How To Increase Your Instagram Engagement 

Wondering how to increase your engagement on your Instagram account this2021?

Remember that Instagram is one of the best places to advertise your brand online, gain a loyal following, and build a community that understands your business.

A lot of people mix up followers with engagement on social media. They think having a large follower on Instagram is the same thing as having engagement. No, it’s NOT. 

The truth is that the number of Instagram followers you have means nothing if those followers aren’t paying attention and engaging with the content you share

Engagement is a much better measure of success on Instagram than the number of followers.

The higher your engagement the more your brand becomes more visible and generates more sales for your business.  

When your followers like comment, or share your post on Instagram it means they are interested in your content.

A smaller audience paying close attention to your content will be more likely to buy from you or work with you.

In this blog post, I am going to share 10 interesting ways how you can increase your engagement on Instagram.

10 Ways to Increase Your Instagram Engagement 

1: Get to know Your Audience

As a business owner, before you take your business to social media, you must be able to identify your audience.

When you identify your prospective customers, you can create content that would resonate well with them. 

The demographics of your target audience will help define the type of content you post, your brand voice, and even what days and times to publish.

Flowing from the above, even if your audience is low, you would get more results than when your followers are high and you create content that doesn’t meet their needs.

2 Like and comment on up to 10 posts within your industry

One way you can increase your engagement on Instagram is to engage with other people’s posts.

You can’t grow your engagement without first engaging with other people.

The best way to do this is by interacting and engaging with other people in your community. 

That means liking and commenting on their posts, and sharing your admiration and your thoughts via DM.

Interacting with existing conversations will help position you as thoughtful, trustworthy, and someone worth following, leading to higher engagement on your posts in return.

Doing this doesn’t have to be hard, you can start by scanning your feed and find five posts you could like or comment on. You can also find posts or accounts that have the same interests as you by searching for popular hashtags relevant to your field.

3  Post Consistently and Be Strategic about it 

The more you post, the more opportunities your followers have to engage. 

The algorithm behind the Instagram feed means that engagement across all content types is quite heavily affected by when you post.

Try and aim to find your brand’s personal best times.

Another good way is looking at Instagram Insights to track your own content’s performance as well as basic data concerning your followers, such as when they’re most often online.

Commit to a consistent schedule to keep your feed fresh and your followers intrigued.

4.Respond to every comment or DM you receive

As you start engaging with other peoples’ posts, more people start to follow you, comment on your post, and DM you. 

When someone does take the time to engage with your content, make sure you respond to their comment or DM.

This helps build a strong relationship between you and your audience. 

Engagement is one of the indices used by the Instagram algorithm to prioritize posts. 

Therefore when the algorithm sees people commenting on your posts, it knows that those posts must be more valuable, so it promotes them in your audiences’ feeds.

5 Host contest and Giveaways 

Hosting contests and giveaways is another way to get your audience more engaged. 

The more you engage your audience the more you stay relevant. There are different ways you can engage your audience on Instagram.

• One is to set up a contest. Instagram is a great place to host contests and giveaways. 

You can pick a product or service, reach out to your users on all your social accounts, and tell them to post Instagram pictures of the most creative way that they can think of using your product using a unique hashtag. 

How this works is that, your customers indirectly market for you by posting your videos and photos about your services and product and how they are using them and what they gain from using them and then share it with their friends who might share it with their friends too. 

You can give the winner a gift card to buy more of your product as an incentive. 

In this way, you are engaging your audience and marketing at the same time.

• Another way is to set up a poll. You can take two of your product that is similar(same characteristics)

 e.g. A red and blue shoes, then you ask your audience which one they prefer out of the two products and why.

• Another way is to pay attention to which kinds of content get the most interactions and create more of them.

6 Tell stories

“Everybody loves a good story”. Ever heard of that phrase. Remember that your audience is human beings who are moved by emotions.

Telling them a story is more likely to get them to engage with your post.

You should captivate audiences through images, video, and text, rather than simply preaching marketing missives at them. 

To increase your engagement rates, become a storyteller, offering micro-stories via your captions, videos, Instagram stories, and profile.

People crave connection, and storytelling is a way to create this experience. 

When people feel an emotional connection to your content, they are much more likely to engage with it and share it.

7 Make use of Hashtags

Strategically using hashtags when posting can help you increase your number of followers as well as engagement. 

Hashtags are essential in increasing your Instagram engagement because Hashtags make your post show up on a content page of that Hashtags which automatically exposes it to a much larger audience. 

For example, if you post a video about baking cakes using #bakingcakes your video would appear to anyone who has clicked on or searched for the #bakingcakes hashtag. 

Creating unique Hashtags for your brands can easily help you get the word out. 

A good place to start is by researching what your followers and competitors are using and once you are done input your findings into the search bar.  

Instagram would show you some related Hashtags you can use. Make sure you find the one with low competition and high engagement.

Note that the number of Hashtags you use in a post matters, while Instagram allows up to 30 Hashtags, using too much of it might be tagged unprofessional and can be considered “spammy”. 

Experts have advised using Hashtags between 7 and 11 that can bring you the best value.

8. Share Great Visuals

Visuals include images, videos, infographics, carousel, etc.  

Instagram, in case you didn’t notice, is a visual medium. so your visuals must be top-notch. 

You don’t have to be a graphics designer or a video editor to make great images and videos.

With your regular smartphone, you can record and edit awesome videos that will deliver your message to your target audience effectively.

Viva Video, Inshot, Filmorago, So Loop, are among hundreds of great apps you can use to create videos.

Canva, Photoshop, Illustrator are awesome apps for making great images.