Best Instagram Practices: Converse

Converse Instagram page on 9/29/22

Converse shoes have been around for decades; we wear them, our parents wore them, and our grandparents wore them. Their basic canvas shoe style will always be the heart and soul of this brand, but today they are remixing that basic style and adding things like platforms to keep up with the ever-changing style. To help keep up with this style and share their new shoe creations, Converse can utilize some of these best practices on Instagram.

Brand Voice

One of the most important aspects of social media is creating your brand’s voice which is your online personality. Before diving into consistent posting you must decide how you want to be perceived online, and once you determine this voice you will stick with it. We can see that Converse has created its brand voice around inspiring people to embrace their inner creativity through fashion. They accomplish this by partnering with upcoming artists and showing how they express themselves in their Converse.

Shah Frank collaboration post, Converse Instagram page

Posts and Engagement

Photos posted to Instagram should always be high-quality and engaging whether that be a regular post or a story post. Instagram itself is a completely visual platform and people are known to focus on pleasing visuals, to ensure that you get people’s attention with your posts is to make sure they are high-quality images. Low-quality images are not a great idea for Instagram content. Making posts engaging can be done by making them pleasing to look at with vibrant colors or adding a link to the post.

Converse Instagram page

Converse Instagram page SKATE highlight

These two images show the importance of quality and engagement. The first photo shows how the vibrant color is important, it makes the shoes stand out to the viewer. The second photo shows a successful way to use a link to create engagement. This story highlight introduces the CTAS PRO shoes and gives the viewer a link to shop them so if a viewer finds something they like there is no need to search for a link.

Captions and Hashtags

On Instagram your character limit in a caption is 2,200, it is not recommended you reach that limit. Captions should ideally be 138–150 characters; this is including hashtags. The captions you put on photos should briefly explain what the photo is, and your photo should do most of the talking. If there is a collaboration post you should introduce that in the caption, but let the images of the collaboration posted do the main talking.

Using hashtags on Instagram is a great way to increase your brand visibility. It is a great practice for small businesses to get into the habit of because Instagram will show users posts based on what hashtags are used and their interests. Instagram has a limit of 30 hashtags, but best practices are to use 3-5 hashtags. Another great way to use hashtags is to create a specific hashtag for your brand that customers can use in their posts. An example for Converse would be #converse and #chucktaylor.

Converse Instagram page

In this photo we see that the caption introduces the collaboration, it is kept short and sweet while the photo does the talking. This photo follows the examples mentioned above, it is high quality with vibrant colors that draw people in. Something that is not shown in this photo is hashtags. Converse has 10 million followers on Instagram and is an extremely well-known brand. Using hashtags could still benefit the brand, but they are still successful without incorporating them. Converse will create hashtags for specific campaigns to help boost it which is another great way to use hashtags. We see an example in the photo below. Converse used #ConversePride to boost their 2023 pride collection.

Converse Instagram page

Working With Influencers

Within the social media world, there are many influencers with a dedicated following. Partnering with these influencers can help your brand reach many new customers. The above photo is an example of how Converse worked with an influencer with relevant content. Sean Pablo, @_streethassle on Instagram, is a skateboarder and the shoes created with Converse were skate shoes. Through this collaboration, it can be inferred that Pablo’s dedicated following will choose to purchase these new shoes from Converse.

Conclusion

Converse is a brand that has been successful in the shoe industry for decades. Their presence on social media is something they have been able to use to help keep up with the ever-changing fashion world and to continue to bring the creative side out of their customers by working with other artists or influencers to create one-of-a-kind shoes.

References:

York, A. (2017, April 24). 5 Social Media Best Practices Every Marketer Must Follow. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-best-practices/

Hart, H. 6 Benefits of Partnering with Social Media Influencers. 99 Dollar Social. https://www.99dollarsocial.com/6-benefits-of-partnering-with-social-media-influencers/

West, C.(2023, July 25). Instagram Hashtags: How to Find and Use the Best Hashtags. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-hashtags/#how-to-use.