How Marketing Experts Get More Instagram Engagement

Improving Instagram engagement is one of the most logical things to do if you want more people to see your content. I can teach you several tactics in getting more engagement on Instagram, and a few that comes right off the bat are:

• Having a regular posting schedule.
• Collaborating with other Instagram accounts.
• Cross-promoting on other social media platforms.
• Posting high-quality photos.

However, the best tips are always those that are from experience, so here are some Instagram engagement tips from marketers themselves.

Tag your followers 

Jeff Sieh of Manly Pinterest Tips found out that tagging customers and followers resulted in more people tagging and mentioning you. When someone @mentions your account, repost it on Instagram. You also would want to check out Facebook too since most of the time, people also post the same photos and captions on Instagram and Facebook. Share the post you’re tagged in on Facebook as well.

Sieh found that other people start tagging them because they also want to be featured. 

Another tactic that works for Mónica Malavé of elevateitnow is giving weekly shout outs to their most engaged followers. 

Image: @elevateitnow Instagram Post. Screenshot was taken on August 6, 2019

They make it a point to thank followers and tag them in a post every Friday as a way of thanking their community, especially those who have engaged the most with the page for the week. 

Other followers are also encouraged to engage and participate in discussions since they also want to be tagged during the weekly “Instagram Fab Friday Celebration,” which elevateitnow has been doing since July 2015.

Let your authenticity show in the captions

People love stories, and it’s no different on Instagram. You’ll drive more engagement when your posts tell stories using wonderful photos and engaging captions. This is what Katie Grazer of Whatskatieupto.com does. She often shares the following on Instagram:

• Where and how she failed in her business.
• The strategies she used to get through her failures.
• How her followers can apply these strategies.

For Grazer, building a relationship with her audience means “getting personal and vulnerable” while giving something back. 

Image: @whatskatieupto sharing personal input in her IG post. Photo was taken on August 6, 2019

What works for Grazer may not work for everyone, though, and she says that you shouldn’t try to be something you’re not. Authenticity attracts people and encourages them to engage, so if telling funny stories is your thing, then create funny captions. If you feel more comfortable writing poems, then do it.

Know what your target audience wants to see

Knowing your target market has always been the first step to any marketing plan. You can’t craft an effective strategy without knowing what makes your target market tick. 

Nadine Rohner, a social media manager, and strategist, says that the key to driving more Instagram engagement is to “know your target audience inside out.” Once you know them, you have to write your captions with them in mind. List down some topics and issues your audience is interested in and these should be the basis for your content.

Image: @NadieRohner IG Story. Photo was taken on August 6, 2019

In case you have no idea what content they want to see, you can use Instagram Stories to ask them. You can get to know your audience while driving engagement to your account. 

The most important thing to remember is that you are creating content for real people, so a random inspirational quote just won’t do it.

Create an effective hashtag strategy

The Instagram hashtag strategy of most brands and businesses involves typing in the keyword after the hash sign and choosing the most popular hashtags. If you type in #fitness, for example, you’ll see that:

• #fitness has over 346 million posts
• #fitnessmotivation has around 66 million posts
• #fitnessmodel has almost 42 million posts
• #fitnessjourney has 19.5 million posts

Businesses that are into health and fitness will definitely include these hashtags in each of their posts. 

While this is a logical way to go, it’s quite difficult to rank with millions of posts to compete with. Aside from these popular hashtags, you should also use hashtags that will help you make it to the top posts so that your post will be the first thing that people see when they search for that particular hashtag. 

For this to happen, you’d want to include hashtags that have less than 100,000 posts. This way, you’re building authority within a specific niche, no matter how small that niche is. 

It can be quite difficult to find the right hashtag to use among the hundreds that are suggested when you type in a keyword. For this reason, Rebekah Radice, product marketer at Tailwind, suggests that you use Tailwind’s Hashtag Finder so you can find related keywords that are making waves on Instagram. 

Make it fun

With Instagram, you can mix business with pleasure because people go to Instagram for fun and education. Making Instagram fun was what Christina Nicholson of Media Maven did, and she attained this by asking for her audience’s comments and replying to each like and comment her posts received. 

Asking for comments and including calls to action in every Instagram post will drive engagement, and you’ll even have some fun replying to the comments. Nicholson says she tries to respond to every single comment, and although it seems like a lot of work, it’s still quite fun. When conversation seems to come to a halt, you can ask questions and keep the ball rolling. It’s pretty much like having a face to face conversation with another person. 

Learning from Instagram marketing pros

These are only five tips from five marketing experts who have gone through trials and errors in Instagram marketing and have found these tactics to be effective in building a successful Instagram page:

• Tag your followers to encourage them to tag you.
• Be authentic in your captions.
• Get to know your target audience.
• Use smaller niche hashtags.
• Have fun making conversation with your followers.

Do these things and tweak them a bit according to your brand, industry, and target audience, and soon you’ll see some improvement in your Instagram engagement rate. 

Date: September 5, 2019 / Categories: Engagement, / Author: Disturbinsilence