Instagram engagement can do miracles for brands. Recently, Oneplus has done a phenomenal job of marketing using Instagram where their Oneplus Nord brand gained a million followers in a month. They didn’t spend a single dollar on paid ads on Instagram, and their product launch has been a great success.
Observing brands like Oneplus Nord, & many others, as well as understanding the Instagram algorithm, we felt this article must be put out there for every brand looking to increase Instagram engagement.
In this article, we are listing 20 ways to increase Instagram engagement for brands. It is time to move past engagement groups, cutting corners, and buying likes & followers. Here’s what you should actually be doing.
Click here to download detailed infographic on tips to increase engagement on Instagram.
20 Ways To Increase Instagram Engagement
To make it easy for you to understand and implement these ways, we are dividing them up into 3 categories.
Jump to the desired category or keep scrolling for all 20 ways to increase Instagram engagement.
Increase Instagram Engagement Using Analytics
The first few ways to increase Instagram engagement are based on the dimensions of analytical data you need to understand and base your efforts upon.
1. Understand Your Followers
Any type of analytics available for Instagram, stock, and third-party, offer all the required metrics for your followers. The most important ones are “Age”, “Gender”, & “Location”. Based on these metrics you can have a basic understanding of how the majority of your audience thinks and you can be more relatable to them on Instagram. For better analytics & reporting you can use Statusbrew.
2. Analyze Top Posts
It is also important to have an understanding of your posts that have performed best in the past. To increase your Instagram engagement, you need to figure out the reason for their performance. Pay close attention to the content, caption, hashtags, and more. Also, notice the time and day they were posted.
3. Find Best Posting Time
While going through your analytics, make a note of the posting time for the top posts. Understand the patterns for when your posts are receiving maximum engagement. Try posting at those times. You can also schedule posts for being published at that time if you want to ease the process.
Increase Instagram Engagement With Communication
Let us now look at ways in which you can increase Instagram engagement by working on your brand communication. Here are some ways you can do just that:
4. Reply To All Comments & Messages
Replying to comments and messages opens a whole new way your audience can connect with your brand. This also gives you a chance to win them over and convert them into loyal customers. Your comment section is also a very important social media real estate where you can impress your profile visitors with care and positivity. If your comment section is filled with spam and negativity, its time you claim it back.
We’ll not miss our chance to advertise Statusbrew here. Our solutions help brands & teams manage thousands of comments and messages across profiles easily. There’s automatic moderation, conversation assignment, saved replies, team performance, engagement reports, and a lot more.
Explore Statusbrew For Instagram
5. Use Appropriate Hashtags
Hashtags can be a great tool for brand discovery. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand the concept of hashtags and the way they work on Instagram. To make the most out of hashtags on Instagram, here’s what you can do:
- Make sure only to use the related hashtags. Stay away from generic hashtags such as #like4like
- Your hashtags should be readable, short, and easy to type, eg. #denimlove vs #DenimLove
- Whenever possible, type hashtags on your own rather than pasting from somewhere. This actually makes a difference to the Instagram algorithm.
6. Start Conversations Using Captions
Instagram captions are a great way to begin a conversation and increase engagement on your posts. There are many ways in which your caption can start a conversation. You can ask your audience for their opinion. Or you can ask them to share similar experiences. You can ask relatable questions. Try different things and monitor your audience’s response to see what works best.
7. Encourage Community Building
Make your Instagram account a safe place for your brand loyalists to build a community. Enable your audience to communicate with one another about your brand. With Instagram offering so many features like sharing posts in stores, threaded conversations in comments, and more, you can easily build a strong brand community. Sharing user-generated content is also a very good way to build communities and increase Instagram engagement.
8. Engage With Other Brands
Brands that actively engage on social media are often seen engaging with one another. They leave light remarks and fun comments on each other’s posts delighting the audience for both brands. This also humanizes your brand and allows your audience to connect with it better. People also like to reply to such comments and they might even go viral.
9. Capitalize On Tags
Another trick you can keep up your sleeve to increase Instagram engagement is of tagging relevant influencers and content pages in your Instagram posts. This will put your content in a better discoverability range and will enable your audience to have conversations on Instagram.
10. Ride The Trend Wave
Social media is all about trends and Instagram is no exception. In every community, at any point in time, some kind of content is going viral. Many brands associate their content with such trends and win their audience over. You can also use these trends to increase engagement on Instagram for your brand page.
11. Be A Platform For Audience's Voice
If you come across messages by your audience, that resonate with your brand message & your campaign goals, make sure you share them. Provide your audience with a platform to amplify their voice on social through your brand. You’ll need to be careful with this one as to only share messages that meet community guidelines and resonate with your brand message.
Increase Instagram Engagement With Content
Here are some quick tweaks you can make to your content strategy to increase Instagram engagement and have a better social media presence for your brand.
12. Post Visually Appealing Content
Instagram is a very visually-focused social media platform. Your content will only catch the attention of your audience if it is pleasing to their eye at a glance. There is no excuse for posting low-quality images and poor graphics on Instagram, especially from a brand profile. It is clearly seen with almost all successful brand pages on Instagram that the visual quality of your content is the basic requirement for engagement.
13. Make A Feed Pattern
You can use any number of ways to send your brand message across to the audience. It isn’t only restricted to individual posts and stories on Instagram. You can also communicate your priorities and brand preferences using highlights sorting and feed patterns. Try creating a feed pattern that is instantly recognizable when someone opens your Instagram grid. This would not only create a unique brand image for your brand but will also spark a social conversation about your brand page.
14. Be As Consistent As You Can
Engagement on your Instagram posts is directly related to the reach you are getting for your posts. And to get sufficient reach, you need to beat the Instagram algorithm. A key aspect of keeping up with the algorithm is “consistency”. Being consistent with your posting times, your content quality, your reply time, & other actions on Instagram will help you to secure a wider reach on Instagram. The rest is simple. More people seeing your content, more chance you have to spark conversation, and increase engagement.
15. Make Shareable Content
The next way of increasing engagement on Instagram is to post content that intrigues curiosity and amazes people. If you are successful in posting such content, people will share your content on their profiles and with their friends thus increasing your reach, engagement, and brand recognition across Instagram. Not only this, but it will also help you gain and retain followers.
16. Run Contests & Giveaways
If you just started building a presence on Instagram, one quick way to grab attention and increase engagement on Instagram is to run small contests and giveaways. You can set goals for maximum engagement such as high number of comments and likes to be the winning criteria for these contests. If you choose to do this, make sure you advertise correctly and showcase the real winners after to promote genuineness of your contests.
17. Optimise Instagram Stories
Everyone in the social media industry has observed that stories have a greater reach than traditional posts on Instagram. Hence, you can use stories to promote your Instagram posts so that it reaches the proper audience. Announcing new posts on Instagram stories and giving a bit more context about them is bound to help you increase engagement for your Instagram profile.
18. Come Up With Authentic Campaigns
Nothing beats originality and relatability. Although a new campaign is fairly difficult as compared to riding the trend waves, they can mean a great deal for your brand image if successful. These campaigns can range from a social cause to even a movie release. You can celebrate a festival in your brand style or create a new one. All you need to know is what your audience will like or what will stick on social media.
19. Tell Brand Stories With Video
If you are not using video on social media in 2020, your brand is missing out on a lot. Video is a very powerful medium of storytelling. It can capture your audience’s attention and deliver your brand message in the most efficient way. Even Instagram’s algorithm prefers video content. If you want to increase engagement on Instagram, you must be serious about incorporating video in your Instagram content strategy.
20. Provide Value To The Audience
In the end, it all comes down to this - “Is your audience getting value out of your content?” If the answer is yes, they will stick around and engage with your content. You might not even have to use half of the ways mentioned above. All your Instagram engagement can be based upon this one question. The only condition is that your brand page on Instagram has high discoverability and your content delivery methods are on point.
In conclusion, these are the “20 ways to increase Instagram engagement” using analytics, communication, & content. If you have any questions regarding these ways or have a suggestion for us, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.
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