The Ultimate Guide on How to Use Instagram for Your Baseball or Softball Brand | Beginner to Pro Coach on Social in Six Innings

Are you looking to grow your baseball or softball brand's Instagram account? 

Of course, you are.

Instagram's platform has become one of the best options for creating and cultivating a personal brand or business that ballplayers and their parents love. 

In fact, of the platform's 1.4 billion users, 1 in 3 follow at least one sports business account. 

Below you'll find an in-depth guide for social-media-overwhelmed coaches or anyone looking to sharpen their Instagram game. 

It starts with setting up your account and profile properly and goes all the way to running effective paid social media and influencer marketing campaigns. 

We'll be going through 6 detailed "innings" to tackle all things need-to-know on Instagram from A-Z.

Of course, we made it the length of a Little League game because that's where so many amazing ballplayer journeys begin. 

#Inning 1: How to Start the Instagram Game

To start growing a coaching business on Instagram, you'll want a few foundational aspects in place. 

We can’t know exactly where you’re at right now with your account, so the following are some if/then scenarios that’ll cover all bases. 

No matter who you are, relevancy and brand image are pretty important to this Instagram game. 

Your account should ideally reflect in every way the brand you are trying to establish by making sure there aren't any irrelevant elements or posts to distract or confuse potential clients or buyers.  

So if you already have a decent following with a personal account filled with content that’s not useful to ballplayers or their parents, or, worse, content that raises red flags about your professionalism or character, you really have two choices to make:

1. Start a completely new public brand account that’s optimized from the start for relevancy and image. And then encourage the followers of your, now private, larger personal account to come follow you on this new entrepreneurial journey. 
2. Purge your personal account of questionable or distracting content that wouldn’t make sense to new players or parents landing on your Instagram profile.
   
   Also, prune who you follow to better reflect the brands and individuals you want associated with your new baseball or softball brand to both potential followers and to the Instagram algorithm. 
   
   And, if it makes sense in your case, you can even create a dividing line of images, graphics, or videos that separates and punctuates your new entrepreneurial-minded account.
   

Once that bit of housekeeping is out the way, your next step is to get a dedicated Instagram Business or Creator account. 

If profits fit somewhere in your current or future goals, then this step is paramount. We even have a whole article explaining why coaches should switch to an Instagram business account.

If you don't have an Instagram account to begin with, you'll have to go through the signing up process, then come back and continue reading this for the transitioning steps from personal to Business or Creator accounts. 

On the other hand, if you currently own a personal account that accurately represents the image your audience will love without the need for strategic pruning, you can transition it directly into a Business or Creator Account in seconds. 

This choice makes the most sense for those who are creating a personal brand, where they themselves are the main product or service.

The transitioning steps are:

• From your Instagram app, tap on the profile icon
• On the top right corner of the page, tap on the three line icon 
  
• Once tapped on, on the right down corner you will click on Settings
  
• In the list of selectable items click on Account
  
• Switch to Professional Account will be in blue, on the bottom of the page, tap on it
  
• You will then be prompted to select whether your account will be Business or Creator
  
• Then to pick your industry
  

You will now have finished creating your coaching business account, so you can now move on to the next step – optimizing it.

#Your @ handle and your name

The Search and Explore sections of Instagram are the two places where others can look you up by name.

So, your profile starts with your searchable @ handle.

Make sure that your @ handle is the same one you're using or very close to the one you'll be using for all of your various social media accounts – Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.. 

All bio choices, from your @ handle to your name, must be informed firstly by what type of brand you’re building.  

A more traditional business brand, one without a single, personal face and a collective, instead of individual, voice is usually used for operations with multiple employees working towards the common goal of selling products and or services. 

A personal brand, on the other hand, which is much more common in baseball or softball, uses the creator’s given name and background in the game to sell products or services. 

Whether you use your emerging brand's name or your own first, last, full, or nickname, keep in mind that using a relevant keyword from your niche will increase your likelihood of being found when searched for on the Instagram app.

Don’t miss our in-depth guide with advanced tips and tricks for picking the perfect username for your baseball or softball account. 

Here’s an example of an account that uses the founder’s name, “JD,” along with the searchable keywords “Baseball Training”:

#Category

The category section is detailed right under your name and will instantly tell your profile visitors what you generally do.

“Coach,” “Personal Coach,” or “Sports & Fitness Instruction” are possible category options for you to consider if your passion and source of income center around educating baseball or softball players or their parents. 

Whatever you do, choose a category that’s relevant to exactly what you're trying to do on the platform. 

Instagram’s algorithm uses your category selection, along with all keywords you use in your name and bio fields to figure out who might be best to show your posts and content to. 

So any mismatch between your brand’s goals and the bio category or keywords you use risks limiting your reach and potential growth.  

Below are three different category choices made by popular accounts in our industry – “Coach,” “Product/service,” and “Sports.”

#Website

Website is the only field that lets you insert a clickable link on Instagram. 

It's a golden opportunity to call your followers to take actions that'll help your baseball or softball brand grow in trust, revenue, or both. 

In this website field, you might include a link to your website if you have one, a sales page for your instructional services, other social media accounts you're trying to grow, or the latest promotional content you'd like to lead interested account visitors towards. 

Many baseball and softball pros and instructors who offer their online or in-person lessons on our platform will include the link to their professional SeamsUp profile in this Instagram section.

Wanna grow your baseball or softball coaching brand?

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This link and your fully sales-optimized SeamsUp profile inspire parents or ballplayers interested in your expertise and services to take the next logical step in their journey with you and purchase one-on-one instruction. 

This allows you to convert fans on your social into engaged and recurring paid clients in a single step. 

And because all scheduling and client communication is automated on SeamsUp, after this single step, you can just show up to lessons on or offline and focus on teaching the game.   

But your SeamsUp profile may just be one of the many links you want to share and promote to your audience.

If you can't decide which single link to promote, you can get the help of a free online service called Linktree that will enable you to use up to 5 links into one branded custom URL. 

With this service, or the dozens of others just like it, you could, for example, send visitors to your SeamsUp profile, your Shopify merch website, your latest video on YouTube, a guest blog post on launch angle you wrote, and to that new hitting gadget you are offering as an affiliate seller.

#Bio

Your Instagram Bio displays to viewers who you are, what services and values you have to offer, and, most importantly, what makes you unique.

This bio can be the very first impression a potential client or customer has of you and your brand. 

And we all know how important first impressions are.

If you’ve already composed your bio, it’s worth asking if it represents you and your baseball or softball brand in the brightest light possible?

A great Instagram bio highlights your brand identity and purpose, and compels viewers to dig deeper – whether that be scrolling down your page, engaging with your posts, following your account, or clicking that link in your bio. 

This facet of your account is so important, in fact, that we penned the ultimate guide to the Instagram bio for baseball and softball brands that’s packed full of different strategies and real-world examples from your colleagues in the industry.

#Contact information

Contact details give your audience a way to reach you directly.

Examples for this field include a business email address, a business phone number – Instagram will ask if you prefer to be contacted through phone call or text message – or a physical training location address. 

This step is kind of a no-brainer for local baseball and softball coaches who offer in-person private or group lessons. 

You want to be as reachable as possible for potential clients. 

But some higher profile coaches, like former MLB players and select college coaches, may be understandably hesitant to give out their personal information in this optional bio creation step on Instagram.  

And this is where an outside platform that allows such coaches to still work with their fans and monetize their expertise in the game without sacrificing their privacy and personal information really shines. 

Such concerns partly led to the rise of shout-out apps for celebrities, like Cameo, and sports instruction apps for professional athletes and coaches, like ours, in recent years. 

#Profile picture

Your profile picture, along with your username, are the things that will set you most apart from others when interacting on Instagram.

Choosing one that reflects your brand's image is crucial for creating a good first impression.

If you have a logo and are planning on using that, make sure that it still remains clearly visible when Instagram crops it into their standard 110 x 110 pixels. 

If you don’t have a brand logo yet and don’t have a graphic design or branding background – as is the case for most baseball and softball coaches – sites like 99Designs, Fiverr, or UpWork give you access to talented freelance logo designers for very affordable rates. 

If you plan to focus on selling the hot new baseball or softball training tool or clothing merchandise, then a logo and accompanying brand book is worth considering. 

But for personal brand coaches interested in selling their expertise or influence as services, it’s highly recommended to just use a headshot image of yourself instead.

The profile picture you choose will serve as the initial non-verbal introduction for your future customers. 

And the hype around first impressions is backed by actual science, so don’t take this step lightly. 

If you have a high image quality headshot taken with professional lighting – maybe from your playing days – then use it here. 

But an image taken with plenty of natural light and a smartphone will also work great.  

A final small tip for such headshots is to carefully choose the background you'll be standing in front of. 

The aim is for it to make you stand out while also matching your profile's content and brand themes.

If you want to change the background color or design for your image, make a Canva account and use their one-tap background remover feature before simply selecting the new color or image you want behind you.

We promise that there’s no sponsorship or affiliate deal between us and Canva – we just know that solo-entrepreneur baseball and softball coaches can get a ton of value from their easy-to-use design product, so you’ll hear the name a few times in this guide.  

#Inning 2: Goal Setting on Instagram for Your Baseball or Softball Brand

Before going further into Instagram business strategies and tactics, you must first establish your target goals and action plans. 

You should ideally set goals that are just slightly out of reach, to keep momentum going, and always strive for more. 

But it’s also important to know the why, what, where, who, and how much of your actions on Instagram.

To avoid working hard but not really knowing what you're expending energy on, employ SMART goal formatting to guide you and your ambition. 

#Specific

Your goals must be clear and precise. 

This will help you in all the decisions you'll be making in the future, and in not accidentally straying from the path you've decided to follow. 

You actually don't want to say, "My goal is to grow my presence on Instagram for my softball brand."

You can and should do way better. 

Clarifying what the goal is, why you want to attain that specific goal, who will be collaborating with you or who your target audience is, where it will be located (eg. remote lesson services or in-person locations), and how much resources you have to invest in the endeavor are all necessary for the growth process to run hiccup-free. 

#Measurable

For Instagram growth, this might mean specific date or deadline, a set amount of followers, or even designated engagement levels. 

But it has to be something you can quantify. 

The saying, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” very much applies here. 

You'll need this quantifiable information that can be compared to previous results. Growth is a process of continued learnings and iterations. 

This data will help you see where your actions might be lacking and where you can do things better to improve. 

Also, seeing tangible successes serves as great motivation to keep grinding. 

Don’t miss our comprehensive guide on exactly how to use Instagram analytics to grow your baseball or softball account.

#Achievable

Can the goal be attained? 

Make sure your set goals are more or less reasonable for what assets and abilities you have right now. 

When you are just starting off with either goal-setting or building your Instagram, knowing what types of goals are achievable is honestly very challenging. 

However, once you have a chance to look at your Instagram analytics and see your baseline follower growth or post engagement, you can go about setting your first goals for improvement. 

After setting and hopefully attaining a few smaller goals, you’ll have a better handle on what’s possible moving forward.

#Relevant

Is it the right time? 

Is that thing, whatever it is, that you want to do beneficial for your business right now? 

Every new goal must go hand in hand with all of your other goals. Inconsistency will only result in a waste of your valuable time. 

Both entrepreneurs and marketers tend to get excited about the next big, shiny automation software, AI, or hacks that purport to make our lives easier and our businesses grow faster. 

But, relevancy is all about focusing one’s limited resources – time, energy, and, of course, money – into a comprehensive strategy that will actually move the needle forward on your success. 

#Time-sensitive

Set a deadline. 

To keep yourself accountable, focused, and not losing sight of your primary long-term goal, you must make a timeline for each smaller goal you set. And then stick to it like pine tar to the front of a helmet.

#Inning 3: Instagram Content Quality and Editing for Baseball or Softball

After laying the groundwork, you can start to think about your account's visual aspects and the overall theme of your Instagram profile. 

The keyword to focus on here and throughout this whole guide is: consistency.

You want your uploads to have a distinguishable appearance with a consistent color scheme, personalized editing style, and maybe even applying identical or similar filters across all your videos and images.

We should also address the quality of the images now. 

For promoting your services and your social presence, it's important to have professional-looking images to showcase. 

But who says you need a fancy camera or professional equipment to take amazing photos? 

These things do help, of course, but when you’re just starting out, they may be an unnecessary expense – not to mention that they come with a bit of a learning curve to use effectively.  

Besides, with these simple tips and tricks below, you'll be uploading crispy clean, attractive images with just your phone in no time.

#Grid lines

When this function is enabled on your device, usually a phone or tablet, you will see two vertical lines and two horizontal lines on your screen when taking your photos and videos. 

Composition is what will set your images apart from the average random Instagram post. 

The easiest way to achieve balanced shots is to use the grid line function on your phone or tablet’s camera for positioning focal points for the viewer to fixate on. 

This idea is based on the rule-of-thirds, a technique that revolves around placing your subject points along the grid lines or in the intersections of lines rather than in the middle of your frame. 

#One Main Focus

Great photos and videos tend to have one primary point they want people's attention to be focused on. 

Use the gridlines to place the focal point properly, and because your camera doesn't always focus where it's supposed to, don't forget to tap on your screen to optimize your camera's focus and exposure levels to ensure overall sharpness. 

This is especially the case if you take photos or videos of subjects in motion, such as your lesson client throwing a slider or doing that new hitting drill you came up with off a tee.

#Perspectives

To make your images stand out, don't be afraid to experiment with shooting from different angles. 

Let your knees kiss some field brick dust or batting cage turf in order to take an upward photo, or stand on top of a bucket or bench for downward shots – play around with some unique angles until you find the right one for your subject. 

Unique visual perspectives alone can help set your content apart.

#Flash

Unless you're using your camera's flash during the day where it could help soften up certain dark areas, using flash on your pictures otherwise, for instance, when it's darker, will do you no favors. 

Better to take your shots during the day outside and take advantage of those prime light rays. Sunrise and sunset, in particular, make for the most stunning images. 

However, many batting cages and training facilities are well-lit enough to give you the right amount of light to still get some great shots.

Suppose you’re taking pictures or filming often in poorly lit spaces, as some cages and training facilities are known to be. 

In that case, you might consider purchasing a ring light to make your drill explanations or candid thoughts on the games we love look more professional. 

This purchase example to consider is four useful pieces rolled into one:

1. It’s a tripod.
2. It’s a ring light.
3. It comes with a holder specifically designed to hold any phone or tablet device securely onto a tripod.
4. It comes with a wireless remote control, which allows you to push a single button to start your phone or tablet’s recording. 

The remote control allows you to only begin recording your video once you are ready and in position to film, without having to run over and push record and then run back into position. 

Even a small detail like this makes a massive difference in the video’s professional feel, and it saves you from having to edit out the amateurish opening of each video.

#Image Size

It's best to avoid overly cropped images. 

Instagram standard sizing is 1080px by 1080 pixels, known as a 1:1 aspect ratio. 

You don’t need a strong grasp of what that means to understand that Instagram automatically tries to crop uploaded images into this ratio’s distinctive square shape. 

If you’re capturing video or images with your phone or tablet in landscape mode (tilted sideways), you can still upload the full image to Instagram. 

In case you didn’t know how, you simply go to post the landscape photo or video as usual, but within your camera roll, you tap the zoom out arrows icon at the bottom left of your image before you tap “NEXT” in the upper right corner. 

But studies show such landscape images tend to get worse engagement than portrait (taken with the device upright) or 1:1 square photos and videos on Instagram.  

And with the explosion of Reels in recent years, filming your videos in portrait as much as possible is an obvious choice for baseball and softball coaches looking to grow on Instagram. 

This article goes into much more detail about image size considerations and how they might affect your Instagram growth.

#Clean Lenses

We often don't take this into consideration, but after a while, our mobile devices lenses tend to get blurry due to all the dust and lint they gather. This is especially true for coaches who spend a lot of time on the ball field. 

Make sure to quickly clean your phone or tablet’s camera before almost every use. 

#Creating Graphics

Of course, you’ve spent a lifetime cultivating your skills as a baseball or softball player or coach and not a graphic designer or photo editor. 

But, luckily, we live in a time when simple and intuitive tools exist to take your Instagram posts to the next level in just a few taps. 

Here are also a few editing apps that might come in handy you can use to polish your images or add text and graphics.

Snapseed, with their Photoshop-like, smooth easy to use platform. 

VSCO, deemed the best by even photographers with their high-quality filters, particularly suited for outdoorsy types of images. 

And we’ve already mentioned Canva earlier for its amazing background remover feature, but it really can be a baseball or softball coach entrepreneur’s best friend. 

If you’re looking for just one tool to cover any and all editing and design needs, Canva’s the one.  It offers you access to infinite amounts of templates to use to craft custom designs suited to your brand theme.

And an added benefit of using Canva’s paid version is that it gives you access to thousands of copyright-free images. These images are very handy to have when filling out a content calendar. 

You can use text overlays, filters, and frames and more, in order to make those stock photos on brand and on point.

#Sound Quality

If you are recording a video with someone talking, like one of yourself breaking down how to do the step-through hitting drill, for example, you need quality audio. 

Unfortunately, the microphone on your phone or tablet will only (barely) cut it when held very close to your face for selfie-filmed rants and the like.

For filming the knowledge that you’re providing in-person lessons and really any videos where you address the audience from a bit further away than you would for a Facetime call, you’re going to want a microphone set up.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. Usually, a simple lavalier microphone, along with an adapter that makes it work with your phone or tablet, will suffice.

If you plan on doing a lot of drill videos or recording your private lessons as has become popular, then you might consider a wireless lavalier mic. 

This way you don’t have to mess with a wire connecting your mic to your phone – which makes throwing bp or demonstrating technique much easier. 

The Boya upgrade 2.4GHz Wireless Lavalier or Rode Wireless Go System are two wireless lavalier examples that we’ve tried personally and can recommend for your Instagram content or remote lesson toolkit. 

And don’t miss the chance to learn way more about how to upgrade the sound and visual quality of baseball or softball content with our step-by-step guide.

#Inning 4 : Instagram Scheduling, Content Types for Baseball and Softball, and Captions

Now that you have your Instagram account in order and all the best practices and tools you need to up your game, we can finally get into the nitty gritty. 

Let’s hook-hand-slide into the when, what, and how of posting content. 

#When

Once you start acquiring a few followers, you'll want to begin thinking about how often you upload. 

Do you post ten times on the same day? 

Or do you only post once a month because you're too busy with the other aspects of your coaching business?

Unfortunately, both of these extremes aren't very effective.

To make sure your followers don't forget about you, you'll want to stay top of mind by posting engaging content often – but not so often that you overcrowd their feeds and waste tons of your valuable time in the process. 

Whether you're a team coach, former pro, current private instructor, or you check all three boxes – one thing you likely lack is free time. 

In order to consistently build your brand on Instagram and keep up with your many other responsibilities, scheduling apps, also known as content calendar apps, can be a gamechanger. 

These allow you to take one morning or evening in your week and carefully plan out and schedule all of your posts in advance. 

This is the best way to ensure that each post gets published at the hour of the day or night that your audience shows peak engagement, while also fitting your overall strategy and brand theme. 

Unfortunately, as helpful as content scheduling apps can be, they’re worthless if you can’t consistently batch create and organize your various content generation and creation efforts. 

Luckily, for you we put together a guide on how to batch your baseball or softball social media posts like pro and it also covers which scheduling apps work best for coaches.

You still might be wondering, "So how often should I be posting?" 

The unsatisfying answer most experts would give is that it depends on where you and your brand is at the moment. 

If you're just starting out, just try to pick a schedule that is achievable over a consistent period. 

During their Creator Week a couple years ago, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri shared that posting 2 feed posts per week and 2 Stories per day is enough to build a following (this was before Reels had really taken off). 

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

We won't leave you hanging with our “depends” answer though. 

Generally, 2 posts a day is ideal for most coaches who are just starting to grow a brand on Instagram. 

Right now, you’ll mostly want to alternate between posting Reels and less-polished Stories, with only 2-3 purely Feed posts per week. 

If this sounds overwhelming, just remember that re-posts curated from other accounts and user-generated content, which we’ll explore in detail below, definitely count.

But always prioritize quality over quantity – rushing out half-baked ideas and posts just to meet an arbitrary daily quota isn’t doing you or your followers any favors.  

Lastly, as mentioned above, posting times matter quite a bit in terms of brand exposure. 

It'll take a bit of trial and error before you figure out the best times to post and when your followers are online, keeping in mind that they might be in different timezones. 

Posting based on the free time of parents and players in your unique time zone is especially great for coaches offering local in-person lessons or clinics. 

But if you're looking to reach the entire world with your online lessons or product offerings, then we’ve got you covered with the best Instagram posting times below.   

#What

Now that you know when to post, let's focus on what to post. 

To tap into the art of storytelling, you need to use captivating visuals to engage with your followers’ emotions in a way that uniquely represents your brand image. 

Are you sarcastically thinking:

“So, just produce amazing content – you don’t say?”

Of course, this is often the hardest step, and, again, nothing else is possible without content that baseball or softball lovers want to see. 

Below, you’ll find four popular content ideas within our niche to get you started.

We’ll use a couple examples from baseball and softball YouTube, but both coach creators showcased below also post clips of this same content as Reels, Feed, and Story posts on Instagram.   

See why SeamsUp's the #1 app for baseball & softball businesses

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#1. Online How-To Tutorials

These should involve going into depth about a particular topic you have passion and expertise in. 

These are likely the most common and intuitive types of images and videos that baseball and softball coaches tend to produce. 

The great thing about how-to tutorials, is that each of the mega-topics, like pitching, lend themselves to hundreds of sub-topics. 

Some pitching examples are: ideal grips, basic mechanics, advanced mechanical considerations, the mental side, warming-up, cooling-down, band training, weight training for pitchers, mobility exercises for pitchers, bullpenning strategies, trust-building with your catcher, etc. 

Such sub-topics will keep you busy snapping photos, filming, and editing for months to years. 

And, if you’re a pitcher or pitching coach, you hopefully realize that within each of the subtopics listed above, there are even more fine-grain micro-topics.

#2. Swing or Pitch Analysis Videos

These involve you as a coach utilizing an analysis software to watch, voiceover, and telestrate onto the swinging or pitching technique of ballplayers to entertain and educate your audience. 

One of the most common ways to go about this content type is by breaking down the mechanics of popular MLB and collegiate players. 

Of course, you can also do this to showcase the progress of a young ballplayer you work with in-person or remotely. 

This progress-report-type content can be done with a swipeable carousel of before or after or with the compare feature of an app like ours, which lets you have both pieces of video footage compared side-by-side in a single postable video. 

#3. Carousel Posts

When you stumble upon a post that gives you the option to swipe left to see more, with those small gray dots below the post’s picture or video, that's a carousel post. 

They are, in essence, a slide show.

You can upload up to 10 pictures and videos into one post, and such posts are known to perform significantly better on average than regular one image or video uploads within Instagram.

And, the other great news is that for teaching more nuanced baseball or softball concepts or showcasing before-and-after videos of your improving lesson clients, this format is second to none. 

Don’t miss our super in-depth article all about this post type, how to make it, and how baseball or softball coaches can ignite their following with Instagram carousel posts.

#4. Product Reviews

These are a staple of content across all niches – including ours. 

First, you either buy or get sent a new bat, glove, cleats, or training aide. 

Next, simply film yourself using the product or sit down and give a talk about the product and its features – or do both styles in the same video. 

An added benefit of creating product review content is that it opens up the potential for affiliate sales. 

Not sure what that is?

If you want to know everything about affiliate selling, check out our free guide on how to make passive income by affiliate selling baseball and softball tools and gear. 

#How

Once you home in on the general type or types of content that your profile will publish, you’ll need to consider what form this content will take within Instagram. 

Instagram offers many different post options, including regular Feed posts, Reels, going Live, Guides, and Stories. 

Each posting option has its own set of best practices in terms of video duration, aspect ratio sizing, and the types of content that often do well. 

But in this guide, we’ll first cover Stories a bit more, because they are one of the most practical and simple things a baseball or softball entrepreneur can leverage in order to grow their brand.     

#Stories

Instagram Stories became a major driving force for growth on the platform a few years ago.

These 24-hour-only uploads inspire 500 million people to post 1 billion Stories every day.

Another powerful statistic is that Stories created by brands see an 85% completion rate. 

This means that many consumers who come across a brand’s Instagram Story watch the panels to the very end, without skipping to another account’s Story, which is great news for all entrepreneurs. 

Think about what you or your baseball or softball brand has to offer and use that to create interactive Stories. 

Just be sure that your Story choices still reflect your overall marketing goals. 

If you’re looking to use Stories as a means to make sales or boost traffic to your social links, a general tip is to add a call-to-action (CTA) into each Story. 

Obvious examples include putting in a clickable link or a call to “Check Link in Bio.” 

But asking viewers to answer a poll you’ve created, or to ask you questions – both of which the Stories feature makes very easy to set up – are also powerful calls for your audience to perform engaging actions with your content. 

As a Coach, ask yourself what things our community might need to be reminded of?

What are some thoughts, ideas, or off-platform content – like your blog, Youtube channel, or podcast – that you can point Story watchers to?

What are some heated debates within our industry that you can create polls about or ask open-ended questions about?

For example, talk about using internal versus external coaching cues, or your thoughts around launch angle, or linear swings versus rotational versus both, feel versus real, or tackle the pros and cons of travel ball?

Because Stories can be more behind the scenes without the need for much polishing, they also work great for showcasing user-generated content. 

Say your remote pitching lesson sends you a video of herself getting an inning-ended strikeout with the dropball you were working on the week before. 

This footage with a sticker or two and some copy to give viewers context would make a great Story –  especially if it fits your goal of increasing remote pitching lesson clients.   

Another great use of Stories is to showcase your remote or in-person lesson clients in the midst of actually working with you, as pitching coach Stephanie Guerra does below.

Since Stories are often a more light-hearted flexible way of communicating, you can let yourself get creative with emojis, stickers, polls, filter effects, and lesser quality but authentic images.

Stories can either be still photos or videos, but it's worth noting that sports lovers watch twice as much video content than the average user. And most of your clients or customers are nothing if not sports lovers. 

The only issue is that creating custom made Story videos with graphic elements that are a bit more polished up is very time-consuming. 

If you don't have any minutes to spare, which is the case for most coach entrepreneurs, it's unlikely that you'll get yourself to publish them on a daily basis.

To stand out and make your Stories extra engaging with little added effort, consider checking out software like Mojo, Impresso, or, again, Canva. 

These user-friendly apps let you use fully customizable Story templates that will instantly wow your audiences and keep you on brand.

#Reels

One of the newer additions to Instagram’s ever-expanding features list is called Reels. 

Reels allows you to record, edit, and share 3-90 second videos in 9x16 portrait mode, AKA with your phone vertical. 

Reels are often set to music and now even have their own easily discoverable feed within Instagram.

Reels do have some similar features to Instagram Stories, such as text overlay, filters, and the ability to add audio tracks, but there are still some important differences beyond the scope of this guide. 

Reels are a rather obvious clone of the popular short-form video platform – and Instagram direct competitor – known as TikTok. 

TikTok generated “the most downloads for any app ever in a quarter” in Q1 2020, according to Adweek. 

And TikTok’s demographics are shifting all the time. While once dominated by younger Gen-Z users, Millennials now make up a more significant share of TikTok’s user base than ever before. 

This shift makes TikTok more attractive to advertisers, as older demographics equals more spending potential. 

But these facts are important for coaches and entrepreneurs in our space to note because millennials now make up the majority of baseball and softball parents who will purchase your services or products. 

The unoriginality of Reels’ genesis does not mean that they aren’t worth being a part of your Instagram content mix as a baseball and softball coach. 

In fact, we are only mentioning how similar Reels and its capabilities are to TikTok because it’s important to know that entrepreneurs who are quick to adopt new features and trends often win big wherever tech giants compete with each other. 

As a relatively new feature to Instagram, creating and engaging with Reels is still an opportunity to grow your Instagram account noticeably faster than the feed posts and Stories you may already be familiar with.  

If you want to learn the tips, tricks, and advanced tactics to take your Reels to new heights, check out our full guide on how to use Instagram Reels for baseball and softball coaching businesses. 

#How to think about captions & hashtags

Captions can be just as important as the photos and videos you choose. 

Captions influence how your followers react to you. Depending on your brand tone, your caption can evoke a wide range of emotions such as laughter, determination, and even kindness. 

All of them can fuel a potential client or customer's desire to take a trust-building or revenue-generating action. 

What's brand tone? 

It's how you and others describe your brand as being; it's your personality. 

To make your brand recognizable, the way you communicate must remain consistent across all of your social media accounts. 

Writing as you talk is generally a best practice. 

Find patterns in the way you naturally express ideas and if your audience is engaging, lean into these patterns. 

This is especially true for personal brands, where you and your knowledge and skills are the product. 

It's your choice to have a professional, casual, quirky, empathetic, bold, or upbeat brand tone. You should even consider how you use emojis and where you place your hashtags. 

All of these details make up your brand voice. 

For personal brands, you will make your life and livelihood much easier if all these choices are authentic to who you are offline.

If you want some help finding your unique voice, we recommend our free ultimate guide to establishing your baseball or softball brand.

Its insights and exercises take you from beginner to advanced on all things brand. 

Now onto hashtags. 

The success of hashtags on Instagram posts is proven. 

The reason for these numbers is simple – hashtags are designed to help Instagram users find your account. 

Hashtags are categories that posts get filed under. 

When someone searches the hashtag #baseball on Instagram, all the public posts that have used this tag will populate the search results.

By using hashtags, your objective should be ranking as highly as you can in those search results. Hashtags also factor into Instagram’s Explore algorithm. 

Your tags help identify what your content is about, and Instagram will use this information to suggest your content to users who already follow similar accounts. 

But there is so much to understanding and then crafting a professional hashtag strategy.

Luckily, we wrote the ultimate guide to baseball and softball hashtags to break it all down for you once and for all. 

#Inning 5: Reach Larger Audiences and Create Campaigns

You've been doing everything right, but feel like you're stuck in a rut on Instagram, and things aren't really moving forward anymore. 

One remedy: campaigns. 

Campaigns are not only about paid advertisements, like most people probably think. 

A campaign is simply about achieving results for a specific goal you have in mind, and you can definitely do that organically as well.

Below we'll give you a couple of ideas for you to consider implementing.

The lowest hanging fruit, though, if you are present on other social media networks, is to let those followers know about your Instagram presence and get them to check out the content you'll be putting on the platform.

Here's an example of hitting coach Joey Miller following this tactic, albeit by sending his Instagram followers to his YouTube content.

Below we list a few other tactics, strategies, and campaigns that can be run for little to no cost. 

#Don’t ignore your notifications

Social networks are, well, social. 

To establish connections, you will need to put in the extra effort.

So keep the valuable bond you have with your followers by never forgetting to respond genuinely to their various comments, questions, and mentions.

Thanking them for their likes and following, while liking and commenting on their posts, strengthens the relationship you have with your followers.

If you already have some loyal fans, also don’t hesitate to give them personal shout-outs here and there. 

Cold shoulders aren’t a good look on social. 

#Giveaways

Everyone loves giveaways. And they are a fun way to grow any community.

Write down your contest or giveaway with the clear requirements for entering, set a deadline, then use an online generator to pick out a winner, and voilà, engagement.  

As someone who mostly sells their own personal knowledge and skills, you may be perplexed at first as to how you can create such giveaways. 

They seem more obvious for those with hard products, like a hitting gadget or pitching sensor, to execute. 

But, we’re here to tell you that there are, in fact, things for you to offer. 

Prizes don’t have to be expensive nor extravagant. 

A great giveaway idea for your personal coaching brand could be a free in-person lesson. 

Or, since most of your followers won’t be from your hometown, a free online technique analysis or live call lesson is a great way to showcase your expertise and generate meaningful engagement. 

Here’s why we said “meaningful.”

By giving out a free iPad, you’ll get lots of likes and follows, but everyone wants a free iPad. So followers generated from such giveaways are less likely to be a part of your ideal audience.

There are long-term negative consequences to building followers who may not be interested in your baseball or softball lessons or whatever it is that your personal brand is actually selling. 

Unfortunately, many influencers across industries that relied on misaligned giveaway promotions and other quick-win growth tactics to increase their follower count have been forced to learn hard lessons when they tried to finally monetize that audience by selling their own products and services or doing affiliate marketing.   

Instead, always seek to offer contests or giveaways that are meaningfully aligned with your own business goals.  

If you’re just starting out as a private instructor, keep in mind that you set the prices for your remote offerings with online lesson platforms like ours. 

You can make the Analysis Only Lessons free, or almost free, and the 5-minutes total you spend on that lesson has the potential to grow your social media and online following in a more meaningful way than any tip, trick, or growth hack you can imagine. 

One true fan is worth loads more than thousands of half-interested likes.  

Another great way to pull off giveaways is by collaborating with a fellow personally branded coach or company in our industry. 

By combining your followings together, you can simultaneously reach even higher brand awareness levels for both accounts.

#User-Generated Content

User-generated content, abbreviated UGC, is images, photos, messages, or reviews made by people not officially a part of your brand.

Featuring your fans or clients on Instagram can significantly increase your social proof and promote overall brand awareness. 

It can also trigger your followers to feel a greater sense of loyalty toward you.

People view user-generated content as being easier to trust than what brands are self-promoting, which, in turn, affects their final purchasing decisions. 

After getting permission, make sure to always re-share posts about you and your services.

By sharing the experience they had with the services you provide, parents or ballplayers expose your brand to their personal audience, connect you to like-minded people, and boost your credibility to your own audience. 

All of that payoff without spending your hard-earned money on more complex ad marketing is why this tactic is so powerful. 

Here’s an article we’ve penned detailing much more in-depth and advanced tactics and strategies around user-generated content for baseball and softball brands.

#Inning 6: Paid Ads for Baseball and Softball Coaches

Even though your primary focus should be on organic campaigns as a coach solopreneur, it's also useful to at least make yourself aware of paid media buying. 

A successful paid ad campaign informs your customers how you can help them, and it often allows new potential customers to discover you much faster than organic methods.

When setting up your campaigns, it's always a good idea to use the same SMART formula we mentioned in Inning 2 to clarify your brand and revenue goals. 

We’ll cover the basics of paid social media ads, influencer marketing, and then give you an idea on how best to test your paid and organic efforts on Instagram. 

Let’s dive in.

#Instagram Ads

Instagram ads are feed posts, Reels, or Stories that businesses pay to have appear to more users than they would have organically.

They are easily identified as they always have the “Sponsored” label under the brand’s name on the post and feature a call-to-action, such as “Learn More.”

How much do they cost? 

Well, that depends on various factors.

Things such as your targeted audience, ad format, time of day, week, or year, can all influence the average click-through-rate, abbreviated as CTR, cost on a given ad.

Your Facebook Business Account allows you to monitor everything and set how much you are willing to pay per ad set for your daily or overall budget. 

Here’s a quick step-by-step walkthrough for the creation of an Instagram ad campaign:

• Log in to your respective Facebook account (Facebook owns Instagram), and access your Facebook ad manager here.  
• On the Campaign tab, click on create
  
  You will be asked to choose an objective, what goal are you trying to achieve.
  
  Some available options are:
  
  - Brand Awareness = Generally more exposure, and these are usually cheapest
  - Reach = Optimized for more people to many see your ads
  - Traffic = drive people to your website or other links like your SeamsUp profile
  - Engagement = Get more likes, shares, and comments on your ad
  - Videos views = self-explanatory
  - Conversions = drive people to make the decisive action of investing in you, but this also is going to be the most expensive cost per click.
• Choose your objective depending on what your marketing strategy aim is.
  
• You will start creating the ad set
  
• Define the audience you’ll be targeting, where the ad will be seen on (on people’s Instagram Feeds, Reels, or in Stories), and set the budget
  
• Then, add your ad’s visual element and write your headline and caption.
  
• Click Publish, and you are good to go
  
• To track your campaigns, you can go into the Measure & Report Column of your Ad Manager
  

We must confess that the above steps are a significant oversimplification of all the details and considerations that genuinely go into creating successful Facebook and Instagram ads.

#Disclaimers for running ads

A huge caveat here. 

You do not want to just haphazardly start boosting posts without a firm overall ad strategy and optimized funnel in place because you will almost certainly be wasting money. 

Mid-sized traditional business brands without in-house ads specialists usually outsource this task to a hired-gun freelancer or an ad agency. 

For baseball and softball solopreneurs, this option may not be possible at the moment due to how much they typically cost. 

However, you still might have the advantage of time and sweat-equity. 

The skills to film, edit, or graphically design ad creatives – whether you are going for a video, graphics image, or moving animation – can be learned quickly. 

Today, technology has made what used to be very technical and costly much more accessible to pull off solo. 

For example, by combining your smartphone, nice natural outdoor light, a tripod, and a lavalier microphone, you can film some great-looking footage of yourself or of you working with lesson clients. 

This footage can then be edited using free downloadable software on your laptop or even using robust editing applications on your smartphone, like Filmmaker Pro.   

For graphics and animation, you will not get more beginner-friendly than Canva, again. And you can even animate text and images with their intuitive tools.

If you get overwhelmed, freelancer sites like 99 Designs for graphics and UpWork for video editors have affordable options. 

However, the more intimidating parts of creating and running effective and more advanced baseball or softball ads on Instagram are setting up things like: 

• A Facebook pixel on our website
• Ad campaigns and then scaling them 
• Ad set targeting strategies
• Ad creative and written copy optimizations 
• Conversion-optimized landing pages
• A customer journey with built-in follow ups

Here is a great how-to resource from Buffer to teach yourself some of Instagram Ads' ins and outs. 

Besides consuming more articles and videos on the subject – and, believe us, there’s a lot to check out – there is another option for entrepreneurs with a bit more capital to invest, who also want to start creating paid campaigns as soon as possible. 

That is to hire a Facebook/Instagram ad specialist freelancer from MarketHire or Upwork and make their temporary role two-fold.

Here’s what we mean.

This is generally a much faster way to up-skill yourself than months and months of free online books and video tutorials on paid social advertising, but, again, it’ll cost you. 

#Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing refers to collaborating with an individual or brand in your industry who has a substantial audience. 

When it’s an individual, they are commonly known as “social media influencers.”

80% of marketers find using influencers to be effective, most likely due to how much followers trust their favorite brand’s recommendations.

When looking to find an influencer to work with, it’s crucial for you to be conscious of certain key points:

• If there’s a business email address available online, use that to initiate your partnership inquiries rather than through Instagram Direct Messages.
• Payment rates are negotiable, but a rough guideline many use is $10 per 1000 followers for each post.
  
• Posts made based on your requests need to abide to the FTC guidelines and visibly be labeled as #ad or #sponsored.
  
• Make sure their brand values and actual content supports and aligns with your own.
  
• Check their comments to see how much actual engagement they get rather than focusing on how many followers they have. Or use a free Instagram engagement calculator to check.
  
• Pay attention to the communication they hold with their audience, whether it is one-sided or not. This is an indicator of how tight their bond is to their community.
  
• Focus on so-called “micro-influencers” – 5,000 to 25,000k followers – who are known to have a more niche fan base. Not only are they more affordable, but they often possess highly dedicated audiences that trust them more than larger celebrity influencers. 
  

Though the traditional influencer marketing relationships characteristic of larger brands might be out of reach for most coaching entrepreneurs, we included this section for two reasons. 

1. As you grow your presence on Instagram, you may be approached by baseball or softball brands as a person of influence. And the bullet-points above give you some baseline information worth knowing about the process.
2. You may have the monetary capital or social relationship capital to already consider adding influencer marketing to your growth strategy mix.
   
   The money part is obvious, but what we mean by social capital is that you may have in the past been teammates with or coached a current person of influence in the game.
   
   This person may be willing to help you get your brand or product out in front of their similarly relevant audience. Don’t be ashamed to shoot your shot. Everyone started somewhere.  

#Testing

Set aside some dedicated time to analyze and go over your Instagram analytics every week to avoid missed opportunities and stagnation.

It’s almost a given that you should be looking at how your organic posts are doing and double-down when posts of a certain type or style perform particularly well. 

But a technique that works and quickly evaluates how good or bad your paid ad setup is doing is called the A/B testing method.

Such testing can become data-scientist-level-complicated, depending on how robust you want your test set up and on how many variables you must control for.

But one simple example of a way to put A/B testing to use is to see which words in the captions of two paid ads, ads that are visually identical, elicit the most cost-effective clicks on your call-to-action. 

You can also try keeping the same caption copy – “copy” just refers to the words you’ve written – and only change the call-to-action on a given ad. 

Of course, using the same logic, you can also keep the same call-to-action and caption but change the creative visuals on your ads.

Traditional A/B testing on paid ads aside, in your normal, organic posts, you should observe (and log) which text length, tone of voice, use of emoji, or word choices work best for your particular audience.

Other popular elements to test out are images vs. images with quotes, short videos vs. longer videos, and disparate copywriting styles.

Each test will reveal information on what works best for you.

This data will help you iterate on your social media strategies more quickly and efficiently. 

This can all be done yourself with nothing besides your Instagram business Analytics. 

Still, if you want more info in a neater presentation format, a great way to manage all of your statistics hassle free is to use apps like Iconosquare and Squarelovin. 

They can assess your metrics, including following rates, link in bio traffic levels, engagement highs and lows, stories visibility, etcetera.

#Extra Inning: Coaches, Do Not Fear Failure

Consider improving on Instagram the way you would learn a new pitch in baseball or softball.

You want to go about it intelligently. 

Start by getting reps, building your feel and mechanical memory. 

Do a lot of flat ground tosses with the pitch when playing catch and work it into your bullpenning – instead of just throwing it for the first time in a live game with one out and runners on second and third. 

But just like a new pitch, it’ll never be successful if you stay apprehensive forever and don’t just let it rip live eventually. 

And regardless of the initial outcome, like if you can’t find the strike zone at first or someone takes you deep, just continue to tweak and adjust the pitch until it feels like your own. 

Marketing and business, in general, are chronically plagued by failures – just like the games we love. 

But a practical coach and entrepreneur with SMART goals that harness their creative spirit intelligently will continue to iterate until they earn success. 

We’ve now given you 6 innings of tools and strategies to help you play the Instagram game – now, let’s play ball, coach.

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