Create engaging content on Instagram using posts, Stories, and Reels directly from your mobile device. This article walks through uploading media, customizing it with filters, music, and text, and adjusting privacy settings before publishing.
Key Insights
- Instagram offers three main content formats, posts, Stories, and Reels, which can be selected by tapping the plus icon on the app's home screen.
- Users can enhance their posts with multiple features, including photo carousels, filters, text overlays, and music from a curated, copyright-cleared library categorized by genres such as hip-hop and EDM.
- GSUSA’s digital marketing training includes step-by-step instruction on how to edit images using Instagram’s built-in tools like brightness, contrast, saturation, vignette, and more to create polished visual content.
This lesson is a preview from our Digital Marketing Certificate Online (includes software). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
Hello and welcome back to section three of the Instagram Bootcamp. Let us discuss how to create content. You can createcontent in the form of a post that shows up in your followers' feed.
You can also create stories and create reels. So to help us through this, let me share my Instagram mobile app screen and discuss how this is done. So to create content, you click on the plus sign here in the upper left of your screen.
And here you see all of the recent photos, etc., that I have on my device. And I have the option, well, first on the bottom here, I can pick what type of content I want to create, post, story, or reel.
We'll go with a post first. Now I can either select a post or an image for a post. I'm going to use a little Shiba Inu, Michi.
I can do additional images, such as in a carousel, by pressing the multiple photo image. So if I wanted to add myself to the mix, I could do so. But let's just go with one, all right.
Now, once, if I had instead chosen to take a photo, as opposed to picking a photo from my library, I could just click on this camera here, and then it'll switch over to take it from there, right? If I click on the camera here, it will take me to my camera, right? But to get back to the images, just click this right here, and I'm back to the images.
So what I want to do is take the next step and begin to edit this image. Press next. Now I have options, right?
Along the bottom, it says I could add music. There's a whole library of music you can pick from. Any of this music, the rights have been cleared.
I can pick based on what they've curated, what's trending, and trending audio. I could upload the original audio, right? That, again, all this has been copyrighted, uncleared.
If I have saved any audio, I can also pick to save, and I can search genres, right? If I wanted to search for hip-hop, right, I would go here, and I'll get all the hip-hop, EDM, right, and I would get that, right. So I can pick music to accompany the photo, or I could add text, right, right along the bottom here, add text.
So if I wanted to, I should go in there. I can move the text around, right. I can do an overlay by adding an additional photo to it.
I can filter it, right? Any of these along the bottom makes it warmer, looks kind of cool, or cooler, right? Let's go with warm to show his reddish Shiba Inu fur, right.
Done, and I can edit it, such as adjusting it like that, right? You know, play with the tone of it, right? Deluxe, the brightness, brighter or less brighter or darker, the contrast, among the many, you know, options you have, and among other things, so structure, warm, saturation, color, fade, highlight, shadows, vignette, tilt shift, and sharpen.
So all things that you could potentially do, and then when you're finished with that, you can click next, and at this point, you will determine that you can add a caption to it, right, whatever, and determine who gets to see this post, everyone or close friends, right. On a personal post, you might use that, but for a brand post, you generally want everyone to see, and all you have to do is share, and now that it's shared, right, and we'll discard that.
