Every brand partnership starts before the first message. Before an agency reaches out, before a brief gets sent, someone is already looking at your Instagram and asking: would this athlete make sense for our brand? That decision happens fast.
Getting noticed isn’t just about follower count. Brands are looking for athletes who know who they are, post consistently, and give people a reason to care. We’ve watched thousands of athletes grow across every sport and division, and the ones who land repeat brand work tend to build the same habits. Here are the ten that matter most.
1. Rewrite Your Bio Like It’s a Brand Pitch
Your bio is one of the first things a brand sees, and most decide whether to keep scrolling in about three seconds. A good bio does three things in three lines: tells someone who you are beyond the sport, hints at your personality, and makes it obvious how to get in touch.
✅ QB at [School] · sneakerhead · contact me at opndr.se/firstlast for collabs · [City, State]
❌ QB at [School]
The first one tells a footwear brand to reach out. The second tells them nothing. Spend ten minutes on it. It’s the easiest upgrade you can make.
2. Post the Life Around the Sport
Game content is table stakes. Every athlete posts it, which means it doesn’t differentiate you. What separates the accounts brands want to partner with is everything else: the pregame routine, the dorm setup, the behind-the-scenes content.
Brands aren’t paying you because you’re good at your sport. They’re paying you because you have an audience that trusts you, and audiences trust people they feel like they know. Your sport gives them a reason to watch. Who you are beyond it gives them a reason to care.
3. Make Your Captions Do Some Work
Instagram now functions more like a search engine. The words in your captions, your bio, and the text on screen in your Reels are how the platform decides what your content is about and who to surface it to. They’re also how a brand reads whether you have personality. A two-sentence caption with a real thought, a question, or some personality outperforms a one-word caption.
Try ending captions with a question. The comments that follow tell the algorithm to show your post to more people, and the engagement is exactly what brands look at when they evaluate you.
4. Post Reels Consistently
This is the biggest gap between accounts that grow and accounts that don’t. Reels are how you reach people who haven’t followed you yet. Stories and feed posts mostly reach people who already do.
Most full-time creators aim for three to five Reels per week. You’re not a full-time creator. You have lifts, class, practice, film, travel, and a season that doesn’t slow down. The realistic version: post at least one Reel a week, every week. Use quieter stretches in the calendar to bank content for later. The athletes who win on this platform aren’t the ones who posted ten Reels in a hot week and disappeared. They’re the ones who posted something every week for a year. Brands notice consistency. The algorithm rewards it.
Two rules from how the platform works in 2026. Reels can run up to 20 minutes, but the algorithm won’t recommend Reels longer than 3 minutes to non-followers. For reach, stay under 90 seconds. And originality matters more than it used to. Instagram now actively penalizes recycled content, including Reels with TikTok watermarks. If you film something on TikTok and want it on Instagram, re-record it natively or strip the watermark. Posts that fail this check get suppressed, which means brands stop finding you.
5. Set Expectations in the First Three Seconds
The first three seconds of a Reel decide whether someone keeps watching or scrolls. Most people get this wrong by trying to bait. Mystery, cliffhangers, “wait until the end.” That stuff feels manipulative because it is, and it trains the wrong audience.
Set expectations instead. Tell people what they’re about to see. “Three things I do before every game.” “What recruiting actually looks like in the portal.” The right viewers stay. Brands pay for the right viewers, not the biggest crowd. Use text on screen too — a lot of people watch with sound off, and if your hook is only audio, half your audience never hears it.
6. Make Content People Send to a Friend
Likes are nice. They’re also one of the weaker signals in Instagram’s algorithm right now. The strongest signal in 2026 is your share count. When someone watches your Reel and sends it to a friend, Instagram reads that as the highest-value endorsement content can get — more weight than likes, comments, or saves.
Stop posting content only your aunt will like. Start making content a teammate would screenshot and send to the group chat. Make posts where one specific person watches and thinks, “I have to send this to so-and-so.” When the content has a specific person in mind, it travels.
In our experience across thousands of deals, the accounts that get repeat brand work over-index on shares relative to followers. Brands can feel the difference between an audience that watches and an audience that participates. That feeling is what separates a one-off post from a long-term partnership.
7. Use Trending Audio (and Know the Rules for #ad Posts)
Audio is one of the strongest signals Instagram uses to surface your Reel to non-followers. Trending audio is essentially a free distribution boost. Find it on the Reels audio page or in your professional dashboard, which lists the top tracks at any moment.
Critical note for paid work. Once a brand pays you, you can’t grab any trending song. Licensed audio comes with rights restrictions, and using copyrighted music in branded content can get the post taken down or land you in legal trouble. For paid posts, use royalty-free audio from Meta’s sound collection, or audio you’ve cleared with the brand.
8. Try Trial Reels When You Want to Experiment
Most people get conservative on Instagram because they’re worried about how content lands with their existing audience. Posting outside your usual lane feels risky, especially once you’ve started getting brand interest. Trial Reels solve this.
A Trial Reel only shows to people who don’t follow you. It doesn’t appear on your profile. Your audience never sees it unless you share it after seeing how it performs. It’s a low-stakes way to test a new format, topic, or version of yourself on camera without risking a flop on your main feed.
9. Pick a Lane Beyond Your Sport
Being an athlete is great, but every athlete shows that side of them on Instagram. So that’s not what makes you stand out, and it’s not what gets you a brand deal.
The athletes who build the strongest personal brands and land the most partnerships almost always have a clear second identity. The softball player who’s serious about baking. The running back who’s a sneakerhead. Brands don’t partner with a sport, they partner with you.
10. Use the Free Discovery Levers Instagram Still Gives You
Hashtags used to be one of the main ways to get found on Instagram. They aren’t anymore. The platform has been clear that hashtags no longer drive reach. Instagram capped them at five per post, removed the ability to follow hashtags, and shifted discovery toward captions, keywords, and on-screen text.
What still works is tagging real things. Tag your school, your conference, the brands you’re wearing, the photographer, your teammates. Geotag your campus, your stadium, the away gym you just played at. Brands check their tagged photos. If you’re wearing their gear in a Reel and you tag them, you’re putting yourself in front of decision makers you weren’t before.
The other lever is the collaborator feature. When you post a Reel with someone else, mark them as a collaborator. The post appears on both profiles and goes out to both audiences from a single post. Use this with teammates, with brands when you’re posting their product (huge — it puts your content directly on the brand’s profile), and with creators you respect.
Brands Find the Athletes That Do the Work
Most of what’s in this post is free. The information is public, the tools are built into the app, and the time is yours to spend. The people who put the work in are the ones brands actually find, and the ones who keep doing the work are the ones who get signed again.
Opendorse exists to connect athletes who are building a personal brand with the brands looking for them. The more your account looks like a real audience and a real personality, the more partnerships find their way to you.
