In this day and age, your social media accounts are an important way of demonstrating social proof—that is, that people like and trust your brand. Part of that is having a sizable following, but more importantly, you should have high engagement from your following. Engagement refers to likes, shares, and comments on your posts. It demonstrates that your followers are real people who take a genuine interest in your content.
If you’re regularly not seeing much—or even any—engagement on your Instagram posts, you definitely need to figure out why and focus on increasing engagement on Instagram. An active account without likes, comments, and shares creates a negative impression, and could be discouraging consumers from connecting with your brand. Of course, even if your followers are interacting with your posts, there’s always room for increasing engagement on Instagram even more.
Beyond social proof, engagement is also crucial to the success of your social media marketing. If your content isn’t resonating with your audience, they aren’t clicking through to your site, or forming a stronger relationship with your brand, or sharing your posts so they increase your brand awareness and reach potential new customers or clients, and so on.
So, here are some pointers for increasing engagement on Instagram.
How to Boost Engagement on Instagram
- Share content of genuine interest to your followers. They’re not there just to see ads for your brand. They’re there for information, entertainment, stunning visuals, and other content that provides them with some sort of value.
- Use these tips to build your Instagram following with people who want to connect with your brand.
- Post high-quality, eye-catching images. Remember, Instagram is primarily a visual platform.
- Create an Instagram persona for your audience. Review the audience statistics in Instagram Insights. Look at accounts of the people who engage with your brand to see what they care about and are most drawn to.
- Use relevant hashtags—including trending hashtags when it makes sense—to attract more attention from people interested in the subject of your posts.
- Put real effort into your post captions. Be quick and clever or long and interesting, or ask a question—whatever the approach, make it worth reading and make your audience think. And stick to your brand voice and personality.
- Be consistent in your branding. That includes across different social media sites (use the same handle, logo, etc.), and from post to post on Instagram (standardize the look and formatting for the posts you create).
- Post once or twice per day, fairly consistently. Regular posting builds engagement, but excessive posting annoys people and will get you unfollowed.
- Check Instagram Insights to see when the most followers are on to figure out the best times of day to post.
- Reply to comments that your followers leave, and try to say something of substance.
- Interact with other accounts, especially by leaving valuable comments on their posts.
- Tag brands, influencers, and other accounts when relevant.
- Take advantage of the different content formats. In the beginning, Instagram only allowed photo posts. But as of this writing, there are five supported types of posts: photos, videos, Instagram TV, Instagram Reels, and Instagram Stories; use all (or most).
- Pay attention to your results. Note which posts get high engagement, which ones get moderate engagement, and which ones get little to none. Figure out what they have in common, and use that to guide your Instagram strategy.
- Ask people to like, share, or comment on your posts. Yes—the simple act of requesting it often makes it happen!
