Instagram has become one of the top social media platforms for sharing content. It not only has an excellent engagement rate, but can also help raise brand awareness, grow your audience and gain more website traffic. It’s a useful tool to showcase your product and service, especially when Instagram advertising features are involved too.
Engagement is key if you want to build an audience that trusts your brand and create relationships with your customers. There are certain things you can do to increase your engagement on Instagram and maximise the level of interactions you receive.
Know When Your Audience are Online
Like its sister social media site Facebook, you can check on Instagram’s Insights when your audience are active on the platform. This means you can tailor your posting schedule to the time they are online and scrolling. When you identify the most appropriate time to post, then it’s about how many posts you want to share a day and according to research, one to two posts a day is best practice for those wanting to stay active to their followers.
Increase your Engagement on Instagram with Stories
Instagram Stories are a great place to engage with your audience as you can use different features which can entice your followers to interact with you. There’s questions, sliders, polls, GIFs and music that can be added onto your post so your audience can answer, give their feedback and vote on questions you ask them.
Furthermore, you can direct people through to your latest post and tag partners and influencers to get them involved in the discussion too.
Know Your Hashtags
Hashtags are the perfect way to get your brand out there and improve your engagement on Instagram. All people have to do is click a hashtag to see a number of posts by users and businesses all relating to that word. However, it’s important to get your hashtags right and with a limit of thirty, you want to make sure every single one counts. You want them to be optimised for your brand and relevant to the post you’ve shared.
Also, you have to strategise where you’re going to input your hashtags. If you’ve got thirty hashtags to share, then it’s best to put them in the comments in your post so the copy doesn’t look messy. However, if you’re sticking to less tags or using branded ones to create more engagement, then they will be more useful in the caption. You can now also hashtag in your Story, so more people can notice your twenty-four-hour content too.
You can follow hashtags too and interact with other users who are discussing the same topic or are involved in the same industry.
Don’t Forget It’s Instagram
It can be easy to cross-post to Instagram from your other social media platforms, but most of the content that is optimised for sites like Facebook and Twitter won’t be as successful on the photo-sharing app. Instagram is all about visual content, so having heavy captions and uninteresting photos will not appeal to your audience on the app as much as it would on Facebook. Therefore, you should keep your feed aesthetically pleasing – consider a consistent theme to help enhance your brand and look into sharing video content.
Read more about Instagram for your business in our article, or contact us if you need any assistance with your social media platforms.
