Hey, hey you. Yes, you!

Are you wondering why your followers don’t interact with your educational carousels? Why do they completely ignore all the effort you put into preparing a list of your insights? Why don’t they share them with the world? Yes? Then lucky you, you’re in the right place.

Okay, okay. We know. We’ll stop with the ancient times sales pitch. All kidding aside. We just thought that maybe it was amusing. 

But seriously.

Having a low organic reach and almost no engagement when you’re putting all your heart into educational content creation can really make you feel low, and trust us, you’re not alone, and we’ve been there too. But we’re coming with good news (old times sales pitch again?): Instagram is all about good strategy, and having low engagement just means you haven’t implemented the right strategy yet. 

When it comes to educational content, there are so many strategies and Instagram golden tips out there that figuring out your own strategy can be frustrating, time-consuming, leading to growing confusion over lack of comments and shares and less confidence in your decision to start creating anything in the first place. Yup. We know it. 

Good news once again: let’s talk about some practical ways that you can speed up your engagement-renewal process and save your precious time. 

Let’s go! Today we’ll discuss in detail:

• Is educational content a good way to go?
• How to gain more shares?
• How to position yourself as an expert in your niche?
• What to do when your audience doesn’t like your educational content?
• Can you neglect hashtag research and still grow?

In today’s article, we’re going to walk you through the things that are holding you back from creating a thriving Instagram profile with valuable educational content. And we’ll discuss how you can fix your process so that you can attract high-quality followers from your target audience (the ones that love carousels and all the educational insights you post)!

Why your educational content may not be getting high engagement? Let’s find out!

1. You haven’t positioned yourself as an expert, and your followers can see it

Trust is the number one factor you need. First, you need to build it between you and your followers. Most people want to know more about the creators behind the educational carousels and posts with tips & tricks, so show up, don’t be afraid to share behind the scenes of preparing your posts, your daily life, daily problems you solve. Share your reality – especially if it has something to do with the things you’re teaching in your posts! 

You’re you. What you have to say is always going to be unique and one of a kind, as long as it comes from your own unique perspective and experience. Your own storytelling. Your mission is to make people see that you’re an expert worth trusting, and you can share a lot of intriguing insights with them.

What to do if you struggle with impostor syndrome and you feel like you lack something? 

Reading leads to ideas. Read more – that’s our favourite trick! Every article, every blog post, every book makes you more self-confident, and full of exciting stories and pieces of advice to share!

You may be in the gaining trust phase – share the things you read, the podcasts you listen to, quotes you love. What for? That’s the easiest way to show off that you really like what you do, and you don’t pretend to be somebody you’re not. Authenticity is a good way.

 

 

2. Your audience doesn’t consist of your target followers

Follow for follow and other quick and easy random-followers attracting methods may seem tempting, but believe us: it’s not worth it at all. If you’ve been doing 4f4 in the past, and now you’re paying the price, you may know what we’re talking about. The number on your follower count is high, but the engagement isn’t. It can lead to serious frustration: why nobody from your audience cares about your posts?

The reason can be extremely simple: they aren’t your target followers. No one topic or niche is better than another – there are just different people, and some are interested in this, some are interested in that. 

Now comes the juicy part that everyone waits to hear about: when you don’t want to pay for past sins, how do you reach the right target audience?

You keep on creating content that will attract them, along with the right hashtags, to make it more discoverable. We’ll elaborate on that in a sec! 

3. You neglect hashtag research 

“Oh, the elusive hashtag research. This is probably going to be the most challenging thing to get used to when preparing better performing educational content”. 

Are those your thoughts? Good news: that’s far from the truth! Let’s go back to the basics. 

Rule number one: you need to use relevant hashtags that match your content. 

Just like on Google, Instagram uses keywords (hashtags) to help sort content and distribute posts when users are looking for something. Unless you’re a celebrity or a Hollywood actress, and you go viral off the bat, hashtags are most often your greatest chance of getting your content seen by new eyes. 

Particularly if you don’t have a large follower base, you can create the most educational, polished, and prettiest content in the world, but nobody from your target audience will discover it if you don’t post hashtags.

You’ll be surprised by how many people still use them to seek out new posts and new accounts to follow – the discovery process is still alive!

4. Your audience isn’t used to seeing educational content created by you

Content pivoting isn’t the easiest thing to do. You may have multiple strings to your bow, and once you decide to modify your leading niche, your followers may get surprised or even a bit angry. You may lose some of them. The thing is: don’t worry too much, you’ll attract new ones from your new target audience!

That’s the first big lesson: you need to understand who you should actually write for. And then focus on attracting those people with the right hashtags and maybe even cross-collaborations with other creators from your new niche.

Educational content creators should stick together!

That’s it for today! Trust the process. We know you’re not afraid of rolling up your sleeves and putting in some great work to get good at Instagram educational content strategy.

Are there any burning questions about Instagram hashtags or engagement you would like us to answer? Let us know, we’re gathering topics for upcoming Instagram lessons!