Does Your Instagram Aesthetic Matter?

Ah, yes, the age-old (ok, decade-old) question: Does an aesthetic Instagram feed matter?

The short answer is yes, but not in the perfectly curated way you might think.

For the long answer, let's get into some no-BS facts.

You don't have to be perfect

Contrary to popular belief, achieving perfection on Instagram is not a prerequisite for success. You don't have to have a perfectly curated feed, BUT intentional and cohesive feeds tend to outperform their chaotic counterparts. The goal isn't perfection. It's to make sure every post looks like it belongs and offers a little snapshot of your brand's personality.

Quick and easy ways to brand your feed:

Use either a profile pic with your face or your logo.

For small businesses and personal brands, using a good, well-lit photo of yourself is a fantastic way to humanize your brand. For larger businesses, use your logo for recognizability.

Be consistent with your branding.

Choose 3 or 4 brand colours, a primary and secondary font, and an editing style. Stick to them to maintain visual consistency. If you tend to use whatever graphic template you want without adapting it to your brand colours and fonts, this is your sign to stop doing that. Stay cohesive. It helps with brand recognition, promise.

Create templates for carousel posts and graphics.

Establish a consistent format for multi-image posts and single graphics. Templates can streamline your content creation process, and having a consistent format will help with recognizability and the consistency we keep talking about.

Use reel covers:

Don't leave your reel covers to chance! Unless your reel already fits with your branding, pop a reel cover on that sucker and post. I love Canva for this. Instagram stories have the same dimensions as reel covers, and you can easily create professional-looking reel covers with little experience.

TLDR;

A cohesive feed makes your business look more professional - a trust signal that you take your business seriously and are credible. There are chaotic feeds that are super successful posting whatever they want, so is branding 100% necessary for everyone? No. But it will help most people.

If you haven't given a ton of thought to your branding, check out this article on why consistent branding is important, and this article on how to build your brand book.