Animal photos are undoubtedly as popular on Instagram as food, fashion, sports, and travel. Pet accounts have thousands and hundreds of thousands of subscribers now. Millions of people flip through their feeds in search of videos and photos of cute animals to satisfy their cute stuff curiosity.

Therefore, if you are a lucky owner of a furry pet and want to share moments of life with your four-legged friend with the world, our tips are for you.

1. Tell a story

Introduce a story of your pet to your guests and future subscribers. How did you get the animal, was it taken from a shelter, or is it a rare breed. Maybe your pet has an interesting fate or there are some features, unusual abilities, oddities of character. What makes it different from others? Tell about it in one sentence, because this is exactly what fits in the Instagram profile header. Learn storytelling as an essential tool for engaging your audience. This skill will come in handy for witty post signatures.

2. Post photos of good quality only

If you have already created an account and shared the story of your pet, it is time to fill your page with photos. Now on Instagram, the era of quality content has arrived. People like clean beautiful vibrant feeds, so we strongly recommend honestly evaluating the quality of your photos so that only the very best get into the feed. Photos should be original, clean, aesthetically pleasing. Try to take photos in natural light, look for a beautiful background, not overloaded with unnecessary details, use special programs for processing photos before placing them, the best of free: Snapseed, VSCO, PicsArt. Try to take horizontal photos mostly (this applies to both photos and videos).

3. Keep one style

A feed styled in the same style is another important tool for achieving popularity. Try different filters, principles for placing/alternating photos. Be inspired by other accounts of your subject, but do not try to repeat them exactly. The same style may not suit everyone. We advise you to think about the nature of your pet, evaluate its color and other external features to determine the brightness, color palette, heat balance, etc. that suits you for settings when processing photos. Perhaps this will take you a lot of time, but this is a necessary condition for creating a truly high-quality account, with a large number of subscribers.

4. Use appropriate hashtags

Using the right tags will allow your posts to become more popular, as in this case, more users will see them, which is especially important if your account is still very young and has few subscribers. Do your research. Which tags are most relevant to your pet? This will help you to attract a new audience and get into the already existing community. Use both very popular tags, such as #photo cats, and tags with a narrower audience. Try to come up with your tags with which you will sign each photo, making it easy to find you. But be careful! Overloading the post with tags is also not worth it, the Instagram robot does not like this. 

5. Keep in touch with your audience

To maintain a constant high level of involvement, you need to do posts at least once a day, and preferably two in the morning and evening. The best time to post photos you will need to find out on your own. Usually, this is morning and early evening. Do not forget to like and comment on the posts of your subscribers and those whom you follow. Instagram is a social network, therefore, to be popular in it, you just need to be socially active. Keep track of spelling and punctuation, be polite and friendly.

6. Get inspired and dream

No matter how cute, touching and funny your pet is, the same pose in the same location or very similar shots quickly becomes boring. Take a look around. Maybe your usual walking route comes across interesting places beautiful walls, cozy courtyards or a "dog-friendly" cafe, where you can take photos that have not yet entered your photostream. Or maybe your furry friend can skate or love to dress up? This can also be an occasion for beautiful shots.

Gather props that will look good on the photo and create a separate board on Pinterest, where you will attach ideas that inspire you to be creative.

7. Get it planned

Watching your pet, taking photographs and processing, as well as keeping in touch with your audience, can take a lot of time. Also, you are unlikely to want to give up your usual routine for an extra hour on Instagram. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you install a special scheduler application on your phone that will allow you to download and sign several photos once to guarantee you regular posts with the right frequency without your participation.

8. Enjoy the process!

The biggest advantage of your decision to keep an account with your pet is the fact that you will spend more time together! To catch interesting moments, emotions and manifestations of the animal, you will need to watch it more from afar or to engage it more often in the game, and this will invariably bring joy to both of you. Just remember to always keep your camera ready.

About the author: Melisa Marzett is a traveler, a freelance writer, a photographer, and an animal rights activist. Currently working for http://essay-editor.net, she enjoys doing what she loves best of all and having a brilliant opportunity to see the world, find out something new and keep track of events.