Picture it. You’ve spent long hours polishing new content, and now you’ve got something extremely exciting to share with your tribe. A seamless carousel, eye-catching graphics with secret sauce tricks from your niche, a shiny new tutorial, immensely creative Reels. You can’t wait to SHARE IT. No wonder you want to get as many eyes on it as possible to obtain satisfying post engagement and gratifying post reach. We all know it from experience: coming up with new content isn’t a piece of cake, ever. And it’s much, MUCH worse when you spend ages doing it, and then all you hear is radio silence once you post.
But let’s go back to our scenario for a sec.
You put all your heart into it: you type out an engaging caption, even longer than ever before, add your well-thought-out photos or videos, and here you go: it’s time to post. Enter and voila.
While you wait for the likes, shares, and comments to cascade in, you head over to the kitchen to make yourself a well-deserved chai latte (well, if you’re like Kate from our team, and you can’t live without these delicious spices), and as you’re taking the first sip, you smile to yourself as you imagine 50, no 100… Maybe even 1000 new followers appreciating your effort and rewarding it with authentic admiration. Plenty of hearts. True rapture.
So you skip back to your desk, sit down comfortably, wiggle your smartphone, and click on the ‘Gram icon.
And here comes the WTF thought.
What. What’s happening here? ZERO likes. ZERO comments. Zero, zero, zero. Not to mention (heavy-breathing): only 2 users have even SEEN your content. Two people out of 1000.
You start to lose your enthusiasm (let’s be honest: you lost it exactly ten seconds ago), sweat a little, and raise your brows. Why, WHY doesn’t anyone see your new content?!
Keep calm. We can fix it. Breathe in, and breathe out. Let the dark thoughts and heavy complaints wash over you and be with those feelings.
Then, it’s time to face the truth: most probably, Instagram’s algorithm isn’t hurting you. You’ve done it to yourself. Why did your strategy lead to this? Great question. What SHOULD you do? Come on in!
How can you get people to see and ENGAGE with your posts?
Let’s discuss it – when it comes to good tactics, you need to think about at least a couple of things. First of all, the initial issue may be the fact that you’re waiting for new people to come to your profile. It can be the biggest reason for you not having ANY traffic: you’re not promoting your content. You would prepare your perfect post, publish it and expect it to get a lot of views and engagement without doing anything more. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. At least when you’re not from the Kardashians family.
There are so many outstanding accounts out there that getting views by chance/ or by being found randomly (without hashtags and without any kind of self-promotion) simply doesn’t happen anymore. You need to MAKE IT happen. And the best news? You can! And we’re here today to show you how.
First of all, we need to analyze your profile’s situation.
Let’s do it now: Check your recent posts and see which posts got the higher engagement and most likes. What for? This will help you understand your audience a bit. If all your friends are fit-food lovers and you’ve been sharing donuts recipes, this can be a SERIOUS reason for the lack of comments or any engagement on your posts. That’s just an easy example, but yup: that’s how it works.
Let’s dive deeper. So what’s the MAIN problem?
We often see people blaming the Instagram algorithm for a drop in reach and engagement, and it’s well… Partly true. But only PARTLY.
The algorithm actually is trying to work in your favor – of course, if you know how to master the tricks to collaborate with it and discover how to tickle its fancy. There can be over a million reasons under the sun as to why people aren’t seeing your content. Nevertheless, the main reason is that you haven’t quite worked out how to become genuinely DISCOVERABLE.
Let’s dig deeper to really hit this home for your problem, find out where you’re leaving engagement and views on the table and discuss quick fixes you can IMPLEMENT right now to destroy the worries. So, if you’ve seen a decent drop in your engagement, likes, comments, and pairs of eyeballs, it’s probably one of the following:
1 // Your content isn’t encouraging engagement – and the algorithm notices that!
Want to discover where you’re dropping the engagement ball?
The truth is, Instagram profoundly cares about their users enjoying the time spent on the platform, so they will stay there the longest they can. Instagram wants users to log in, pull up a chair, and scroll, scroll, scroll. How can they make it happen? By displaying content that they actually LOVE to see. But hey, hey, wait…how does Instagram know if people want to see something?
They analyze what people engage with. Yup. The algorithm analyses what people like, comment, and share. It takes notice and serves up MORE of similar content to keep users fascinated and addicted. That way, users see content that they surely enjoy all the time and keep coming back for more ALL THE TIME.
Now back to YOUR PROBLEM.
It will hit hard. On the contrary: if your followers never interact with your posts, they’ll rarely see updates from you. That doesn’t mean they’ll never see posts from you. If you post something that’s earning a lot of engagement – REALLY A LOT – that post will likely appear in their newsfeed.
Essentially, that’s what Instagram algorithms (because actually, there are many of them) do. They take all the data they have about your community and wheel and deal to come up with the best possible newsfeed experience for every user.
Vital tip: It’s a bit similar to karma circle: you get out of Instagram what you put into it. Instagram engagement isn’t only about how people engage with your content, but it’s also about how YOU engage with other creators.
If you like and comment on other creator’s posts, you show your appreciation for them, engagement on your own posts will also increase. To increase engagement, you can also prepare captions that encourage others to like, comment or share your post.
Welcome EVERYBODY in, reply to every comment, engage with your followers, and pretty please: make sure they feel welcome. Instagram makes your content much more visible if it believes it’s what people enjoy seeing.
Top tip #2: What’s also crucial: ensure what your audience wants and needs. When you’re posting stuff your tribe doesn’t truly like, Instagram can see that your engagement is down, so it significantly reduces your content reach. And then you get down on your photos or videos when you see the stats in the insights section.
Always keep in mind that Instagram prioritizes showing content that gets a lot of engagement. Posts that get a lot of QUICK engagement (right after being published) will be shown to a broader audience. The more engagement you get from your current followers, the more new eyeballs will discover your content.
This is huge, HUGE!
You’ve started using risky hashtags – Instagram hates hashtags that have been used too often for spammish photos and graphics and for content violating Instagram’s policy. Nothing slaughters reach like using the banned ones – Instagram’s team is trying to make the Instagram community an extremely safe place where people can feel comfortable expressing themselves. They impose a set of rules in order to make the platform enjoyable for everyone. Breaking these rules can result in a lower reach of your posts, a warning, a temporary ban, or – in the most extreme cases – even permanent removal from Instagram. Some hashtags are blocked because Instagram doesn’t want you to search for illegal, pirated, and inappropriate content – so they put those hashtags out of action!
Using them will cause your reach to plummet. They ruin your reach.
Top tip: How do you know if a hashtag is banned?
The list of banned hashtags is long, and the problem with it is that it’s ever-evolving, and it changes daily. So how to avoid the risk and be 101% sure that your posts are banned-hashtags free?
There are online tools that can do the check for you: what is more, they have constant access to official Instagram’s list of banned hashtags updates, so you don’t have to worry whether your source of banned hashtags lists is valid.
Moreover, you can scan all your existing posts and detect all banned hashtags used in the past: so your posts will be entirely free of those forbidden ones. From our own experience and our clients’ ones, the tool most worth recommending is the one we’re using as well – IQ Hashtags. It’s the most innovative and intuitive tool out there – it’s definitely worth a try, as it will do all the hashtag scanning for you. More good news? IQ Hashtags gives you more helpful features to help you skyrocket your profile: you can find new hashtags trending in your niche, analyze your account’s data and see how your posts are performing in time. Give it a try.
3 // Your posts have become predictable, generic, and… A bit boring
As Jenna Kutcher has said once: your posts need to educate, entertain or empower your followers. So yeah. It’s all about E’ing it right. How to achieve it? Ask intriguing questions. Not just questions that are a clear cry for comments. Ask REALLY interesting questions relating to topics from your niche – because your audience can get easily bored too.
Diversify your publications, so that it isn’t just “look at my products”, “buy now”, “visit my website” CTAs, and short posts that are almost THE SAME every week. Do you need some inspiration? Here we go:
- Share behind the scenes posts and backstage of your daily work
- use storytelling; it has the power!
- hop on lives or IGTV
- create funny memes
- and focus on your followers as HUMANS
In a nutshell – you need to post content that encourages your followers to engage. Believe us when we say that.
To wrap-up!
We wanted to help you remove frustration by exposing the possible reasons your reach and engagement are dropping down. We hope we’ve also provided some quick fixes, and we believe these strategies will help you bring your good stats back to life and create stronger relationships with your followers. Play around with these strategies. Experiment. We’re SURE you’ll be pleased with how quickly you can increase the engagement of your posts. Because your goal is to have a highly engaged community and a profile with content so engaging that it knocks your followers’ socks off and makes them never want to leave, right?
