Tips For Using Stock Photos On Instagram | Business Edition

Most businesses nowadays are connecting with their customers online through Instagram. Connecting with the customers through social media helps to improve the relationship between the two parties. This in turn helps the company to build a better branding. Instagram allows users to share images and videos as posts to visually capture the attention of their audience.

In fact, it is advised to post at least 1-3 times a day, to help improve the engagement as well as the reach. Though, it is hard to produce good quality images for your feed every single day. This is where stock photos come into the picture, saving time with good quality images at your fingertips.

 

Tips For Using Stock Photos On Instagram

1. Ensure Consistency Of The Feed

When implementing stock photos into your feed, it is important to make sure that it matches the aesthetic that you have been and would like to continue putting forward. This creates an attractive feed, that would then be able to portray the focus of the business itself. Don’t choose images that do not match the content that you have been providing, as it would be very obvious when scrolling through the Instagram profile. It is always best to maintain consistency, as it helps carry the brand of the company.

For instance, this could be an Instagram feed of an account about Taxi Travels, and you really can’t tell which exactly is the curated stock photo.

 

2. Have a Healthy Mix of Curated Content with Self-Made Content

Just because stock photo websites like Stockunlimited make it convenient to curate content, you should not take the easy way out and do it for every post. Do not post only stock photos to your account, remember what exactly you are selling! The vast market of stock photos can accidentally make you lose your focus, but remember your main priority.

If you are selling makeup brushes, you need to ensure that a picture of your products appear at least once between the stock photos you are using. If you continue posting images without your products, your audience will slowly start to forget what exactly you are trying to sell.

 

3. Be Smart About What You Curate

Okay, you’ve got lots of stock photos at the click of a mouse. But, which is the right one to incorporate into your Instagram feed? So many nice images to choose from, but you should choose the right one that would blend in well. A smart way to go about this is to choose those that feature brand colors, in which would then help tie back to the overall branding.

Here’s a good example of how to curate photos with yellow in them, as the logo is of the brand(middle) is dominantly yellow. Although, it definitely isn’t advisable for a photography business to curate stock images for their feed, we can see how the color yellow helps unite the feed together.

 

4. Make The Image Your Own 

If you like using stock images, but find that they don’t exactly meet your requirements, you can always be inventive. Editing images are made easy with all sorts of software. We recommend Pixlr as it has both web and app for convenience. Layering filters, adjusting image contrasts, framing, inserting typography and so much more can be done when editing the stock image. Here’s an image for a travel account;

Click to see the image

Adjusted contrast with added filter, and voila!

Click to see the image.

 

5. Plan in Advance

This is probably the most important thing that you should keep in mind. Using Instagram for business is great, but if not planned properly, the brand will be affected. Jot down, or type out what is scheduled for each day, and you will know when you require stock photos as ‘fillers’. Instead of searching through thousands of photos last minute, you would be able to post on time. You can also ensure that your branding is upheld through your feed.

Here’s an example, you run an architecture company, but you’ve been too busy to take photos for your Instagram account. Searching on Stockunlimited provides you a huge variety of images to use.

The catch? Not all images are suited to your branding, which is modern and minimalism themed. This is why you need to go through them and select those that you need, in advance. Our pro tip would be to save as many as you can when you have the time. That way you would have backup when needed.


Using stock photos can be very beneficial to any Instagram account, especially business based ones. As long as you follow these 5 tips, you’ll be set, and watch your account flourish!

Check out more stock photos on Stockunlimited

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