Instagram Collab Posts to Share the Love

This week’s tip is about a feature you should def be utilizing on your grid: Instagram Collaborations.

If you’re not yet hip to this feature, it’s pretty easy to do - I would say the hardest part can be getting the other party to accept if you haven’t discussed that with them. Some companies can be “weird” about disclosing where they source their goods from, whereas other companies use it as a selling point.

I want to add a side note here: part of my strategy for DLH’s marketing has been to help showcase why we are the bomb - so that smaller or less known, newer brands can help advance their credibility by advertising that their gear is made by us.

Then when curious peeps go to check us out, (hopefully) come to the conclusion that we’re legit - it can help them feel even better about their purchase.

Okay back to the tutorial -

You’re probably familiar with how to “tag” people on instagram when composing your post - to “collaborate” with an account it’s on the same page, but there’s an “invite collaborators” button below your image or reel where you’ll select the account(s).

If the other account accepts your collaboration request, the post will then be broad cast to their own follower list as if they had posted it themselves.

This is an IG hack that works great to spread your IG presence. If the post is intriguing enough that viewers go check out your page, and like what they see - it’ll add some more followers to your community who may be interested in working with you OR at least, be able to send folks your way if they meet someone who needs some screen printing done.

As I mentioned earlier - sometimes these efforts fall flat if the other account holder doesn’t feel like accepting your collab request…I have had a few taunt me myself, and there’s not really an easy way to be like “hey…will you accept my collab request”..So I’ve let those go.

One tactic you can use is to hype up any content you may know you’ll be posting to the company contact you have, and say in your own way how you’d LOVE to do a collab post on IG to help promote their brand / business to your audience. If they’re savvy, they’ll know this is half true - the unsaid part is that it will also be doing you a favor, too 😉 So be as transparent about it as you’d like. By hopefully capturing their consent & informing them of the plan, you can possibly get them to accept the request on their end when they might have pretended to ignore it.

Or, if you know their account is a lot more poppin’ than yours, and they have the means to post some snazzy model shots, etc - they might not even throw a collab request your way. These are the times I wish I would have brought it up beforehand! In those cases, you can tie in some language after finalizing the order to them, or especially when they pick up / receive their order. Something like - “we loved working on this with you! If you happen to post anything fun using this merch, don’t forget to add our account as a collaborator on the post so we can help share the love!” You get it. 😎

You can collab with multiple accounts - up to 5 (omg) on a single post. So now that you’ve got some ideas…have fun!