Learn how to boost your Instagram engagement with 14 strategic actions
Instagram engagement is undoubtedly one of the most monitored metrics by those who have a business profile on this network and wish to get closer to their target audience.
It is through this data that we track interactions (likes, comments, and shares, for example) generated from published content, showing whether those posts are relevant to our personas or not.
However, since engagement is not always easily achieved, it is important to always pay attention to what brings you closer to your audience and look for tactics that can aid in this process.
What is Instagram engagement?
Instagram engagement occurs whenever your audience interacts in some way with the content that was published. On Instagram, engagement can happen when a user decides to follow your profile, comment, like, save to collection, share, among other actions.
Through engagement, they demonstrate an interest in your content. In other words, it’s an indicator that your strategy is working.
Why is Instagram engagement so important?
Whether on Instagram or any other social network, engagement is crucial for creating a close relationship with the audience and generating authority for your brand.
Even though likes or views are considered vanity metrics in a digital marketing strategy, it’s these insights that help understand whether your content is attractive and relevant to your audience.
After all, having thousands of followers is pointless if your content does not connect and interact with them, right?
Therefore, monitoring Instagram engagement is a way to understand what works, connect with your persona, and deliver posts that truly assist them in their daily lives.
Additionally, having good engagement with your audience facilitates the expansion of your profile, the arrival of new followers, and increases trust in your brand, making it a reference on the social network.
14 Tips on How to Increase Your Instagram Engagement Rate
However, we know that maintaining high Instagram engagement rates is not always straightforward and requires a lot of work.
But there are tips that assist in the process and can work very well for your profile. Below, you’ll find 7 that are extremely relevant!
Publish quality content for your audience
There’s no way around it, the first and best tip to have good engagement on Instagram is to plan and publish content that is high-quality and aligned with the needs of your audience.
To do this, it’s essential to study your personas, understand their pain points, and map out how your content and brand can help them overcome their challenges.
This will lead to the creation of informative, interactive, useful, and attractive posts for your followers. The higher the quality, the greater the engagement!
Create a strong visual identity for your profile
Along with content quality, another important point is creating an attractive visual identity that makes your company stand out and generate engagement with visual appeal as well.
From choosing colors and fonts to organizing the feed, it’s important that the profile is aligned with the brand and conveys its essence in every post.
Moreover, you also need to focus on your own photos and videos that help make your content more humanized and closer to the followers. After all, Instagram was created to establish this connection between people, right?
Post with the right frequency
Although quality is always better than quantity, maintaining a certain frequency of postings is also relevant to increase engagement with the audience.
When you “disappear” from Instagram, there’s a greater chance of people interacting less and stopping seeing the point in following your profile. The social network itself may even reduce the reach of your content and deliver it to fewer followers over time.
On the contrary, when you set a frequency (without exaggeration, of course), people who follow your brand will know what to expect, and you will have a higher probability of increasing reach and engagement.
Interact with your followers
Whether on Instagram or any other social network, interacting with followers is as important as delivering quality content to the audience.
If your brand generates engagement, followers will comment, send direct messages, or tag the profile in their own posts.
Therefore, it’s necessary to pay attention to all these interactions and create interesting responses for all of them, always thinking about the correct language and the needs of your personas.
Take advantage of the features of stories
To increase interaction with the audience and engagement on Instagram, one of the best tools is indeed stories.
This format of temporary postings has gained more and more popularity since its launch and, over time, also received several interactive features that are extremely attractive to followers, such as polls, question boxes, profile tagging, among others.
The best part is that these functionalities are easy to use (they do not require advanced editing skills), so it’s possible to create stories to maintain engagement quite frequently.
Use Relevant Hashtags for Your Business
Another tool that can significantly aid in the visibility of your posts (and consequently, in engagement) are the well-known hashtags.
However, despite being simple to use and super helpful, as they generate links to content related to the term, one should be cautious in selecting and using them.
For hashtags to work and attract users to your posts, it’s essential they are related to your business and the content you’re posting.
In other words, stuffing your posts with various hashtags that have no relation to your product or service can repel rather than attract your audience, so choose wisely.
Repost Mentions from Other Profiles
If your followers like your brand and already interact with it, it’s quite likely they use the mention tool (in story posts or feed captions) to show the new product or service they acquired, a visit to your store, among other situations.
Like all other followers, these customers deserve special attention and should even become part of your content.
Reposts are always very valuable not only for generating engagement with your customers who made the post but also with all other followers who follow your profile.
Take the opportunity to write a heartfelt message whenever you have a mention, thank for your customer’s trust, and take the chance to generate proof of value for your work.
Invest in Reels
With each passing day, Instagram is transforming more into a video network rather than a photo one. Therefore, it’s important to be aware of this shift and study how to include this content format in your profile.
Reels is a very interesting feature to increase your reach and ensure engagement. But, to benefit from these characteristics, it’s important to pay attention to a few details. They are:
- Sound: native platform audios, popular songs, and trends are excellent for giving an organic boost to your content;
- Quality Image: no one expects a 4k video, but it’s important to ensure your reels have quality images that reflect brand values and are in line with your visual identity.
- Duration: you don’t need to speed up your content, just be clear, concise, and coherent.
- Creativity: riding the trends is cool, but try to add a dash of originality to your content. After all, after a while, no one can stand to see the same gestures being repeated ad nauseam.
Invite a Collaborator
A relatively new feature on Instagram, the collaborative post allows the content to be displayed simultaneously in the feeds of two profiles.
Thus, the profiles involved in the collaborative content share the number of likes, views, and comments of the post.
This means it’s ideal for new profiles that want to build a follower base and for large profiles that want to explore other niches.
Study the profiles of professionals and influencers, find out which make sense for your strategy, and propose attractive content to present to this new audience.
‘Collabs’ function allows the creation of collaborative posts on Instagram – Photo: Disclosure/Instagram
Include CTAs in Your Posts
CTAs (calls to action) are a very important tool to increase your engagement on Instagram. After all, they guide the user and stimulate their interaction with your content.
So, whenever possible, invite your follower to like, comment on what they found most interesting, save, share in stories, or simply reflect on the topic.
Host Instagram Lives
I bet you follow some influencers in your niche, right? Which ones do you think can bring valuable content to your audience? Make this analysis and organize yourself to host Instagram lives.
Just like with Collabs, lives allow your profile to reach a new audience (from your guest) while offering your existing audience quality content.
Moreover, lives narrow down the communication with your followers, facilitating interactions and feedback that are crucial for your strategy and engagement rate.
Focus on Accessibility
How many users are deprived of consuming and interacting with your content because you don’t consider accessibility? These actions are simple and help present your content to a new audience.
Here are some accessibility measures that can help increase your engagement on Instagram:
- Video subtitles;
- Story subtitles;
- Alternative text to describe images;
Use Geolocation
Whenever possible, publish your content with geolocation activated. Do this for photos and videos in your feed, as well as what is posted in your stories.
This is because, whenever someone clicks on the location, your content may appear among those listed.
Posts with a geo tag have up to 79% more engagement compared to those without.
Meanwhile, tagging in stories allows the publication to be shown as Stories from that location.
In this case, the more specific, the better! For example, if you want to showcase your bar’s branch in Leblon, instead of tagging Rio de Janeiro in geolocation, you should put the neighborhood. This way, you increase your chances of appearing, and reaching users who were already looking for a bar in the neighborhood where you’re located.
Stay Tuned to Trending Topics
Everything is fair game, from holidays, reality shows, memes, and the ENEM. See what’s trending and think about how your brand can join the conversation.
Remember, the goal is to add value! So only participate if you have something to contribute – even if your contribution is just a good joke.
How to Measure Engagement on Instagram?
There are numerous tips for increasing engagement on Instagram, but besides following them, it’s also necessary to measure the results to understand exactly what’s working.
In the Reportei report, for example, the engagement metric takes into account all interaction actions related to the posts (such as likes, comments, shares, or saves) and is one of the most important to understand the relationship with the audience.
But, beyond focusing on this metric specifically, it’s also important to monitor reach, profile info clicks, and audience characteristics, for example.
