of behind the scenes of your life with your audience, which, like I said, helps build that connection piece authentically, which you really need to convert followers into buyers. Another trend that will be changing in 2024 is hashtags. This started this year and will continue, but they are not as powerful as they used to be as far as growth, they're more for discoverability. So make sure that you're using keywords to rank in searches, but do not rely on them as a strategy for growing your audience just with hashtags. If you are confused about how to find the perfect hashtag and how many mentions they should have, I will link an older episode in the show notes that explains all of that. The third trend that I want to mention is engagement. Engagement is a huge, huge piece of your strategy. And I'm not even talking about incoming engagement of people commenting and engagement with your content. I specifically mean outbound engagement, the engagement you are doing on your followers content, on your target audience's content, on any account that your target audience would follow. If you're not doing this, make sure you are doing it because you will see a huge increase in your follower growth. But make sure you're doing it authentically. The whole takeaway here, I think with these trends shifts is authenticity and connection. So when you're engaging, there used to be these kind of like outlines of find a person that is in your target audience, comment on three of their posts, and do this to a couple accounts every day. It comes off as very inauthentic and very cheesy. Like you can look through your feed and see oh wow, this comment is offering absolutely no value to my content and it's just not a good look. So outbound engagement is important, but if you are going to comment on something, make sure your comment gives value. A way I like to think of it is like an improv. The rule is yes, and so when you are commenting, say you can agree with what they're saying or not, it's up to you, but then add something new to whatever the topic of their content is and you will bring more value and start conversations and also get your own account seen by other accounts. But your comment, your engagement, your story replies needs to be authentic for it to be effective. Okay, so the three takeaways here for Instagram trends in 2024 is one, broll content behind the scenes type of content to show glimpses into your real life, less curated feeds two, less relying on hashtags for growth, more relying on outbound engagement and three, making sure that outbound engagement is authentic. And again, biggest takeaway? Focus on connection and authenticity. And if you haven't looked at your own insights to see what worked well in your content, what didn't, what needs to change highly, highly recommend doing that. If you're not checking your content to see what works and what doesn't, and to have a more data informed strategy, you're essentially wasting your time creating content, which sounds really harsh, and I don't mean it to be, but I also don't want you to waste your time. I know you don't have a lot of it, and I want you to focus on the things that are going to get you the results you want. So just to give some examples, I recently checked over my insights. I did a glance over the past three months and then six months and then the whole year, and I wasn't even just looking at individual posts. It was comparing actionable trends along with my business metrics, my sales goals, my leads, things like that. And what was working with Instagram marketing, what was translating to actual business success from my Instagram strategy. And I think the biggest thing that I am going to be focusing on in quarter one of 2024 is going to be connection. And I know I've said it a whole bunch this episode, but it is just such a key, underrated piece of your strategy. Because again, no one is going on social media with the intent to buy something. I mean, they might be, but it's very rare. Most people don't go scrolling reels and things looking for a course to buy or things like that. You're there to be entertained. You're there to waste time to disassociate a little bit, but very rarely with the intent to purchase something. So that connection piece is so important because that is what social media is for. And I admittedly did
not do a great job of that this past 02:
15 quarters, honestly. So I'm going to refocus and make sure that not only my content is creating that connection with the followers that I currently have, but also my engagement, my stories. And so I'm going to be doing this in a few different ways. I'm going to show up more in stories and reels because when you show your face, your personality, your voice, your tone, all of these things, it is easier for people to connect with you. And also, I'm going to up my outbound engagement because I haven't been doing that as much because things get busy, but it is something I want to prioritize so that I can have a more connected and nurtured audience. Another thing I'm going to do with my actual feed content knowing that I want connection is to not have as many promotional posts. And I don't even mean just for selling things. Promotional posts could be for a lead magnet, for a podcast episode, anything really that you are promoting. I will share more stories, more personal content, relating my life to my business and with the intention of getting comments and learning more about my audience and how I can best help them. Because not only will that connection help convert followers into buyers, it will also mean I know my audience more so that I can serve them better with my content and with my offers. Even I could have an amazing, super awesome offer. But if it's not set up in a way that is accessible and benefits my audience, they're not going to buy it. So it doesn't really matter. And it was a huge waste of time. So I want to make sure that I am both connecting with them to build trust and authority and eventually get more sales, but also to make sure that the way I am doing my work, the offers I am creating for people are accessible for them and are going to help. If you are interested to see what these kinds of posts will look like, make sure you subscribe, because next week I'm going to explain how I batch create content. I usually do it a month at a time because it saves me just hours and hours of time and effort. And batching content also helps make sure that your posts aren't disjointed. Because the real big overarching theme that your strategy needs to have is that each post is working together to achieve this common goal, to attract new followers and then guide them down the buyer's journey so that they go from followers to buyers. And all of your posts need to work together to do that. And that is exactly why you should be planning your content out ahead of time, so you can make sure that that is exactly what you're doing. And if this sounds like greek to you, come back next Monday and I will show you exactly what I mean when I show you how to plan out a month of content in one go. So make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button, whatever it says on whatever your platform you're listening on, so that you don't miss it. It will be a great way to start the new year with a month of content just ready to go.