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As a Creative, you want to increase your engagement while maintaining authenticity. Small brands and individuals can utilize these soft tools from Tieghan Gerard, Rachel Mansfield, Liz Moody and Alison Roman, food bloggers that keep content fun, engaging, creative and, most importantly, authentic.

Half-Baked Harvest: Fuel your feed with connection.

When you scroll through Instagram, ultimately you want to be connected with.

Tieghan Gerard, founder and creator of Half-Baked Harvest, is constantly connecting with her audience. She does a few things that make her unique:

• Responds to all comments on her Instagram and website
• Always responds to stories she’s tagged in with something unique
• Answers questions on stories every week
• Shares picture’s of her family eating her food
• Gives “behind-the-scenes” tours of studio kitchen and messy creative process

Rachel Mansfield: Stick to YOUR personality.

Knowing your personality is the first step to letting it soak through your Instagram profile. Rachel Mansfield is determined, focused, bubbly and energetic. One look at her Instagram feed and you know what she’s about.

Here are four things Mansfield does to stick to her personality:

• Has a purpose-driven bio that tells you who she is and what she does
• Creates bubbly and directive caption
• Shares her food content on her page and uses stories to include you in her day-to-day
• Sticks to her guts and stays on brand (not a trend chaser)

Liz Moody: Be a journalist!

Asking questions, researching and then writing is a great way to create high-quality content. Liz Moody is a former journalist, and when she creates content, she writes like a researcher and a journalist.

Here’s how Moody sticks to being a journalist:

• Tells stories with the most important information up top
• Asks questions in her posts and then gives you the answer in her captions
• Uses words instead of just relying on graphic and pictures to drive information to her audience

Alison Roman: Good content or nothing.

Alison Roman is notorious for taking breaks from her feed, but she knows that it’s better to cultivate an active and loyal fanbase than have thousands of inactive and uninterested followers.

Roman will only post high-quality, on-brand content with her stellar Instagram aesthetic. Here’s what I learned from Roman’s Instagram:

• If you can’t post high quality, don’t post at all
• Faster isn’t always better
• Spend more time creating and less time posting

Work on implementing these tips into your everyday content practices to see traction and engagement on your page.