If you are in a similar position, you need to check out other people’s Instagram profiles and perhaps even buy a few popular profiles. You must have some sort of real following (not bots) for the advice in this article to matter. After all, why concentrate on effectively utilizing Instagram for communication and branding if nobody is there to receive your message?

When Branding Gets Personal

Here’s the rub… Instagram branding is best left to models, especially female models, be they amateur (most are) or professionals. This is because Instagram is a very visual medium, and a model can say all that he or she wants to with just his or her appearance. 

That is why music videos, comedy, and news always struggle on Instagram. You can invest thousands into a comedy-orientated show on Instagram, and you will be easily overtaken by an 18yr old woman trying out Cosplay for the first time. 

Added to this, communicating your value as a CEO through Instagram is very difficult. This is again because what you have to offer is more than skin deep. Getting across how efficient you are, how well you manage, how well you administer, and so forth, is simply not something you can easily communicate using the visual medium that is Instagram.

However, there are two saving graces for CEOs who are looking to exploit Instagram. The first is to demonstrate brand principles, and the second is to strengthen a reputation.

Demonstrating Brand Principles

This is mostly for your staff, your investors, and the people you do business with. You simply demonstrate how you stick to your brand principles. Perhaps the best example of this comes from the Red Bull marketing team. Even their middle managers have them trying out extreme sports on their Instagram pages. 

Some only have less than 1000 followers, but you can still see them riding the Red Bull go-karts. Some are doing that parachute water skiing thing with the Red Bull logo on their parachute. If their Instagram accounts were of them sitting in a McDonald’s with their bellies hanging over the table, how would other people view them and their brand? Probably not favorably.

Building Trust and Building a Reputation

Of all the communication and branding methods used by CEOs on Instagram, this has to be the only one that works almost every time. You take photos of yourself and your success. You do the Andrew Tate thing of taking photos of yourself with your supercar that has your name stitched into the seats. You show your name on the building like Trump used to in the business magazines. You show yourself on the factory floor, on the private jet, and laughing with the workers. If you are in the public eye, you can also take photos of yourself with celebrities and other important businesspersons.

Why “Almost” every time? Well, because there is a subset of CEOs out there who get it intensely wrong. You see them on Instagram doing the hand-hover over a woman’s shoulder when taking a photo. It is okay for Keanu Reeves to do it because the world is stuffed with nutcases who want to exploit him, but when CEOs do it, it just looks weird. The people in the photo need to look as if they feel comfortable. If they are not happy being touched during a photograph, then do something else with your hands and arms, don’t put them around the woman but hover your hand because it looks weird.

There are also those CEOs who simply take a bad photo. They look straight at the camera so they look creepy, or they ruffle their eyebrows, they squint, or they smile too wide. Sometimes, these reputation-building photos fail because the CEO hasn’t learned how to be photogenic.

After posting suitable content, go to an online marketplace like Shoutcart and buy a little attention. Pay a few influencers in your industry to throw and little attention your way. Not only does this convince Instagram’s systems to promote you a little more, but it also adds a little weight to your account. It helps you rank up the search engine results, and it attracts likes to your posts, which will make them seem more authentic.