8 ways to increase your engagement on Instagram

8 ways to increase your engagement on Instagram

I'm sure a lot of you know what Instagram is, most likely all of you do, so I won't get into too much about how the platform works.  Now if you're not on Instagram, and don't know what it is, it's basically a social platform where you post images for people to like and they will hopefully follow your profile in order to view more pictures you post at a later date.

As for the marketing side of Instagram, it's pretty interesting to think of all the ways you can increase your retention, engagement and conversion rates when posting.  In this discussion I'll be covering 8 ways you can increase your engagement in order to make your profile, and images, to come alive muahaha!

When posting to Instagram, you need to know what your target market is wanting to see.  I like to research the top influencers in order to get an idea of what they are posting since it's usually pretty similar to each other.  This will give you an idea of what will get the most engagement and conversions (hopefully).  Of course you'll have to test everything, but that comes in time and won't happen right away.

There are 8 main ways you can increase engagement, and they are:

1. The use of strong and some solid colors within your images
When you post, you want to stand out from the competition who will be seen along side your own images.  To do this you will need to be BOLD and put in some strong and solid colors so people get drawn to your image like a black hole pulling in a star.  Getting likes is good, but getting followers is great!  If you cut through the competition with bold colors, you will usually get some additional followers with every post.  I actually tested this multiple times on many different accounts and noticed that my images with bold and solid colors got more engagement than the fancy images which didn't stand out from the crowd.


2. Your use of CTA's (call to actions)
You will always need to be using call to actions if you're wanting to increase your engagement.  If you're not using any CTA's then you might as well be posting for fun and have no interest in increasing your engagement and possibly making a sale from your viewers.

Placing a link in your bio that leads to a specific landing page for Instagram visitors will help increase your conversions.  This is because they will see that you're welcoming them from Instagram, and letting them know you're friendly. 


3. Entice a Discussion to happen
One of the big things that I don't see everyone doing is asking questions on their posts.  They will simply post an image with some tags and they consider that a quality post.  What I like to do is ask a question right at the top of the description of the image and it usually gets people to answer within the comments. 

This is great for multiple reasons

1. Increased Engagement:  People will answer your question and some will likely talk with the other people who are commenting.  This increases your engagement and sometimes it will increase the amount of followers you have.
2. Increase Your Views: People who have questions on their photos will usually have more views because of all the users being tagged or people coming back when they see "JoeBob liked your comment" or something like that.  Your image will likely show up more for the tags you add since there is a good amount of engagement on your photo, which is always great.
3. Increase Your Followers: When posting a question on your image you'll get more conversations going.  Having more conversations will bring in more likes and more likes increase the likelihood of your image showing in the top images for your tags.  Getting more followers from each post will just increase the livelihood of your image showing up on top.  It's like a good snowball affect

4. Using the best hashtags
Hashtags can be added to each photo in order to be found for that specific keyword when typed into the search bar.  You can add up to 30 hashtags in total, this means you can have 30 in the description or you can have 25 in the description and have 5 more in the comments.  You get to post 30 but your users can post their own in the comments if they like (unless this was changed).

I like to use 10 to 20 in each of my images and they MUST be specific to the image for best engagement.  If you're posting a picture of a 2017 Mustang Convertible and you tag #gokarts, you probably won't have a great engagement.  You can use 30 hashtags in each of your images, but just make sure that you post something like "The following tags are simply to help out our profile" just so people know you're not trying to look spammy.


5. Use faces when possible
When you go to a new image, you're usually drawn to a persons face, it's normal.  So if you can utilize this automated behavior, you can increase your engagements.  By using a face in your images you can be seen in a larger crowd than you normally compete with.  This is because there will be a sea of images for people to cycle through and then they see a face, your image, and they click through.


6. Test, Test, and Test some more!
Not many people have the perfect formula right at the start.  You will need to test everything from your images to your text used in the descriptions.  Figure out the perfect length of the content for you images since most industries will have different attention spans.  Usually a short and sweet description is best, but you never know!


7. Cross promote whenever you can
If you're running a website or business you should already be on multiple social platforms, not just Instagram.  You will want to cross promote your social profiles in order to get as many people following you as possible.  The more followers you have on your profiles, the better, because it will usually increase your engagements and conversions. 

Not everyone uses Instagram as their primary source for a social media platform.  Someone may be on Instagram randomly and get to your profile, but not like something.  If you cross promote your facebook page, pinterest page, youtube page, etc. they might go to their preferred social media platform and follow you there.  If you're not cross posting your other pages, your traffic won't like your pages because they won't take the time to look for you.

I'm sure some of you are saying "I don't cross promote and I do just fine!" and that's great!  But you could be doing much better if you just took the few seconds to cross promote lol.


8. Post at the right times
Now this is going to be different for everyone because we all have different industries.  There will be a common trend for your posting times, you just need to figure out when the peak hours are and post your images then.

Once you put everything together, you will be posting the best images in your industry at the perfect times and increasing your engagement 10 fold  




In Conclusion:
Every niche and industry is different, but most of the points I touched on above will work for you.  You'll have to customize each point for your own target market, but that's pretty obvious I would think lol.  After you master everything in this discussion, I'm sure you'll see your followers sky rocket and your engagement jump quite a bit


Remember to follow me!
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/Razzy


Thanks!

Razzy