Many people have been using Instagram to grow their brand or page, which they started as a hobby or want to generate more clients and money from Instagram through their products and services.
However, many personal brand owners, influencers, and small business owners struggle to achieve their desired goals from their Instagram marketing. Due to the lack of engagement, it is considered a significant factor within any digital marketing strategy. Especially within social media marketing, it keeps giving signals to the Instagram algorithm that your account or profile is helping the community and how you are providing value to the audience. Based on that, Instagram pushes your posts, stories and other content to more people so that you can attract a new audience for your page because Instagram is a platform to build relations before making clients and earning dollars from it.
So considering this fact, today, we present you the ten hacks that you can use to engage with your audience to grow your account and be connected with your audience and at the same instance.
Before jumping into the hacks, first, let’s know how to boost your Instagram engagement but with a new taste.
So let’s get started.
In this article you'll learn,
- Posting at the right time
- Having the correct captions and hashtags
- Using the Instagram stories and stickers
- Using the Instagram live sessions
- Using IGTV videos and reels
- Stories hop-over
- Organizing giveaways and contests
- Using the cross-marketing technique
- Repurposing the evergreen content
- Instagram DMs, comments, and replies
What Is Instagram Engagement?
Instagram engagement is not about how many likes and comments you get on your posts and stories, nor is it about how many followers you have. Engagement on Instagram is simply about how much value you provide to your followers and how you solve their problems.
How Instagram pushes your posts to a large audience?
When somebody likes your post and comments on it indirectly, it sends a good signal to Instagram telling your page and content is good. It shows you can solve the problems of your audience, that’s when Instagram shows your post and stories to more people, and that’s one of the reasons that your notification inbox is full of likes and comments.
Additionally, this is the business and marketing strategy of Instagram because its end goal is to entertain the audience with existing and new things to feed the people’s needs and generate money.
Pro-tip: The Instagram algorithm is not software or anything. It’s just the physiological analysis of human behaviour and tendency, and on this basis, Instagram is functioning and will tend to do so forever. Moreover, suppose you understand this one section to the fullest. In that case, it will be easy for you to curate a robust Instagram marketing, content, and engagement strategy for your brand, page, or business.
Moving further, now as you are aware of Instagram engagement, let’s learn what Instagram engagement rate is?
Instagram Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the sum of likes, comments, mentions, saves, and shares that you receive on your post divided by the number of followers you have.
Still unable to understand, we know it’s pretty tricky for new people, especially non-marketers, to understand this. But don’t worry, we are going to illustrate this whole process in a simple step-by-step formula. So keep reading
.
Take the number of likes, comments, shares, mentions, divide by the number of followers you have, and multiply it by a hundred.
For example, you have 15,000 followers on Instagram, and on average, your posts receive 500 likes, 50 comments, 20 mentions, 40 saves, and 35 shares on each post daily.
And, if we have to calculate your engagement rate, we will add these numbers together, which makes a total of 645 engagements.
Now, as we know, what’s your total engagement?
Let’s do an Instagram engagement rate calculation of your engagements on this basis.
645/15000=0.043
0.043*100=4.3%
So your engagement rate 4.3%
Knowing your engagement rate is a straightforward concept; you need to see this concept and examine it.
Note: The above engagement rate calculation makes it easy for you to understand the Instagram engagement rate and measure it, even though there can be differences between the number of likes, comments, shares, and saves you receive.
What's A Good Instagram Engagement Rate?
There’s no reasonable engagement rate as the ideal engagement rate depends on several factors and how you measure it. However, the average engagement rate is anywhere from 1% to 5%.
So, for example, if your engagement rate is 0.90%, it’s pretty good; nevertheless, you can aim high to grow and monetize your account.
How To Improve Your Instagram Engagement?
Until now, we know how to boost engagement on instagram (with a new taste), what is Instagram engagement rate, and how to measure it.
Furthermore, we also know that you might be thinking, where are the tactics? Duh, these people are just talking about the basics. Are they kidding, though?
We aren’t kidding, but we needed to bring the above information to you before presenting the hacks. Because when you understand the real reason behind the significant things for the growth of your platform, then it turns out to be super easy to master something for achieving our desired goals.
So now, let’s start to explore the tactics! Hurray !!
Various tools and options are available within Instagram and the Internet to create remarkable engagement strategies. Still, ten things seem to be an engagement magnet to get more engagement if they are managed well.
- Posting at the right time
- Having the correct captions and hashtags
- Using the Instagram stories and stickers
- Using the Instagram live sessions
- Using IGTV videos and reels
- Stories hop-over
- Organizing giveaways and contests
- Using the cross-marketing technique
- Repurposing the evergreen content
- Instagram DMs, comments, and replies
Let’s dive in deep within them.
1. Posting at The Right Time
Posting at the right time is very necessary. When you post at the right time, i,e when your audience is most active, the audience will see your post super soon and will engage with it thus which gives an excellent prompt to Instagram and which urges them to make your post visible to more people from your audience.
However, suppose you don’t post at the right time. In that case, the opposite of this happens: people will not get to see your post because you posted at some other time when they were not active, so the chances of engagement decrease, which also means that it sends a wrong signal to Instagram. Then they don’t promote your post. It is why posting at the right time is necessary when your audience uses the gram.
Furthermore, we can’t deny that knowing the active right time is tricky because the time shown in the Instagram insights is based on pacific time.
And, sometimes Instagram shows the wrong time to you as well within your insights.
So to be able to find out the right time, you can use the three tricks mentioned below.
- Go to the Instagram live feature and there you will be able to see how many people are online, and based on that, you can decide the time or try it to see when your audience is most active.
- You can post multiple times within a day to find out the actual real-time for posting.
- Iconosquare is an Instagram and social media tool that lets you know the actual time when your audience is most active. There is a 14-day trial that you use, or you can upgrade to a suited plan if you like their services.
2. Having the correct captions and hashtags
Content is everything, and the hashtags are a soldier, which protects the good health of your profile. If you want to succeed within any online marketing campaign, ensure good quality and relevant content to your audience. Instagram is a relationship-building platform. The people on Instagram want to find value to progress in their lives, and it makes it easy for us to generate more and more traffic.
Write valuable and context-related captions rather than just posting the basic things or putting your offers. Bring value to your captions by discussing your audience’s pain point and providing them with a solution for that. It will make you connect with them on a personal level and nurture them in the right way.
You can analyze the content strategy of big companies and influencers to know how they bring so much engagement to their followers. Google companies and influencers study and explore their system and take references and notes to craft a solid and fantastic plan.
Moving to hashtags, they are as important as the right content; they fill the gap between you and your ideal audience by showing them your content when you use the right hashtags for your posts.
Let’s say you are posting a business trip on your Instagram wall, so you need to ensure that you use the relevant hashtags within this post, such as #entrepreneurquotes #businessbranding #bussinessquotes #smallbusinessowner. Pertinent other hashtags to reach a larger audience because you will not generate good traffic for your profile if you do not have relevant hashtags.
Before putting the hashtags in your post, do research and know how many people are using them, they are good enough to use them, and so on.
You can use the Instagram hashtag research tools such as hashtag generator, hashtagify to name a few, for conducting your hashtag research.
3. Using the Instagram stories and stickers
Instagram stories are no longer a feature that we use to share our latest posts. Still, stories have become a powerful feature to boost our engagement and generate money from them over time. One of the significant reasons for Instagram behind creating Instagram stories is to let the users establish themselves as an expert within their audience’s sight by showcasing their daily lives, behind the scenes, sneak peeks, struggles, etc.
Start using Instagram stories; you can kickstart your story campaign with the following ideas as well.
◾Behind the scenes
◾Who are you
◾What do you do
◾Sneak peeks
◾Offers
◾Flaspeekses
◾Mini training
And much more…
Additionally, you can use the story stickers in your stories to make them look catchy and attractive to make the audience read or go through them. You can use the following stickers to create Instagram engagement.
#Question sticker
You can begin your conversation by asking questions about the next season’s colour theme or products that they would like to see more and you can include conversation users’ comments and feedback all wrapped in one. In short, this is a conversation starter sticker and a beautiful tool to capture your followers’ email addresses as well.
#Quiz sticker
You can use this Instagram sticker for interacting with your followers by asking multiple-choice questions and understanding the result.
#Countdown Sticker
It helps to tap the interest of your followers and increase traffic to your latest and upcoming launches as they build curiosity for a specific thing in your audience.
4. Using the Instagram live sessions
Live interaction is one of the best ways to strengthen your relationship with the audience. Instagram’s co-founder and CEO, Kevin Strom, once said, “On average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their Instagram profile feed”. Instagram Live also saw a 70% increase in views from February to March in 2020, making it one of the powerful techniques to start using live sessions for your business.
Utilize this fantastic feature by hosting live events on Instagram, one-on-one interactions to launch new products and services, and promote your existing products, services, and affiliate links. You can even use Instagram live to discuss a specific topic, host a live conference, or host an auction as well to raise funds for a noble cause.
5. Using IGTV videos and reels
From the launch of Instagram Reels & Igtv videos on Instagram, Instagram has significantly pushed video creators and vloggers.
They have become an excellent tool for posting different types of quality content, attracting traffic, and earning money from them.
Start using these two powerful Instagram tools to share your clients’ testimonials or start giving mini-training sessions to your audience.
These tools can even help you in your affiliate marketing, brand collaborations, and much more.
6. Stories hop-over
Collaborating with entrepreneurs, bloggers, and followers for a story hop over is one of the fantastic techniques to attract a new audience. Many bloggers have been doing this within their community to boost engagement and relations.
So if you are a blogger or an influencer, then make a list of the bloggers with whom you can collaborate, send them a proposal for the collaboration, and get started to reap the benefits of this trick.
7. Organizing giveaways and contests
Hosting a giveaway and contests on your profile is the fastest way to expand your brand exposure and generate quality leads to convert them into your paying clients. You can even use this technique to create a buzz related to your new launches or best-selling products.
But please note giveaways and contests are pretty good for product-based businesses and to offer a freebie. If you provide services on Instagram or a coach, we don’t recommend you provide your services as a prize in the giveaways. However, you can conduct contests for engagement.
8. Using the cross-marketing technique
You can’t expect to generate traffic and engagement just by Instagram but do cross-marketing on other social media platforms to drive additional traffic.
For example, if you have a Facebook and Instagram page and a YouTube channel, you can post the Instagram content on Facebook to drive traffic from your Facebook page to the Instagram page.
This technique will work the best if you have different posting or content strategies for each platform. If you don’t have them, you can use the repurpose formula to benefit from this technique.
9. Repurposing the evergreen content
Go within the content interaction insights in your Instagram insights and check which posts have the most engagement and are still generating more likes, comments, shares, and so on for you. After analyzing, curate a content strategy based on that analysis and implement it.
For example, you posted nine posts related to social media marketing on your profile and if they are performing well. So here, what you can do is that you can create more content related to those posts in your next content strategy to educate your audience and to provide free value to them.
Pro-tip: You can apply this tip for blog pro-tip, YouTube videos, and other sorts of content.
10. Instagram DMs, comments, and replies
Last but not least, leverage the power of comments, replies, and DMS to interact with the audience.
Engage with other people’s posts by commenting and replying to their stories to create beautiful relations, as communication is vital for converting a lead into a customer.
Moreover, reply to a comment that others made on your post. It is also a means to interact with the audience. Position yourself as an expert within their sight and, of course, to send a good signal to the Instagram algorithm.
And always include a call to action within your content so that your visitors are just not your fans and give them a chance to become your paying client.
