Instagram has been all the rage for the past couple of years. Girls in flowing dresses walking among palm trees, beautiful stacks of pancakes and organic smoothies come at us with every refresh of the page. I'm sure most of us have thought of starting an Instagram account for business purposes at least once or twice.

From photo curating to trends in content marketing, here are some of the winning strategies you can use in order to get up and running on Instagram:

Curate photos, don't just post randomly

One major mistake Instagrammers do right off the bat is trying to get all the cool photos out there. Why is this a bad move?

Think of your Instagram page as an album or a wall in a gallery - the images have to go well together. If you post three landscape shots in a row edited in earthy tones but then slap on a black and white portrait, the whole thing gets ruined.

Make your posts compatible with each other. The best tip here is to choose one filer and edit everything with it.

image via Jeremy Levin

Sticking to one genre of photography helps as well. You've got landscape, travel, urban, food, portrait, and fitness. These are the trends and while they work for many people, the key is to stick to only one of them.

Think of yourself as a curator, not just a media scheduler.

Find out when to post

If you're looking to do business through your Instagram or just gain popularity, get a business account. This will give you statistics on where your followers come from and what times are best for posting according to their timezone.

It makes sense - if you post a photo at 3 pm London time but your followers are asleep in New York, you'll engagement will plummet.

At the end of the day, great content is useless if it's not exposed to the right audience.

Know your audience

This goes together with the previous point - know who your audience is. Once again, Instagram analytics will tell you whether the better part of your followers is comprised of men or women and how old they are.

If you've got only 13% male audience aged 30 - 50, there's really no point of posting photos of cars since the other 87% of your followers would be female and wanting to see more fashion.

Thanks to this information, you'll become more efficient in producing material as it will take all the doubt out of the process.

Learn about content marketing and follow the trends

While it may not be obvious why content marketing is important for an Instagrammer who wants to be popular, the idea is quite simple.

Content marketing is essentially producing material (photos, articles) that will get the attention of an audience.

image via Kaboompics

It's always a good idea to have a blog to back up your Instagram page. While you can post super long captions and tell stories, most people come to this platform expecting to spend 2 seconds looking at a nice photo and move on.

Knowing the practices in content marketing will be a huge boost to your brand and will separate you from other accounts who rely only on images.

There you have it - 4 essential practices for creating a successful Instagram. Now get out there and have fun with it!