10 Strategies to Increase Your Instagram Engagement

Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users out of which 80% are already following at least 1 brand. Sounds like a big deal, right? Well, it is, and if your business is not on Instagram yet, then you are lagging so much that you can’t even imagine.

To stand out on Instagram, engagement plays an important role. You can buy legit Instagram followers to boost your account’s engagement easily.

Engagement on every social media, especially Instagram is measured by likes, shares, and comments from users on your posts. In this article, we are going to tell you 10 strategies to increase engagement on Instagram.

Post consistently

Posting consistently means staying in front of your audience all the time so that they do not lose interest in you. As a marketer, you should ensure to post regularly and keep your audience engaged with your content.

At least 1-2 posts should be uploaded on Instagram each day to increase engagement, however, you can post more than that. Sometimes, marketers ignore the value of quality and focus on quantity. Well, this is not right because your followers will unfollow you if you post bland content. This is where a content calendar or social media calendar comes in handy. A social media calendar is like a content strategy in which you save all your upcoming content plans to save yourself from running out of content.

Don’t preach – tell stories instead

Instagram is flooded with mediocre brand messaging that makes marketers forget that this social network is a “visual inspiration platform”. On Instagram, you should attract audiences through images, videos, and text, not by preaching.

To increase engagement on Instagram, become a storyteller, offering “micro-stories” via your captions, Instagram stories, posts, videos, and profile. People today, crave connection and relationships. Storytelling is a perfect way to create this experience and connect with your audience. When people feel an emotional connection with your content, there are more chances that they will buy from you and share it with their peers too.

Build a strong brand

Clarity, creativity, and consistency are extremely important factors for businesses aiming to build brand awareness on Instagram. An erratic, haphazard approach does not work. Try to focus on main areas such as presenting your profile, mastering hashtag use, and creating style patterns that could help to keep your images look fresh. You should also interact regularly with your followers to build trust, engagement, and loyalty.

A brand that has a strong connection with its audience through content and interaction, is strong because its followers won’t leave it for someone else. Respond to your customers’ feedback and resolve their queries to maintain the relationship with trust and loyalty.

Have a visually consistent Instagram feed

Instagram is a visually-driven platform that accolades aesthetically pleasing content. Today, users are attracted to authentic expression and diverse perspectives.

Though natural-looking photos and less edited content is gaining more engagement, a consistent-looking Instagram feed tops the game. According to a report by WebDam social media, 60% of the best-performing Instagram brands have a consistent style every time they post keeping their feed consistent too.

To achieve a consistent look, you can use photo editing apps like Adobe Lightroom and VSCO Cam. Vintage camera apps, such as Huji Cam, have also gained enough popularity among gen Z as it purposefully adds grains and dust to your photos giving them an enviable aesthetic appearance.

Choose the right hashtags

Selecting hashtags for your Instagram posts can make or break its performance and eventually your engagement. Hashtags can make your post appear on the top or sink it to the bottom without a trace.

Do not make your hashtags too generic, i.e., using only extremely popular hashtags such as #christmas or #fashion as your post will face extremely high competition. Instead, use a mix of trending, generic, relevant, and industry-specific hashtags to connect with your target audience. Do not use irrelevant or unnecessary hashtags just for the sake of engagement, this will only degrade its performance.

The number of hashtags you use also plays an important role. Though Instagram allows for 30 hashtags for each post, a cluster of tags under your caption looks both untargeted and unprofessional.

Create a branded hashtag

A branded hashtag is often an important part of a successful Instagram marketing strategy. The best beginning point is a general branded hashtag. It should be short, memorable, and must include your brand name in some form.

A branded hashtag makes your content more discoverable, creates a stronger community around your brand, and drives more traffic to your profile. Place the hashtag in your bio and in the captions of your posts to organize your content easily. Starting a campaign with your own branded hashtag is attractive and professional.

Focus on user-generated content

User-generated content is like the holy grail for marketers on Instagram. It is a chance for followers to become more deeply with your brand. This reduces marketing costs because content gets created and approved by your target audience only.

User-generated content also acts as social proof and more people get convinced to buy your product. This type of content can be user testimonials, feedback, reviews, pictures with your brand, etc. UGC is a brilliant marketing strategy that can help increase engagement on Instagram drastically while cutting your marketing costs too. It is like a word-of-mouth promotion through your audience without your personal involvement.

Use SEO to ‘win’ Instagram

Though SEO on Instagram doesn’t sound obvious, creating an SEO strategy is extremely important for this increasingly competitive platform.

You need to take care of several things on your Instagram profile and posts to rank high in the Instagram search results and gain the most engagement. Firstly, the two key areas that affect SEO the most are your username and account name. Your username or “@” name should clearly reflect your business’s operation sector. Try to make it short and memorable. Your account name appears under your profile picture and it should reflect your account handle and industry.

In your Instagram bio, it is best to add suitable keywords and hashtags to make your account easily searchable. Adding relevant keywords to the captions of your posts is the key strategy to make them reach your target audience.

Use Instagram video subtitles and closed captions

With video content significantly dominating the online space, audio’s popularity is getting lesser. A significant number of users prefer not to enable its sound while viewing a video. That is why subtitles are gaining much popularity among marketers as it enables core messages to be delivered on-screen along with visuals.

Even if videos have enabled sounds, sometimes, it is difficult to understand what is being said. Subtitles are extremely helpful in this case making subtitles and captions a great option to increase engagement on Instagram or can you simply get Instagram followers for your account from viralyft.com.

Embrace Instagram AR filters

Instagram introduced the creation of AR filters to the public last year with its Spark AR Studio. Since then, AR has become extremely popular on the app, with some of the best filters having over 1 billion views. Marketers have also started using Instagram AR filters to promote their brand among the target audience. They offer users to try their products virtually before buying, resulting in more lead generation and an increase in engagement.

Conclusion

Instagram has the highest engagement rate of 4.21% amongst all the social media platforms. Gaining an organic audience is a difficult and tedious task but once accomplished can do wonders for your brand. So follow these strategies mentioned above and utilize Instagram to get the most out of its marketing potential.