Today's article will tell you 18+ ways through which you can boost your engagement on Instagram.
Whether you are a business, individual, or a content creator, engagement is the determiner of growth for your profile's visibility, audience size, and ultimately, loyal fans.
This article will disclose more than five ways you can boost your engagement to make sure your profile gets the best chance at building a loyal, engaged fan base of the size you deserve.
1. Post More Frequently
The new Instagram algorithm favors consistency. If you post at least one time every day, you are likely to expand your reach as well as your engagement.
Remember that this works great on the audience level as well. Why? Because the audience's attention is scattered in a scroll-friendly platform.
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The more they see your content, the better primed they are to build a sense of familiarity.
This leads to instinctive 'liking.' Getting those impulsive double taps from your regular views will show your post to more of your followers.
2. The Story is king
Since the dawn of time, humans have been driven by stories. From the most inspiring leaders to the biggest entertainment corporation globally, it is a story that drives the world.
This, however, is not about Instagram stories. This is about the stories you tell on Instagram. Don't dump information.
Engage the audience with stories. Tell them what happened in a day in your life. Or let them an interesting story involving your product.
Many content creators have started delivering content in episodes. This makes your followers visit your profile frequently to check for updates. Profile visits count for visibility, which translates to engagement.
3. Be Memorable
You have to make sure that you bank on the sense of familiarity. Therefore your brand must be strong.
You need to foster a digital rapport with your customers. The more you let what makes you unique show through your content, the most your followers will connect to.
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This helps you stand apart from everything else in their feed. Standing out is one of the factors that boost the engagement rate.
4. Plan your Feed
Make sure your feed is consistent in not just your plan but also in a way that it is never "off." Many content creators make their feed in sets of nine but post one image per day.
So 2 out of every three days, their Instagram profile looks "off." If you plan your feed in sets of nine, post at least three times a day to make your feed look right every day.
Or plan your feed so that it looks consistent without being in a set of nine. This gives you more freedom while making sure people keep revisiting your profile and boosting your engagement in the process.
5. Improve Your Hashtag Research
This is crucial as hashtags now reach people in their feed. The right hashtag use on an image that gets enough likes can take it up the engagement ladder to the top of its niche.
Such boosts create extra visibility for all your content as people start visiting your profile.
6. Customize Your Hashtag
You can have a customized hashtag for your personal brand or business.
This helps your fans engage with you more often as hashtags help deliver your content onto their explore feed as well as their home feed.
Needless to say that being in two feeds doubles your chances of getting a double tap or a comment.
7. Involve Users in Your Content Creation
User-generated content is all the rage when it comes to brands. You can leverage this and create contests that facilitate your followers in creating content.
You can release a filter, set a location tag, or ask questions. Make sure to use apps like Mention to find out content about you generated by other users.
By posting this, you will make your brand more familiar to the mass audience.
8. Post More Video Content
Start posting more video content from stories to feed. Video content is more engaging, and it auto plays, which counts towards engagement if someone pauses scrolling.
Even if the audience does not double-tap the video, the brief pause counts towards engagement. That is why it is very important to have at least one video on your feed every day.
9. Optimize Videos For Sound-off
Alongside posting more videos comes the fact that you have to position videos so that they are valuable even when the sound is off.
This is because videos play with the sound off, and you do not want people skipping your content because they are listening to music while browsing Instagram.
You should make it very convenient for them to get value from your content.
10. Leverage Customized Filters
You can create AR filters on Instagram. Filters are among the top viral pieces of media on Instagram this year.
From random quiz generators to face modifications, AR filters have given the users' imagination possibilities. However, a word of caution you do not want to make your filter only about your product.
It has to be about something that you can be accessible to the common people. Something that people want to share or look for after seeing on their friends' stories.
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This works very well for sunglasses brands and other visible accessory products.
The rest of the brands should just create filters for the public's pleasure and only reap the engagement that comes from users visiting their profile.
11. Use Advertising
You can use Instagram video ads as well as call to actions in ads to boost a sequence of action.
While the first action is counted as ad-engagement, the subsequent actions are considered organic engagement.
This literally gives you power over the users' level of engagement via controlled traffic phenomenon.
The downside to this is the fact that it requires monetary investment. It is not ideal for brands with a small budget.
12. Link In Bio Counts
Have you ever seen brands posting stories and asking to check 'link in bio' for details? The interesting thing is that this generates website visits and forces the traffic to their profile.
Profile visits count towards engagement as more of your content starts being shown to people visiting your profile more often.
One strategy you can use is to offer a story in the caption but ask them to click the bio link to find out how it ends. Newspapers and magazines use this.
If you are a product seller, make an offers page and link it in your bio. Remember to call back the audience in every post caption and story to check your link in the bio.
13. Use on-Platform SEO
By editing your username to match the industry or niche you serve, you can boost your visibility and gain profile visits from an intent-based audience searching for new accounts to follow.
Moreover, by leveraging hashtags in bio, you can appear in 'profile suggestions' that are presented to people who do not follow a lot of accounts.
These are the best people to have as followers because they see more of your posts and engage accordingly.
14. Partner with non-influencers
While influencers have an audience so big that your product may be irrelevant for most, partnering with non-influencers has the oddity-factor that works in your favor.
In other words, influencers' audience is desensitized to shoutouts because your brand is one among hundreds they mention.
But partnering with multiple ordinary people will help showcase your brand to their friends. This sort of association builds curiosity and generates more intentional profile visits.
15. Leverage Instagram Giveaways
The cognitive bias of preferring rewards is timeless. Regardless of algorithm updates, platform changes, and application updates, humans will remain reward-seeking and pain-avoiding creatures.
That is why contents are a reliable way to boost your engagement. However, you do not want the contest to be such that irrelevant people start following and drop-off after the contest is over.
Therefore, it is advisable to keep the contest-prize relevant to your market so that the individuals interested in the prize are also likely to be interested in your brand.
16. Create a Mailing List
This is an important step, especially because platforms can shift their algorithms at any given time.
The security of having your fans and followers signup for your email updates is different as you can use your email database to invite them to follow you on other platforms.
With Instagram, you can place your email opt-in page as a link in your bio and offer an incentive to sign up. Then, you can email your subscribers once a month to visit your profile to like your content.
Though this is not as effective as many of the other tactics in this article, it is still a very important one if you want to be independent of Instagram.
17. Use Instagram Story Stickers
By placing fun polls in your stories, you are getting impulsive engagement from most of your viewers.
Make engagement easy. Do not place a question sticker, which is open-ended. By urging the audience to type, you are forcing them to pause and think.
This will not get as much engagement as "yes" or "no" polls. Use them in interesting and engaging ways to get more people in the list of accounts that interact with you.
These accounts will then be shown more of your content on feed. The boost in visibility leads to a direct boost in engagement.
18. Use Calls to Action
A CTA or Call-to-action is when you request your audience to perform a certain action. An example of this would be the "Click here to shop" link on Instagram stories.
You must realize that most of your followers aren't online to shop. You have to curate your CTAs to be mass-action-generators.
An example of this would be a photo of a dog with a "Double-tap to give him a pat." Such CTAs require a lower investment and thus have wider appeal.
It is a very easy way of generating engagement and must be used at every chance possible.
19. Track your Insights
Last but not least, you cannot force your audience to engage with the content you like.
They will engage with the content they like. So it is vital that you study your Instagram insights, look for patterns in your best performing posts, and post at the best times.
Conclusion
Instagram and other platforms want the audience to stay on the platform for as long as possible.
The longer the audience is online, the more ads they will see, and the more revenue the platform will generate. Because of that, social media algorithms are geared toward engagement.
The more engaged your followers, the more your posts will be shown to them and more people among your followers.
That is why it is important to gear every single content creation and social posting action towards increasing engagement.
Using all the tactics mentioned earlier, you can rest assured that you have used all available possibilities to boost your engagement.