Top 7 Surefire Ways to Grow Your Instagram Engagement

Top 7 Surefire Ways to Grow Your Instagram Engagement

So, you have an Instagram account up and running, but you need it to stand out. If you are looking for the most foolproof ways of growing Instagram engagement on your account, you are at the right place. Instagram’s engagement is measured by the way the audience responds to what you post online. It includes them becoming your followers, commenting on your posts, putting likes, and sharing them, among others. If you want to keep track of how well your account is performing on the social platform, keep track of your performance metrics and insights. Instagram lets you study metrics on your comments, saves, and shares. You can also see how your Instagram Stories views and even DMs are stepping up your visibility on the platform. Thus, planning for increased engagement is easier for you now! All you have to do is figure out what works for you best.

Here are 7 ways you can level-up your Instagram engagement without worries.

1. Buy Engagement

You can buy followers, likes, and shares for nearly all social platforms available. There are countless services available that sell engagement for Instagram too. Buying likes is most popular among businesses and personal accounts alike because it is easy to buy cheap Instagram likes. But when you do plan to invest in any purchase, remember:

• Sudden unexplained inflation in engagement numbers will get the platform to be suspicious of you. Your account may run the risk of being suspended or banned if any fake activity is detected. Avoid this by:
  • Buying likes in believable numbers.
  • Purchasing in bulk but ensuring that the engagement promised does not arrive all at once.
• Checking the credibility of the business selling you the engagement is essential. Your source should be a reliable one. There are several tricksters out there ready to take your money and leave you high and dry.
• The engagement generated on your account is a go-to metric for the audience to evaluate your post-performances and account credentials. In other words, the more followers you have to engage with your feed, the more people trust your account. Invest in organic engagement hence. It would not make sense if you had 500 followers but only 2 or 3 likes on your posts. The potential audience is quick to analyze your follower-like, follower-comment, and like-comment ratios, just like the platform’s analytic algorithms.

Buying engagement in the form of likes can only be a temporary solution. It can be a means to get things rolling for your account. To make yourself stand out as a famous brand, you must create content that attracts engagement spontaneously. Buying engagement cannot be a replacement for a long-term strategy. Your end goal must be honest brand loyalty and not just bought numbers that build your social presence.

2. Use Relevant Hashtags

One of the best strategies to lure new audiences to your account on Instagram is using relevant, target-centric hashtags on your posts and Stories. This is one of the easiest ways to generate more engagement with your activity. You are likely to find more followers and more customers for your business if you use the right hashtags. What hashtags essentially do is organize your stories, photos, and videos by categories. Hashtags, in other words, function like a virtual directory for Instagrammers. They discover content that they need by using hashtag searches. Consequently, you should use hashtags with the intent to be discovered by your target audience. While using hashtags, you must keep the following in mind:

• Relevant hashtags will bring your content up on feeds of people who may have never interacted with your account before.
• Hashtags on private accounts do not make the post appear on searches. It would be best if you made your account public first.
• You can use up to 30 hashtags on your posts and 10 on your Stories.
• You can use numbers in your hashtags but not special characters.
• You can create your hashtags. Use this strategically to make yourself trend on the platform.

3. Use Geotags

Geotags are not hashtags, but you can include a geographical hashtag on your posts if you wish. Instagram allows your content to reach an audience worldwide, but sometimes you need to market yourself in more concentrated geolocations. To attract audience engagement, which is more location-specific, take advantage of Instagram’s geotagging feature. You need to enable your device to track you locationally on the map to advantage this feature entirely. Benefits of using geotags include:

• You can tag your location on the go.
• Instagram algorithms will work in a way that your posts will appear more prominently on feeds of local users.
• As the location data is derived from your device, you can only use this if you have let Instagram have permission to make your location public. So, you can run a public account and still choose not to share location details if it does not work in your interest.
• It is easier to locate local customers and influencers for your business.
• It’ll help to popularize the physical address of your business.

4. Create Shareable Content

Creating shareable content may sound like an easy thing to do, but it requires careful planning and execution. It is not enough to change your post settings to public or making it shareable. You have to publish content that the audience naturally feels like sharing on their social feeds. You also need to ensure that the post meets Instagram’s algorithms for maximum traction and visibility for organic discovery and sharing. Here are a few things you can do to set the pace for sharing content:

• Share what you post. If you need to use apps to help you do this, then investing in a good app is worth it. Unless you push your posts first, you cannot expect strangers to bump your post up for you.
• Research audience behavior. Schedule your post sharing by observing the maximum activity periods of your target audience. Get posts organized and line them up if necessary. Schedule posts consistently over time so that your audience begins to anticipate your new posts.
• Find out what kind of storytelling works best with your target audience. Are inspirational quotes the USP you need? Do polls and surveys get you more traction? What kind of posts does your audience feel like sharing on their own social accounts in addition to liking it on your Instagram feed?
• Give your audience a voice. Feedbacks, acknowledgments, shoutouts, and appreciation posts for your audience will likely find a share from the member in the spotlight and their swell wishers on.
• Generate debates on trending topics or opinion-based issues. You can even skillfully use controversies in your content. As long as you are able to appeal to your target audience, the content will work for you.

In order to encourage shares, what you publish needs to be useful to your audience. As such, certain kinds of posts find more organic shares than others. These include:

• How-to posts and videos.
• Problem-solving posts.
• Posts that give the audience an incentive for sharing. This could be an entry in a raffle, a shoutout, a giveaway, and so on.
• Posts with a visible call-to-action do better when it comes to getting shared by the audience.

Create engaging graphics and videos using tools like Instagram polls, emojis, and stickers to market yourself strategically.

5. Use Instagram Stories

To get the right kind of audience engagement, you need to build yourself a loyal returning audience base. You can gain organic followers quickly by focusing on the feature of Instagram Stories. Insta Stories is a full-screen visual post feature that disappears in 24 hours. If you need it to last longer on your account, you can turn it into a Highlight. It does not show up on the feed, so no matter how frequently you post, you cannot annoy your followers into unfollowing you. They will not get spammed by your Stories activities! But people are curious about Stories and tend to view them. That is why stories are so popular and why you should make them an integral part of creating brand awareness for yourself.

To build engagement with Instagram Stories, it is a good idea to:

• Keep your posts aesthetically aligned with your brand. Let your viewers visually identify you by your color scheme, font style, or video-taking style.
• Try to arrange your Stories like a storyboard. Prepare your content ahead of time. Well-thought-out line-ups of Stories will highlight your purpose and connect to your audience.
• You can put up multiple shots in a beginning-middle-end format to build a Story arc.
• Create content that is unique and identifiable as yours, even if your subject matter is a trending topic everyone else is speaking about. Think of why you want your audience to favor you and give you their likes and shares over your competition.
• Boost your website and other handles by posting links in your Stories as this is the only place apart from your business account’s bio where you can put a clickable link on Instagram.
• Create CTA posts in Stories. Use tools that keep your audience engaged. You can add music, polls, mood, emojis, stickers, and many other frills to your Stories.
• You can also partner up with other Instagrammers to reach out to a larger audience while promoting mutual Stories. Collaborations are a great way to attract a new audience to your brand.
• Post Stories that ask the audience to engage and leave responses. Take a quick survey or a quiz. Ask for opinions. Engaging Stories will make your audience naturally respond to your posts.

6. Use Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels is a feature that lets you record and publish clips of 15 to 30-second long on Instagram. You can even set these clips to the music of your choice, though not all accounts currently have access to this feature. Reels are a fun and entertaining way to draw the audience’s attention to your brand. What’s more, reels are another type of post that appears on account feeds based on their popularity, location, and hashtags. People who do not follow you and never interacted with your posts can see your reels. Hence, to encourage engagement using reels, keep the following tips in mind:

• Create reels on trending topics and challenges, or start a trend of your own. If you have an idea, go for it. You never know what would click with the audience!
• Keep the reels entertaining. Add an unexpected twist or use humor. It would help if you made the short clip attention-grabbing.
• Take advantage of editing tools to ensure your clip has good light and audio quality.
• Vertically shot videos are seen to trend more, so hold your phone in the right direction while shooting your clip.
• Add texts to filters that add to the reel but do not overcrowd it. Add what will not be a distraction from the main action /message in the clip.
• Reels are designed to be experimental, so go ahead and try something new.
• Low resolution and blurry reels do not do very well in getting audience responses.
• Keep Instagram Guidelines in mind while creating reels. If you choose to repost videos with watermarks and logos of other social sites, the site is programmed to bring their visibility quotient down automatically.

7. Cross Post

In an age when social media has become a second skin, cross-sharing across multiple handles is the best way to bring organic engagement to your Instagram account. As a sister company to Facebook and WhatsApp, Instagram already has certain cross-platform utility tools that make it easier for audiences on these sites to interact with content. Take advantage of simultaneous casting by sharing the links to your Instagram posts and Stories on any other social media platform you have an account on. You can even integrate email-marketing into your Instagram marketing strategies to maximize audience reach and gain organic viewer engagement.

Summing Up

The strategies mentioned above can get your audience engagement to increase but to sustain the increase, you must ensure that you are not compromising your posts’ quality. As you build brand awareness, you will be building brand expectations. Do not let your target audience down, and you will see your performance metrics on Instagram rise up in your favor. Now that you have the best tips for a sure-shot boost to your Instagram feed, go ahead and create some fantastic posts!