Endurance Sports Content Creators: Your Guide to Developing an Industry-Leading Instagram

Whether you’re just starting out as a content creator or looking to evolve your personal brand, collaborations and experience in the endurance sports industry, we’ve outlined six key factors to help your Instagram profile prosper.

1. Establish your niche.

What is your endurance sport? Defining your area of interest and passion should be your first priority. Whether you’re a runner, cyclist, outdoor sports enthusiast or multi-sport athlete, make that known in your bio and throughout your content.

Viewers should be able to immediately see from your profile that you are passionate about endurance sports and maintain motivation to inspire others with your content. This shows brands and potential followers your dedication to the industry. 

2. Create original, varied content.

Audiences are inspired by new, original content that is constantly showing new sides of your athletic journey. Overwhelming your followers with too many selfies, miscellaneous products or mapped runs can not only bore your audience but lower engagement.

Keep your followers coming back for more by taking the time to capture unique, eye-catching photos and establish profile aesthetics to help your content flow.

3. Encourage authentic engagement.

Add value to your photos with captivating captions. Whether that’s details from your training session, a recent challenge you faced or new goals you’re striving toward, share your story and be honest.

Take your engagement beyond just ‘likes’ by relating to your audience, asking questions and being vulnerable. Provide advice for others in the business and show how you celebrate success and also how you handle adversity as an athlete.

4. Be creative with product posts.

Show potential brands and followers how you incorporate product posts into your feed and why these brands are meaningful to you. Express how your content stands out from the rest by creating inventive photos.

Don’t just photograph the product, show yourself using it throughout your daily routines and adventures and express why you’re passionate about the brand.

5. Build an organic following.

Be patient and allow your following to grow naturally. Buying followers may seem like a quick solution to gain the attention of brands but offers zero value to your account. Technology not only detects suspicious accounts, but human screening can easily identify fake followers (pictured below) and engagement.

Pay attention to who’s following you, and avoid being red-flagged by brands as inauthentic. 

In order to create partnerships with brands and provide more opportunities to the community, we do require a minimum reach of 1,500 followers. Don’t be discouraged if you’re just staring out with a low following. With dedication to your sport and content, everyone has the potential to attain this reach. 

6. Consider switching to a business or creator account.

Though switching to a business or creator account may not be the right decision for everyone, both offer a variety of benefits to content creators that a personal account can’t provide. For example, display your contact information right on your profile so brands can easily contact you.

Additionally, you can utilize Instagram Insights to track the performance of your posts and better understand the demographics and activity levels of your audience. With a Creator Account, access even more analytics including growth insights, new discovery data and follow/unfollow data.

Following each of these steps will not only evolve your Instagram profile, but will advance your experience as a content creator. Putting the time and effort into producing original photos, sharing your personal journey and placing a larger emphasis on engaging your audience ignites your potential to be a leader in the industry.

If you’re looking to join the Freestak platform but haven’t quite met our creator criteria, review the advice above and feel free to contact our Community Manager at laura@freestak.com with any questions.