Want to grow your Instagram account and get your content on the Explore page? One of the first things to consider is learning how to boost Instagram engagement, as it’s one of the most important factors that affects the value Instagram algorithm assigns to your content.
You should also note that increasing engagement rate can help you get more followers on Instagram, too. Therefore, it’s the first step to boost your presence on this platform.
What is Instagram Engagement?
Before getting to know how to boost Instagram engagement, let’s examine what this important metric is and how it is calculated.
Instagram engagement refers to the level of interaction, such as likes, comments, shares, and saves, that users have with your content on the platform. It’s a key metric that reflects how interested and involved your audience is with your posts, stories, and overall profile.
Accordingly, high engagement rates indicate a strong connection between you and your followers, ultimately leading to increased visibility, reach, and potential opportunities for growth on Instagram.
As you can see, increasing the engagement rate on Instagram is the most crucial thing to do after building an Instagram account. Don’t worry! If you follow these tips and tricks, getting more engagement on Instagram will be much easier than you think.
How to Increase Instagram Engagement in 15 Ways
You spend time and effort on Instagram and want to get something in return, which might be more followers, sales, or going viral on this platform. Instagram marketing is one of those things that you are required to do to achieve these goals.
Let’s now discover the best Instagram marketing strategies that can help you increase Instagram engagement and improve the stats on your Instagram dashboard.
Here are the effective methods to increase Instagram engagement organically.
1. Post at the Right Time
Instagram algorithm favors posts that create a lot of engagement in a short time, and it will frequently promote those posts to the top of your followers’ feeds. So, time matters a lot in your engagement. Accordingly, you should find the best time to post on Instagram by checking when most of your followers are online.
As you can see, posting at the times your followers are online is the most important thing to consider if you want to get more engagement on Instagram.
Additionally, you shouldn’t overload your audience with too many posts at a time. Find the golden times to post on Instagram and post once or twice a day. More than that might have reveres result!
2. Engage with Your Followers
Interaction is the key. Be open to your followers, especially when you are still a nano influencer and can reply to comments and direct messages.
If you get many messages or comments that you can’t reply to one by one, it’s polite to create a story and thank everyone for their comments or answer the mostly-asked questions to show your followers you read their messages.
You should know that more comments and likes can increase engagement on Instagram. So, be polite and outgoing to your followers to make them interact with your content.
3. Encourage Your Followers to Share Your Posts
One thing that can help you increase Instagram engagement is the number of post shares you get. When you create a post that is interesting enough that your followers send it to their friends or share in their stories, you signal to Instagram that your content is valuable. Therefore, your chances of getting on the Explore page will increase.
Here are some quick methods to encourage followers to share your posts:
- Use a Call to Action: You should talk to your followers and lead them to take action. Use words such as ‘Share your result,’ ‘Which one is you?’, and ‘Share if you agree.’
- Create Shareable Content: Your content should be interesting enough to make your audience take the action you prefer.
- Create Interactive Content: Use polls, quizzes, and questions in post and stories to make your followers engage with you by voting on something you share. Then you can ask them to share it with their friends to get a broader result.
- Offer Exclusive Deals: Provide special offers or discounts to your followers if they share your post. This can be a powerful motivator for sharing content.
4. Write Captivating Captions
You can write a caption of up to 2,200 characters. Use it properly. Share interesting facts and information, ask them questions encourage them to talk about the subject and share their opinions in the comments.
Note that to write a captivating caption, you don’t necessarily need to write long captions and use all 2,200 characters. Just focus on being interesting and engaging.
Not sure where to start? Use these tips to write Instagram captions.
5. Create Quality Content
If your content is not interesting to your audience, no matter what you do, you won’t get engagement on Instagram. Posting engaging and data-driven content is an effective strategy, and it will help increase Instagram engagement as well. Begin by examining your own data. Can you tell when customers like to buy from you the most, for example?
Share the data with your followers in a post or story to build trust in your brand. In addition, use all the data when creating your Instagram content calendar and consider your followers’ interests in your posts.
While creating content, add more fun to it. Meanwhile, it is worth taking your time creating quality content because it helps you boost your Instagram engagement rate.
Pro Tip: You can use Instagram filters and effects to make your visual content, such as images, more eye-catching and artistic.
6. Host Contests and Giveaways
Hosting giveaways on Instagram can significantly increase Instagram engagement. Giveaways create excitement and incentive for users to interact with your content by liking, commenting, tagging friends, and sharing the post because they are going to get something in return, a gift, a discount, etc.
You should have creative Instagram giveaway ideas to run an effective contest or giveaway because the contest you create should also attract your audience to participate in it. Check out your competitors’ pages to see what they do and get some inspiration.
Furthermore, you should be able to use different tools to simplify the process of choosing the winner of your contest. Here is the list of the best Instagram giveaway apps that can help you with this process.
7. Use Relevant Hashtags
Understanding which hashtags bring more people to your posts is critical to increasing your Instagram engagement. Hashtags should be relevant to your post. Therefore, you should not share a makeup tips post and add sports-related hashtags.
Moreover, you should avoid using too-popular hashtags and get your post lost among the many upcoming posts with the same hashtag.
While you shouldn’t forget to use hashtags, you shouldn’t use too many of them. Choose your hashtags from trends related to your niche. Instagram hashtag generators can help you select hashtags that more people search for in your industry, allowing you to reach a broader audience for your post.
8. Don’t Forget Reels
Instagram reels are very popular these days. You can get engagement if you only share images. You should be able to make reels on Instagram that are interesting enough to grab your audience’s attention.
You don’t have to hire a video-making team to create video content. Using a smartphone and an online video editor and of course, a good idea, you can create a cool video that can get a lot of good feedback.
Here are some quick tips to create better Instagram reels:
- Start with a Strong Hook: The first few seconds on your reels are the most important part of it because it can make your audience pass your content or stay and watch it till the end.
- Tell a Complete Story: Even in the short 15-second format, you can create Reels that tell a complete narrative arc, from introducing a problem to solving it.
- Use Trending Templates and Sounds: To make your content familiar to your audience, you should create a template for your Instagram reel. To simplify this process, you can use pre-designed Instagram Reel templates.
9. Use Instagram Stories
Taking a brief look at the statistics, we can see that over 500 million Instagram users use Instagram stories every day. Most people engage very well with this type of content, as it’s short and they can see it full-screen.
There are many tricks to get more engagement on Instagram stories, including using stickers, polls, or ask me questions. Using these tricks can get your followers to interact with you and share their thoughts and experiences, which will help you build a loyal following that feels connected to your company.
You can also add multiple photos to Instagram story and ask your followers to vote for one of them.
10. Be Authentic
Authenticity on Instagram is another important thing you should pay attention to. We see many brands present a more real and vulnerable side of themselves. A high level of authenticity can go a long way toward strengthening your connection with your audience, which leads to increased engagement.
Brands are now using their Instagram feeds, Stories, and Instagram Reels to offer more information about their company’s mission, challenges, and why they do what they do. More business owners may begin to use Instagram this year to expose the inner workings of their companies, organize live Q&As, etc.
11. Go Live on Instagram
The important thing about getting engagement on Instagram or any other platform is to use all its features. When Instagram announced its Live features, many didn’t know how to use it. Today, it’s one of the best options to increase Instagram engagement because using this option you can connect directly with your followers and talk to them.
Therefore, go live on Instagram occasionally and answer your followers’ questions. However, it’s better to announce the time you want to go live via a story or post. Remember, you should go live when most of your followers are online. Check out your Instagram insights to see when the best time to connect with them is.
12. Share Use-Generated Content
Feature content from your followers on your profile and stories. This encourages others to share in hopes of being featured as well.
You can ask them to share their experience about using your product and share their comments. Or share the fun comments in your stories so others can see and laugh.
13. Encourage Saving Your Posts
Comments, shares, and saves on Instagram are specifically important for Instagram. Creating content that encourages your audience to hit the save button is one of the best strategies to improve Instagram engagement.
For example, if you are a fashion blogger, you can share tutorials. For instance, what tall people should wear, what shoes go well with jeans, etc. Then, create a multiple-slide album and share it as a post. People interested in buying clothes or shoes may save your post for later.
The more information you give in your post, the more likely your followers will save your post. People save posts to get back to them and watch it again. Give them a reason to do that.
14. Follow Trends
Instagram is all about trends. It might be a subject, hashtag, or music that most accounts use to go viral. If you miss it, you will lose your chance to get your content in front of more people. If you create high-quality content using trending music or subjects, it’s more likely for your followers to share it with their friends or like it.
Therefore, you should always keep an eye on the social media trends, whether it’s trending dancing music on TikTok or a hashtag on Instagram.
15. Analyze Your Performance
In the end, you can’t choose any Instagram growth strategies if you don’t analyze the performance of each post. Use Instagram’s analytics tools to understand what works. You can discover which type of content is more interesting to your followers and what makes them engage more with your page. Then, track your engagement rates and adjust your strategy accordingly.
You should note that analyzing performance is not a one-time tactic. You should always keep an eye on Instagram insight to see if you are doing well. If you don’t have time and can’t analyze these stats well, you can hire an Instagram manager, who share posts, replies to direct messages, and analyzes these metrics.
What is a Good Engagement Rate?
Well, you analyze your Instagram performance and get to some numbers. How can you tell that your posts are getting good engagement?
First, here is how to calculate the Instagram engagement rate:
- Add the number of likes and comments of your last 12 posts.
- Divide the number by the number of your followers.
- Multiply it to 100.
Now you can tell the percentage of your Instagram engagement. But what percentage is considered good?
Generally, a good Instagram engagement depends on different factors, such as the size of your following and your industry. However, social media experts believe that most pages have a 1% to 5% engagement rate. Up to 3% is average, up to 5% is good, and more than that is high.
As you can see, the number of your followers can define the engagement rate. Therefore, if you have bought followers, your engagement rate will decrease. That’s why you should find inactive or fake followers and remove them. To simplify this process, you can use Instagram unfollow apps.
Note: You may still follow the old rule of following Instagram users to get feedback and increase the number of followers with this strategy. There are some tactics that help you get followers on Instagram without following. Check out the tactics to grow your Instagram without crossing any rules.
Final Words on Boosting Instagram Engagement
Learning how to boost Instagram engagement is a must for every business owner or individual who cares about their Instagram growth. Increasing engagement on Instagram requires a strategic approach that involves creating compelling content, fostering a sense of community, and actively engaging with your audience.
By implementing tactics such as hosting giveaways, sharing user-generated content, and consistently interacting with your followers, you can boost likes, comments, and shares and ultimately build a stronger presence on the platform. Remember that building engagement takes time and effort, but by staying consistent and authentic, you can collect a loyal following and drive success on Instagram.
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