Level up your Instagram with feed patterns

Have you ever been scrolling through Instagram, jumped on someone's feed and immediately fallen in love? Does their content keep you trapped on their profile, encourage you to keep scrolling, and tickle something in your brain?

It's highly likely that these profiles are using some kind of pattern in their feed strategy.

Not only are patterns visually appealing, they help you to plan out content because you know what's coming, what you need to create and keep things organised.

Here are some examples of feed patterns:

Center focus:

This pattern works well to draw your attention to something specific in the midst of a range of other photos. It's particularly effective when your other photos aren't always related to each other. Think about services or venues where their photos aren't always unified because they're different people's events.

Rows

This pattern can repeat in as many rows as you like, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. You can pick a pattern that works for you but it's not always easy to replicate. Think about travel bloggers - they could use each location in a set of three, so each row acts like a mini album but you have to have enough content to group together and cycle through.

Diagonal repeater

This pattern drags the eye on a diagonal. Again, you can repeat the set of images by 3, 4 or 5 themes, whatever is easiest to cycle through.

It can be a little harder to follow this pattern and does require dedication.

Centre column This pattern draws your eye specifically to the centre column. Use that as your main real estate to advertise services or educational posts. The two outer columns support the middle. You could use the 3 tiles to tell a story, or run them independently to each other.

Checkerboard

One of the most popular patterns, this pattern is very obvious and stands out. You can match it like this, or you could do it more subtly.

Now that you know what a feed pattern looks like, you will be able to spot them more easily. There are many more than these, but they are the main ones.

You can also mix and match some of these patterns together. For example, you could deliberately want to put important graphics like educational converting content with services in the middle every so often like the centre focus, but you might want to play with the checkboard.

It's easy to see how feed patterns help you to plan out content. If you have a style you like, you know what content you need to film/ design for the weeks coming.

Like everything with social media, it boils down to experimenting and finding what works for you, your brand or your client.