Three Things You Can Do to Improve Instagram Engagement
Improving Instagram engagement is one of the top concerns of businesses and social media marketers. The challenge is that organic reach is quite difficult to obtain on Instagram, but not entirely impossible.
In this article, I’m going to give you tips on how to improve your organic reach and increase your engagement on Instagram.
What do the numbers say?
Researchers have come to one conclusion: Instagram has become too big to ignore. Just take a look at these statistics:
- 31.8% of the population in the U.S. use Instagram, according to eMarketer.
- Instagram has risen to number two in the list of top platforms for marketers, according to Social Media Examiner’s 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report.
- 80% of Instagram users follow a business account, according to Instagram.
Social Media Examiner’s Industry Report further shows that generating organic reach was the top priority of most marketers in 2018, with 66% of them planning to increase organic activity. This should also be true in 2019 and beyond, especially since consumers’ attitude towards ads in social media has been changing since 2017.
If you’re managing an Instagram business account, there are ways you can generate organic reach. All you need to do is to listen to your audience and optimize your content for them.
Videos generate more comments
The Instagram Engagement Report 2018 by Mention says that video content has received the most likes on Instagram, although the average number of likes is higher for images than for videos. This tells us that popular video posts garner a very high number of likes.
While Instagram likes can give you insights on what your audience reacts to, Instagram comments is a better gauge of shareability.
According to the Mention report, of the 115 million Instagram posts in the study, videos got 46% of the comments, 29% of the comments are on images, and 22% are on carousel.
Of course, not all target audiences are the same so as I said before, listen to your target audience and find out which type of content they prefer. A combination of videos and images will probably work for most accounts.
It’s also important to define your goals on the platform in relation to our business. For instance, are the majority of your customers on Instagram? If so, what are they expecting from you?
Accounts that engage get more engagement
One of the most significant discoveries in the report by Mention is that 54% of the content with the most engagement is not from highly followed Instagram accounts, but from accounts with 10,000 to 50,000 followers. These are known as micro-influencer accounts. Accounts with millions of followers were included in the study, so this is an important finding.
According to Mention, micro-influencer accounts make up only 5.2% of the total sample, so the fact that they got 54% of the top posts proves that the micro-influencer industry is effective. Marketers who go for medium-sized accounts with targeted followers will do well instead of going for large celebrity accounts. More followers don’t always equate to more engagement.
According to a study by PR Daily, the reason why micro-influencers get more engagement is that they post everyday and they talk to their followers. Since they have few followers compared to accounts with millions of followers, micro-influencers take the time to come up with interesting and targeted content. They also build relationships with their followers, something that celebrities can’t do. Here are some things that micro-influencers do which most large and popular accounts aren’t doing:
- Respond to follower comments in a timely manner.
- Reach out to their followers through DMs.
- Comment on their followers’ posts.
- Encourage their followers to ask questions, and actually answer them.
Even when it’s not in your goal to become a micro-influencer, it still pays to learn from them, especially when you want to increase your engagement.
Tagging other users generates more Instagram likes
Regardless of what type of content you’re posting, whether videos or images, you can always @tag someone else and add hashtags. These Instagram features help increase your post’s visibility, and this is confirmed by Mention’s Instagram Engagement study.
Mention analyzed the median number of likes per post and the number of users tagged in the post. They found that there’s a high correlation between the two, specifically 0.5 to one likes for each tagged user.
However, the same study shows that the level of engagement actually drops when more users are tagged. For this reason, Mention suggests that users should only tag people who are directly relevant to the specific post.
As for hashtags, the Mention report found that using more hashtags doesn’t lead to a higher engagement rate, although it confirmed that most people use less than 30 hashtags.
The study, however, didn’t specify the placement of the hashtags, whether in the caption or in the comments section.
Increasing organic reach on Instagram
A brand can only find success on Instagram when they post content that appeals to their target audience’s tastes. Recently, and on other social media platforms, video content earns the most engagement, so every business must look into formulating a video content strategy.
Of course, you will still need to diversify and use images, podcasts, and even blogs in order to reach out to the majority of your audience.
Lastly, it’s important to learn how micro-influencers reach out to their followers. Don’t be tempted to make accounts with massive followers as the benchmark since their post-engagement can be attributed to their popularity, and not to specific Instagram marketing techniques.
Date: August 13, 2019 / Categories: Engagement, / Author: Disturbinsilence
