500 million people log onto Instagram every day, with over 200 million of those users visiting at least one business profile daily from over 5 million business profiles out there. These stats alone demonstrate Instagram’s power.
It’s one of the best places to market your brand online, achieve a loyal following, and build a supportive community for your business.
Here are 5 tips that will send your profile’s Instagram engagement through the roof:
#Tip 1 to improve Instagram Engagement: Switch to a Business profile
Instagram offers this free feature to brands that want their accounts to be recognized as businesses. These business profiles contain additional features compared to a personal profile, including ad targeting, Instagram analytics, a contact button and more.
What’s great about a Business profile is that access to insights and metrics give you valuable information. For instance, you’ll have insight into which stories and posts your audience sees and engages with the most.
This is something that can help you know your audience’s preferences which in turn will help you customize your content accordingly. Users will interact more with content that resonates with them, that speaks to their needs and preferences.
Here’s an extra lil’ tip: Do you want your audience to sign up for a newsletter, read your blog articles, view your website or know more about your business? Then you can send them in the right direction by adding a link into your Instagram profile description.
#Tip 2 to improve Instagram Engagement: Create Stories and Leverage Stickers
Instagram stories receive the most engagement out of any other Feature on Instagram. And no wonder when there are 500 million people using it every day!
What’s great about the Instagram stories feature is that it allows you to share fun activities with your audience and grants them an exclusive look into your behind-the-scenes activities.
Instagram is a personal medium and when it comes to social media, people are there to connect with people. If businesses hide behind their business and fail to inject a ‘human’ element into their socials, engagement on those socials will suffer.
So if you’re flying to a special event or launching a new product, you can share all of these moments with your audience to make them feel like they’re a part of your team.
Instagram Stories Stickers are cool built-in options that can encourage your followers to share their opinions and experiences with you. This, in turn, will help in creating a loyal following that feels invested in your brand.
Here are a few ways stickers can increase Instagram engagement:
- Poll or vote stickers
Your followers’ opinions matter and this feature permits you to poll your audience. This sticker will help you understand what your followers’ thoughts about your services or brand are.
For instance, you can ask people which of two products they prefer with a voting sticker. It’s an awesome way of getting valuable input from your followers, as well as to get them committed to the content you are producing in your stories.
- Question Stickers
This feature allows you to ask questions to your followers, and to have the answers sent to you. Nothing gets a conversation going more than an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Instagram stories.
This is a superb opportunity for your audience to get to know your brand and its mission better or to know more about your product. On the flipside, you can ask your followers questions too. You can either share the answers or use for market research.
#Tip 3 to improve Instagram Engagement: Optimise your captions
Your Instagram caption can be up to 2,200 characters long, so this is the perfect place to add color to your Instagram. By writing longer and engaging captions, you can keep your followers up-to-date about your business goals, your mission, and your products.
Not every caption has to be super long, just a sentence or two can help you increase your Instagram engagement as opposed to a quick, emoji-filled caption.
There is always an opportunity to say something meaningful. So tell stories, provide people with insight into the behind-the-scenes of what you do and give tips in areas you know your dream client needs it the most.
#Tip 4 to improve Instagram Engagement: Create a Schedule for posting content
Posting quality content can be rewarding, but it’s also crucial to determine how and when to post. This can be tricky.
According to Union Metrics, posting one to two times per day is optimal and it’s best to post during off-work hours instead of during the day, typically at lunchtime (11AM-1PM) and evening (7PM-9PM). Regardless of these studies, there is no single best time to post.
To get a deeper insight into what you’re ideal posting times should be, spend some time monitoring your Instagram analytics. Start by checking out your Instagram insights (business profiles have access to this) by tapping the bar chart icon in the top right corner of your profile.
Under the audience tab, you’ll see an entire body of information about your followers, including when they are most active on Instagram, broken down by days and hours.
Pro tip for all of your content: Start tagging locations in your posts to boost your exposure and engagement. This feature allows your posts to reach more people and may show up on the recommended feed.
#Tip 5 to improve Instagram Engagement: Reply to your DMs and Comments
This may seem obvious, but so many businesses are still ignoring their DMs and comments on their posts. Social media platforms are a two-way street. The more you engage and converse with your audience, the more time they will invest in interacting with your content.
Get talking with your followers and respond to comments and DMs in a timely manner. Ensure you’re monitoring your notifications to know when other users @mentions you in their comments or captions.
The heart of Instagram is community building. No matter how big your account gets, devote time to listening and responding to both positive and negative feedback. A lot of business started doing SEO in 2019 for Instagram to build the community.
One can’t deny that Instagram is a competitive place, but there are still many ways that you can innovatively boost your Instagram engagement.
So next time you’re planning your Instagram content, try to apply these tips and see how your followers react!
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