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There are a lot of people on Instagram. But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be easy to get them to pay attention to you.
Without doubt, Instagram is an excellent tool for marketers and business owners to reach their target audience directly. But one of the biggest challenges businesses face is building a strong community around their Instagram account.
You have to think of ideas, come up with the necessary visuals, schedule some posts, and then sit back and wait for your fans to engage. Unfortunately, most people never get the engagement, even after putting in so much effort.
What’s the way out then? The first thing is to get your Instagram channel to stand out and get noticed. And to do this, you must find what works for your brand and align them with your goals.
This article gives you 9 simple ways to get more engagement on Instagram. Get ready to read the most effective and important tips you can apply to boost your engagement. Let’s get started.
1. Upload Knowledgeable and Scalable Content
Gone are the days when the Instagram audience got thrilled with only pictures. Today, it’s a combination of different factors, and posting scalable content is an integral part. Before you can successfully create scalable content, you need to understand your audience and their needs.
Instagram is a platform with over 50 million visits daily, and there’s a diverse category of users. It’s hard creating content for an audience you barely know, so dedicate some time to studying the demographics on the platform.
And creating content has gotten easier, especially since the Insights tool gives an analysis of your followers, their location, most active periods, ages, etc. Using this information, you can easily craft your brand voice and posts to fit your audiences’ needs.
2. Interact with Your Audience Using Live Shows
Image @Nathan Dumlao from Unsplash
Live videos are a thing today with most Instagram accounts. An analysis of the Instagram audience and their desires shows that 82% would prefer a live video to social posts. This shows that more than half of your audience and any brand’s audience will jump on a live show rather than reading through the long captions. So, leverage this and get your live shows rolling.
Live shows are a great way to speak with your audience. Give them nice gists, show them behind the scenes of creating your services, and do other fun things with your audience.
Again, Instagram has made creating live videos better. It’s easy for your followers to join the live session. They can even ask questions and have you answer them immediately.
There’s a lot more you can do with live shows than you know. Let’s just say, live shows are a way to kill two birds with one stone especially when you’re working with a tight schedule.
3. Get More Traffic from Other Platforms
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There are lots of social media platforms that you can register on as a brand or individual. You may want to stick to Instagram marketing only, that’s fine. But, do you know you can drive more traffic to your Instagram page and website through other social media platforms?
Simply insert your handle in your Twitter bio, emails, and other mediums. Let your audience everywhere connect with you, or your brand’s official account. While your content, captions, and posts on Instagram are doing the conversion on the platform, take some time to tell your physical audience about what your brand does and represents. As you do this, the chances of engagement increase on your account get higher.
4. Post Consistently on Instagram Stories
Instagram stories are one of the best tools on Instagram that can help you boost engagement and drive more followers to your account. Instagram statistics show that there are over 500 billion visits to Instagram stories daily and over 60% of the audience gets interested in the brand after viewing.
Using stories, you have the opportunity to include different features like:
- Sticker
- Emojis
- Question Polls and lots more
Some of these may require payment to get their best version, but it’s totally worth it.
Your audience also gets to reply with comments on each post on Instagram Stories.
It’s an adventure and something interesting to try out for better results.
5. Add a face to the name
Image @Harry Cunningham from Unsplash
Your followers know there’s a human behind the account. But if you don’t reveal the face, it’ll be hard for them to trust and connect with you. Naturally, this will take a toll on the way they engage with your brand.
Sometimes, you can organize a meet and greet for those within a location. It helps boost the growth of an e-family. So, start making content that involves you introducing yourself to your audience.
6. Take Advantage of other Accounts
The competition gets real out there, but you can convert it to an advantage for yourself. No man is an island of knowledge. This means that there’s no single person with all the tips and tricks. You can always learn from others, especially your competitors.
Connecting with competitors is quite easy on Instagram. You can organize learning sessions for your audience by collaborating with other experts, or by joining other programs to give talks on your specialty. Through this, you get more followers, and comments, appear in more tags and increase your engagements overall.
7. Use well-researched and related hashtags
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Hashtags are flying everywhere on Instagram. Do you know why? They boost your SEO on the app, and help your content get classified amongst similar ones.
When searching for a service or product, many users go to the search bar and input keywords and hashtags. This brings a more defined result and reduces the stress of checking out each brand individually.
The point is, you improve your chances of appearing on the search list when you insert the right hashtags into your captions and posts.
As advantageous as this sounds, hashtags can damage your growth as well, especially when you use them too much. Also, if you use the wrong hashtags, your post will be classified wrongly. Eventually, your content could get reported as spam and your profile will be shadowbanned. Use hashtags wisely.
8. Post Trending Reels
Reels are trending. It’s one of the new features on the gram. Just like other platforms, there are trends, and to get your audience constantly thrilled when viewing your content, you have to be up-to-date.
Trends change. so, always identify the current ones and follow them. Nothing bores audiences faster than old trends.
Before posting new content, try searching for the latest trends and see how to use them in your posts. For reels, trends may be in the form of songs, content ideas, colors, etc. Let your creativity bring out the best in the short videos. And always strive to entertain your audience for better engagement.
9. Organize Giveaways and Contests
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Do you know that you appreciate your audience through giveaways and contests and benefit while at it? Giveaways always entice people to like and follow, especially since there’s a prize involved.
If you’re a new business trying to thrive in the Instagram market space, giveaways may not be easy to afford. The truth is, organizing giveaways and contests with cash prizes will be difficult, especially when you’re trying to avoid small business mistakes on the platform.
But the good news is that the giveaways can be sponsored. You can always form a partnership with another brand and reap the benefits as a team.
Conclusion
There you have it, your ultimate guide for boosting engagement. It is now time for you to act.
Don’t expect the results to be instant. But, undoubtedly, when you apply these tips consistently, you’ll gradually scale your engagement on each post.