The Walbrook Club is a private members’ club near Bank station — the building is in the style of Queen Anne but it actually dates from the 1950s, and the club itself opened in 2000. People often make the mistake of thinking that the building is much older than it is, and it’s true that it makes a striking contrast with the modern office blocks all around it, that seem to tower menacingly over it.
The photograph below of the Walbrook Club is my highest performing post of all time (26.7k likes). When I look at the image, there are some elements I can identify that my audience tends to like: a strong centred composition, lines leading to something slightly startling (in this case what looks like an old building dwarfed by modern buildings around it), warm lit windows. I can only assume that it grabbed people’s attention enough to pause in their scrolling and double-tap.
In my experience (and I follow a lot of city-based Instagram accounts!), that same principle is true for their high performing posts too — there is something unexpected or arresting about them, whether it’s the scale, or a striking floral element, or (and these are the best kinds of posts, in my view) a mood or visual cue that evokes an immediate emotional response in a viewer.
There’s a caveat to that, of course, which is that everyone’s audience is different, and they expect different things. For example, I tend to focus on architecture and street scenes rather than, say, food or floral images, and so if you follow me on Instagram you may have come to expect those types of images, and to engage more with them. (That isn’t to say you should never post different kinds of images — quite the contrary!)
If you’re interested in finding out more about what resonates most with the people who follow you though, I’d encourage you to look at your most popular posts, and see if you can identify any common threads running through those posts — maybe it was the image itself, or something in the caption that struck a chord?