Instagram boasts of over 1 billion monthly active users and is one of the biggest social media platforms. Additionally, Instagram Stories are viewed by over 500 million users every day. This makes it a great place for you to expand your reach and get customers.
In addition, it’s a visual platform, so you can put your visual marketing strategy to the test there to grow your business. However, you need to generate sufficient Instagram engagement to get noticed by the masses.
With so many businesses crowding up the platform, it can be difficult to do so. Let’s take a look at some strategies that can help you improve Instagram engagement. But before we get into any of that, let’s try to understand the different types of engagement.
Types of Instagram Engagement and How to Calculate Them
It’s crucial to understand the different parameters that are considered as Instagram engagement before diving into the strategies to improve them. Additionally, it’s necessary to know how to measure them so that you can track your progress.
Here are the key parameters you should take into account:
1. Followers
It’s essential to monitor how many followers you have on Instagram. While it isn’t the most important parameter to take into account, you must check it to understand how quickly your following is growing.
Followers are an important Instagram engagement metric because they are the ones who are most likely to engage with your posts. The larger your following on Instagram, the more engagement will your posts get.
2. Comments
Comments are one of the most important Instagram engagement metrics that you should measure. The more comments on your posts, the better your engagement. However, along with the quantitative part of the Instagram engagement, you should also consider the qualitative aspect of it.
For this, it’s crucial to understand the quality of the comments. Simple one-word comments don’t provide any value, and the same applies to emoji comments. However, slightly longer comments are a great measure to figure out your real Instagram engagement.
3. Likes
Likes are often considered a vanity metric by many businesses because they aren’t the best indicators of your Instagram engagement. People may like posts without actually paying much attention to them while scrolling through their feeds.
This is the reason why comments are preferred over likes when it comes to Instagram engagement. Nonetheless, likes do give you a good idea of how popular your business is with your target audience.
4. Shares
The number of shares that your posts get is an important measure of your Instagram engagement. If a user is willing to share your post within their close circles, it surely must have piqued their interest.
This is why it’s important to track your shares when you want to understand how to improve your Instagram engagement.
Now that you’ve figured out the four main metrics for measuring Instagram engagement, let’s look at how you can improve it.
How to Improve Instagram Engagement
Let’s take a look at some powerful strategies that can help you drive the growth of your Instagram engagement.
1. Create High-Quality Content
The content that you create for your Instagram account is one of the most important means of increasing your Instagram engagement.
Remember, your audience on the platform will interact with the post completely based on the content. You only have a few seconds to make an impression on them, and the only way of doing so is through your content.
As Instagram only allows photos and videos, it’s crucial to get them right. Professional-looking images and videos will help you catch the attention of your target audience.
At the same time, they should also be creative and fun to ensure that they engage further with the post. By creating such quality content, you can improve your Instagram engagement.
2. Utilize Hashtags
Hashtags are popular on Instagram and are used to assemble similar content under one roof. By using hashtags in your Instagram posts, you can increase their visibility, and subsequently, engagement.
However, you must know how to find the right hashtags for your posts to get the most out of them. You can use tools like Hashtagify to find the best hashtags for your content.
The hashtags that you choose shouldn’t be too popular as your posts might get lost among the crowd. At the same time, you shouldn’t choose ones that have very few posts as your posts may not get noticed at all.
The key is to find hashtags that have a few hundred thousand posts. These are the ones where you can expect to generate significant Instagram engagement.
Note how Best Buy uses hashtags in their posts. They use hashtags that are relevant to the content and which aren’t extremely popular, so that their posts can stand out. This can help improve Instagram engagement on their account.
3. Use Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories were introduced in 2016, and since then, they’ve captivated the attention of a huge chunk of Instagram users. In fact, people spend approximately 28 minutes daily on Instagram Stories.
Through Stories, you can showcase your day-to-day lives and other informal content with your followers. Businesses can use them to show behind-the-scenes images and videos, blooper videos, and more.
You can also go live on Instagram Stories and connect with your audience in real-time. This can help you generate tremendous engagement.
However, it’s crucial to understand how to get your Instagram Stories right. You should fix your dimensions at 1080×1920 for the best results. It’s also essential to use features such as polls, ask me a question, etc. to generate even more engagement.
Discovery uses Instagram Stories regularly to showcase their expeditions and other news. This helps them increase their Instagram engagement as well.
4. Posting at Appropriate Timings
To improve Instagram engagement, you must know the most appropriate times to post on Instagram. For this, you need to find out the times when most of your audience is active on the platform.
To do so, you can check Instagram Insights. In addition to the times, you can also find the days when your audience is the most active.
Based on these insights, you can start posting content on the platform at those exact times and days. When you do so, the probability of people engaging with your content increases.
Note how the timings for audience activity are displayed in Instagram Insights. By going through these insights, you can figure out the best times to post every day.
5. Manage Your Posting Frequency Well
To improve Instagram engagement on your posts, you should manage your posting frequency. Post too often, and your followers may feel like your posts are hogging up their entire feed. Post too infrequently, and they may end up forgetting your business.
The key to success on Instagram lies in creating quality content consistently. You should post enough to remain relevant without hogging your followers’ feeds. Ideally, you should try creating and posting once a day on Instagram to get the most engagement possible.
6. Add Calls-to-Action (CTA)
A call-to-action (CTA) asks your followers to take some action after seeing your post. You can ask them to like, share, or comment on your post with a CTA.
By asking them a question, you can push them to engage with your post and improve Instagram engagement rates.
However, you must do this in moderation. By asking them questions all the time, you may come across as spammy. You need to find a healthy balance between posts with CTAs and posts without.
Note how Best Vacations uses CTAs to push their followers to comment on their posts. This has helped them get lots of engagement on their posts.
7. Engage With Your Followers
In order to increase your Instagram engagement, you should engage with your followers too. When they comment on your posts, you should try to reply to each comment individually.
Additionally, you must not make the mistake of using a template to respond to them. Instead, you should come up with unique replies for every comment.
Don’t restrict your engagement to just your posts. You should also consider engaging with the posts of your followers to catch their attention. This is especially important when they’ve mentioned your business in their posts.
While responding to comments is a great way of engagement, you can also engage with your followers via DMs. You may receive loads of messages from your audience, and your goal should be to reply to them as quickly as possible.
When people receive replies from your brand, they’ll feel more connected to it. This can help improve your Instagram engagement rates.
8. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a great way to promote your brand. In addition to promoting your brand, it can also help boost your Instagram engagement rates.
When an influencer reviews your products or writes something positive about your brand, their audience will likely engage with your Instagram profile.
Influencers can also help you attract new followers. However, for this, you must know how to find relevant influencers for your brand.
The audience of the influencers needs to be similar to your target audience for this method of marketing to work. In addition, you need to be able to tell the difference between fake influencers and genuine ones.
It’s also essential to know how to assess the influencer’s degree of influence. You need to understand their reach and engagement well to figure out if it’s worth partnering with them. However, it can be quite difficult to spot them on Instagram.
To make the process of finding influencers simple, you can use iFluenz. This tool lets you create your influencer marketing campaign in minutes.
Once you’ve posted your campaign, verified influencers can check it out, and interested ones can apply to it. You can screen their profiles and select the ones you want to partner with. Additionally, you can also discover the best matching influencers for your campaign.
It’s also possible to track the performance of your campaign in real-time so you can understand how it’s helping improve your Instagram engagement. Lastly, you can decide to buy the content of influencers too.
9. Create Instagram Profile Themes
A great way to improve Instagram engagement is by carving out a niche of your own. You can do so by coming up with a theme for your Instagram profile. Doing so can add some visual appeal to your posts as they look like they’re a part of a series.
You could choose to use the same filter on all of your photos and videos. Perhaps you could go for a completely black and white theme.
However, looks aren’t the only way to create a theme. You can also choose to create a theme based on a recurring subject.
For instance, Lauren Aston creates posts that revolve around her knitting projects. This helps her generate engagement as people who are interested in her knitting regularly follow her profile.
10. Add Story Highlights
While Instagram Stories themselves can help you gain tremendous engagement, their utility doesn’t end there. Stories are only visible for 24-hours. However, by adding them to your Story Highlights, you can keep them available for your audience for a long time.
This can help you entice your audience as they can keep revisiting those Stories over and over again.
Additionally, it’s possible to create various Story Highlights. This way, you can segregate different events and group them under each Highlight category. Doing so can help you improve Instagram engagement too.
Note how National Geographic has added Instagram Story Highlights for different categories. By opening each of them, their audience can see all of the Stories added to that particular Highlight.
11. Conduct Giveaways and Contests
One of the best ways to improve Instagram engagement is by organizing contests and giveaways. A great contest through which you can improve engagement is one where your followers have to tag others to participate.
When the number of tags on your posts increases, you’ll get access to a wider audience as all the tagged people will instantly become a part of your audience. Additionally, they may tag others, and so on.
Not only that, but your post will also get more comments, and that can help it gain traction on Instagram. It might even make it to the “Top” section for some of the hashtags you’ve used as well.
When that happens, you’ll be able to reach an even bigger audience. All of this will help you generate even more Instagram engagement.
For example, the Ibotta App conducted a giveaway for a $500 Amazon gift card. As you can see, to participate, people needed to follow their Instagram page and also tag three of their friends.
Through this method, they were able to get over 2000 likes in less than 2 hours. Additionally, the post got over 3100 comments as well.
12. Track and Optimize
To improve Instagram engagement, you must first know how to track your engagement. Only then can you figure out if you’re meeting your goals.
By doing so, you can figure out how well each strategy is helping you grow your Instagram engagement. At the same time, it can help you identify any possible opportunities to improve your strategy and further grow your business.
For this, you must know how to read Instagram Insights. Head there and check out the engagement of each of your posts to find out what sort of content works better. Doing this can also help you identify which strategy for growing your engagement performs is working best.
Final Thoughts
It’s essential for brands to know how to improve Instagram engagement to grow their popularity on the platform. You must know which metrics contribute to Instagram engagement, as well.
You need to create high-quality content and use hashtags that are popular but not overcrowded. Additionally, you can partner with influencers to give a boost to your engagement rates.
It also helps to host contests and giveaways. And you should include CTAs in your posts and engage with your audience to improve your Instagram engagement.
You should use Instagram Stories to your advantage as well. Consider adding them to Highlights to leverage them even further. Lastly, track and measure your progress so that you can optimize your results.
Now that you know how to improve your Instagram engagement, give these strategies a shot and let us know how well they work for you in the comments.