Instagram has become a vibrant online community for wildlife photographers to showcase their work, find inspiration, and connect with like-minded photo enthusiasts from around the world.
With hundreds of millions of users sharing visual stories each day on the popular platform, it offers a large audience reach for naturalists looking to promote wildlife conservation and environmental issues.
Beyond simply posting and sharing photographs, savvy wildlife photographers are leveraging Instagram’s engagement tools and growing their following to strengthen their personal brands, guide professional workshops, and bring awareness to important species or threatened habitats.
In this blog post, we will explore different strategies for using Instagram effectively as a nature photographer, including best practices for content creation, community building, and promotional opportunities the platform provides. These are the methods that helped us grow our Instagram from 0 to 2,200 in about a year of consistent posting.
Setting Up Your Profile
Choosing A Username
The first step in setting up your wildlife photography Instagram is choosing a relevant and easy-to-remember username. Aim to include keywords related to your location, photo subjects, or brand. If you can’t think of anything, your own name works great! Check that your chosen name is available before completing your profile setup.
Customizing Your Profile
Take the time to add a compelling bio that introduces yourself and what people can expect to find on your feed. Using the obvious, like “wildlife photographer”, “landscape photographer” or “nature photographer” is perfect to let people know what you’re all about in a glance. Upload a high-quality profile picture that best represents your aesthetic and subject matter. If you have a website, make sure to link it to let people know where they can find more of your work.
Get Your Grid Started
Curate your initial grid for visual cohesion. Post 3-9 high-quality photos that show off your range and style. This gives any visitors a good starting point and helps them decide if they should follow you or not. Consistency in sizing, orientation and editing will result in a professional appearance that attracts new followers. A well-formatted profile sets the stage for growth and success on Instagram.
Follow Other Photographers
Don’t be shy to follow other photographers that you admire, and to comment on their posts. Engaging with other similar accounts helps Instagram to understand what your account is about, and may recommend you to their followers as well.
Try to engage daily with posts from accounts you follow. Some of these photographers may follow you back in return. It’s a good strategy to start by following and interacting with a small number of accounts and then increase over time. You don’t want to follow too many people at once as this can start to look spammy.
Adding Content
Hash Tagging
Hashtags are one of the main ways that new followers will find your profile. We recommend doing a little keyword research up front so that you have a big list of potential hashtags to pull from each time you make a post.
There are lots of different opinions about how many hash tags you should use on each post, but as you can see from our Instagram account, we just add as many as we can! It is probably a good idea to rotate different keywords and not use the same copy and pasted ones every time.
Types of hashtags to consider:
- Location tags (ex. #banffnationalpark, #canmorealberta)
- Magazines or organizations that could potentially re-post and feature your work (ex. #canadiangeographic)
- Subject-related tags (ex. #bears, #wolves)
Having a good mix of general hash tags (ex. #wolf) as well as more specific hash tags (ex. #timberwolf, #greywolf, #wolvesonly) will help get more eyes on your work, and potentially new followers.
Carousels or Single Posts?
On Instagram, a carousel is a collection of two or more images in one post. We haven’t really used carousels much, but we’ve seen other photographers have a lot of success with it. One strategy that gets a lot of comments and engagement is to ask which frame your viewers liked the best. Action sequences work well as carousels – for example several shots of a bird landing or an animal running, grooming itself, etc.
Videos
While videos aren’t necessary to grow on Instagram (we don’t use them), it’s no secret that Instagram prioritizes video content over photos.
If you’re willing to consistently post reels, you’ll probably gain more followers a lot faster than we did! Reels also have much more potential of going viral than regular posts do.
If you’re filming reels on a photography camera, make sure to turn your camera sideways to get vertical video content. You can also simply use your phone to film reels while you’re doing regular photography.
Posting Frequency
Without a doubt, the more often you post on Instagram, the faster your account will grow. For the first year, Steve made sure to post a new photo once a day. Since he stopped posting every single day, we’ve definitely noticed that we don’t get as many new followers.
You could even post multiple photos each day. If you do that, try to spread them out over several hours so as not to annoy your audience.
Often times it’s better to post consistently – and keep your account active – than to dump 20 photos at a time and then not post for a month.
With that said, it’s understandable that with nature photography, it takes quite a lot of time to go out and get new photos. Don’t be afraid to re-post the same photos again after several months so that your newer followers can see them too. Instagram doesn’t really penalize re-posting old content the way that, say, Pinterest does.
Taking Advantage of Stories
Stories are a great place for behind the scenes content, if you have videos of yourself out in the wild! You can also speak directly to your followers here.
Even if you don’t plan to do behind the scenes, sharing your posts to your stories as well can greatly expand your reach. At the moment, many Instagrammers are more likely to watch your stories than they are to scroll down their feeds.
Maximizing Engagement with Captions
Great captions tell the story and context behind the photo. Add details about the location, date, camera settings, wildlife behaviors observed and anything else that you think could make your post more compelling. Asking questions to spark conversations can help increase the comments you get on your posts.
Gaining followers
Growing your following organically through engagement and quality content is the best way to develop loyal wildlife photography fans on Instagram over time. Posting consistently while also interacting with others in your niche will help expand your reach.
You can consider cross-posting your existing photos to Facebook and Pinterest as well to leverage a broader network there. Pinterest is a surprisingly good way to build more Instagram followers if you link your Instagram account from there!
Have fun out there!
We hope these tips helped you get started and grow on Instagram. If you follow @mountainsandtreausures on Instagram, we will most likely follow you back. See you there!
