How many times have you heard that engagement rate is the most valuable factor, giving you a clear insight about the amount of your meaningful social media interactions? We bet many more than you can count on both hands. We hear it all the time, although not many of you decide to pivot your Instagram strategy. Don’t panic – sometimes drastic changes are not necessary to deliver surprising results. Sometimes your followers need more CTAs or more clear prompts about what they’re supposed to do with the content you’re creating. We have also noticed that sometimes we focus on attracting new followers so much that we forget about activating the current ones.
Let’s say it loud: your goal is not about closing sales on Instagram – it’s mostly about creating authentic connections and genuine trust. Trust and engagement – believe us when we say this is the currency of the future. It sounds cliché, although it’s more than true. Let check it out for yourself.
Why does engagement matter so much?
When your followers don’t have any history of commenting or liking your content, the algorithm is most likely to consider them not interested in your posts. The result? They won’t see your new material high on their news feed. Moreover, it applies to instastories as well – our marketing research shows that oftentimes people only watch the first ten, up to fifteen stories. Long story short: people need to prioritize your account in order to watch your content. In other cases, they’ll just miss it.
Our clients often complain: I have 2 000 followers, but only 50 people watch my stories! How is it even possible? What am I doing wrong? That’s actually not even a surprising case – that’s the average number of views for a profile that doesn’t focus on building an engaged tribe.
Today we’ll be discussing the practical engagement hacks you can implement right now. Functional and straightforward – and providing results, that’s what we like the most about them. Our goal is not only to boost the engagement of your posts but your instastories views as well – so let’s go!
Use instastories to promote your regular posts and the other way round
Have you noticed that sometimes people liking your posts and people watching your instastories are two totally different groups of followers? Some users prefer scrolling through the instafeed, and there are ones who log into the app only to watch instastories – it’s just the format they like better because it’s more direct and frequently more spontaneous. Use each format to promote each other. In your regular post, mention something worth seeing on your instastories + the other way round, show your new regular post on your instastories (with some call to action, a question, a poll, or a different accurate comment you’ve just made up!)
It’s a working strategy: we’ve tried it for ourselves, and many of our clients have tried this method, and it boosts the views significantly. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it because sometimes it may end up being annoying or boring for some of your followers, so do it once in a while, not every day, and hard pass: not a few times a day!
Smaller hashtags can do wonders for your account. Give yourself an honest answer: would you prefer 1000 random additional views or 250 that are from people authentically interested in your niche and are most likely to follow you after seeing or reading your post?
You can’t use the most popular and huge ones – simply because “recent posts” category view for them gets flooded with too many posts (sometimes 1 000 / a second!). Yours will get lost in the ocean of other posts too quickly, making it impossible for people to notice it.
Hashtags play the most significant role in getting people who don’t follow you to see your content. You have to attract them – and use hashtags they’re most probably typing into the Instagram Search Engine when they look for inspiration or knowledge from a particular field (your field).
Sometimes – and yes, we’ve seen cases like that! – one single really well-targeted hashtag can give you extra 1 000 – 50 000 views from people who don’t follow you. Imagine what 30 consciously chosen hashtags can do.
We’ll also mention that your hashtag research can be a lot more effective if you use some hashtag research tool – it will save your time + you’ll discover hashtags you’ll have no idea other ways. Can we recommend any particular ones, in good conscience? Absolutely. IQ Hashtags is the one we always share, whoever asks – not only because it absolutely does excellent researches and is the most extended and professional one out there, but also because it contains free plans, meaning you can test it out for yourself without paying a dime for it – that’s an excellent option for the beginning. You can upgrade it whenever you want.
+ Remember that you should always use only hashtags really matching the contents of your posts – so you can’t use hashtag #foodiesinportugal when you upload a photo of your Greek holidays. It will be considered as spam, and your reach may be much lower – so avoid random hashtags at all costs.
Make people spend more time consuming your content
What do we mean? The algorithm checks how much time each of your followers spends on your content. If they read your captions, leave a comment or come back to look at your photos again, the algorithm notices that your material must be engaging and exciting. That’s remarkably precious.
So how to achieve this result? Write more involving captions – ask questions, include CTAs (calls to action), try to evoke emotions. Create aesthetically pleasing carousels filled up with practical knowledge your audience may need. Give them the solutions to their problems, research what they want to read about.
When it comes to instastories: use the tools Instagram gives you! The quiz feature, poll feature, question feature. The quiz feature kills two birds with one stone: when reading four different options, people spend much more time than reading only two ones or dragging the sliders with emojis. A quiz is much more involving: they have to think about it to choose the answer consciously.
Know that those pieces of advice can drastically increase your engagement – take the tips you learned here and use them to start building your Instagram presence. Your statistics will unquestionably thank you for what you did!
Psst, we’re posting new tips & tricks a few times a week, so stay tuned for lots of credible materials coming this way!
