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How to create Instagram content for a brand that builds follower counts among relevant potential customers
I have learned a lot while I have been interning at Carma Connected on the social media team, and have had the amazing opportunity of having experiences that will prepare me for my career in the future. Through my experience making mood boards, creating mock feeds, writing captions, organizing photoshoots, making reels, and analyzing data I have learned a lot about working in my field. I now know how to create Instagram content for a brand that builds follower counts among relevant potential customers.
Creating mood boards for Instagram and photoshoots taught me the importance of visual cohesion and how to convey a brand's aesthetics and messaging through imagery. It's all about setting the right tone, which is a skill I can apply in design, marketing, and even content creation. A mood board helps you select the right colors, imagery, and overall aesthetics that resonate with your brand identity. At Carma Connected, we use a mood board as a reference when creating content for a brand's Instagram. You can use various tools to create your digital mood board, such as Adobe Spark, Canva, or even a simple collage app. Creating mood boards can help define a brand.
One time, our supervisor asked all of the interns to make concept mood boards of an imaginary brand as a practice. She asked me to make a mood board for a Miami dispensary that plays on cliches. This was challenging because there aren’t many good pictures of dispensaries and the products they sell online. In addition, I didn’t know how to reflect Miami cliches in my moodboard. However, I ended up making two great mood boards that impressed my boss. The mood.
Crafting mock feeds for Instagram has allowed me to understand the importance of content curation and the art of maintaining a consistent and visually aesthetic social media profile. Creating mock feeds for Instagram is very helpful in planning and visualizing the content a brand wants to post. A mock feed allows you to experiment with the arrangement and aesthetics of your posts to create a consistent and appealing Instagram profile. By using a mock feed, you can make sure your Instagram content is engaging and draws consumers in. This skill is transferable to any role that requires visual consistency and branding.
Crafting engaging and on-brand captions proved to be more challenging than I initially thought. While interning at Carma Connected, I have written captions for a variety of different types of businesses. This includes restaurants, hotels, doctors' offices, clubs, and even museums. Each type of company uses a different tone of voice and has a different brand persona. Therefore, it is important to think about the voice of the brand when writing captions. I learned how to strike a balance between creativity, conveying a message, and keeping it concise. This skill has improved my overall writing abilities.
Organizing photoshoots was an amazing learning experience for me. When organizing photoshoots, we start off by making a shot list. The shot list is made up of different photos that we want to make sure to get. For example, when we make a shot list for a restaurant, we list all of the food and cocktails that we want to capture. Next, we find models and communicate with them. Afterwards, we make mood boards with inspiration photos that we want to emulate. Organizing photoshoots taught me the importance of planning, teamwork, and attention to detail.
My proudest moment in my professional career was planning a photoshoot to refresh Bakan’s social media content. The goal was to create engaging and visually appealing content that would showcase the restaurant's food and ambiance, in order to attract new customers. In order to make sure that the dishes looked their best, I communicated with the restaurant's chef to make the food as photogenic as possible. In addition to food shots, I captured images of the restaurant's interior and their staff at work. I created a very comprehensive shot list and mood boards that I used as a source of inspiration for the photoshoot. Ultimately, the shoot was a success. The mood boards I created for this photoshoot can be seen below:
Creating Instagram reels pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me adapt to the quickly changing landscape of social media. Creating Instagram Reels for brands is an amazing way to engage with consumers and showcase what the brand has to offer in a creative and visually appealing manner. This experience enhanced my video editing skills and gave me the ability to tell a story in a short span of time.
Furthermore, I've learned how to analyze data and metrics to evaluate the success of social media campaigns in order to make monthly reports, which is an invaluable skill in advertising. I now know how to measure a brand’s success on social media by ​​obtaining the statistics for their engagement, net followers, impressions, number of posts, and the best-performing reel, post, and story. This can help the brand understand how they are doing on social media.
Overall, this internship has not only provided me with practical skills but has also given me insights into the complexity of brand management, social media, advertising, communication, and creativity. These skills will without a doubt serve as a strong foundation for my future career, and I look forward to further developing and applying them in the professional world. In addition to these specific skills, my internship also fostered my ability to adapt to new trends and technologies in the ever-evolving world of social media. It has made me more tech-savvy and aware of the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest tools and platforms.
Moving forward, I am most excited to learn about creating a social media strategy for a brand. A well-made social media strategy can help convey messages, share stories, and engage with followers in a meaningful way. I look forward to understanding how a social media strategy can shape and strengthen a brand's identity. The opportunity to establish a unique and authentic online presence is very exciting to me, and I can’t wait to learn more about the tools and techniques I can use to achieve this. I'm excited to explore different formats, from posts and stories to reels and infographics, and to experiment with different styles to engage with an audience. Learning about social media strategy will give me the skills to reach the right people with the right message. I'm excited to discover how to define and target specific demographics to maximize the impact of a brand's social media presence.
The part of this experience that I am most proud of was planning a photoshoot to refresh Bakan’s social media content. The goal was to create engaging and visually appealing content that would showcase the restaurant's food and ambiance, in order to attract new customers. In order to make sure that the dishes looked their best, I communicated with the restaurant's chef to make the food as photogenic as possible. In addition to food shots, I captured images of the restaurant's interior and its staff at work. I created a very comprehensive shot list and mood board that I used as a source of inspiration for the photoshoot. Ultimately, the shoot was a success.