Anatomy of a like: 4 tips for creating a highly engaged Instagram audience
In building my own Instagram profile to over 14,000 followers, there are a few things I’ve learned along the way. With Iconosquare removing their free analytics, my understanding of my audience comes from observations, interactions and testing. That experience means that within 30 minutes of posting I can predict the number of likes a photo will get.
Creating a highly engaged audience is a simple task, providing you know and understand your audience. I know that a core interest of all my followers is travel. I know a sweeping landscape, or world famous landmark will always get more likes than something more simple or abstract. I don’t let that limit me, however. I try to offer more than one thing. I’m aware that there are thousands of pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge, many by better photographers than myself. So how do I drive engagement and increase likes on my posts? Here are four easy techniques
1. Captions!
Completely underused by most photographers and brands, the caption is as important as the photo as far as I’m concerned. On a landscape photo it plays a smaller role — the caption augments the beauty of the image. It adds emotion that makes for better recall or inspires others to live their own adventure. On a more abstract photo, the caption is the main event. Here, I take the time to use longer more profound captions. This gives my audience something more than just a visual memory to take away. In either case, the photo captures the attention; the caption keeps it. Now that I have a platform to speak to thousands, I want to leave them with something to think about whenever they engage with me.
2. Timing is Everything
I can’t talk about engagement without talking about timing. Knowing the geographical location of your audience is key here. This is an area where analytics really helps, but since I don’t have that luxury I need to use my head a little more. I do this is through spot checks. That is, viewing the profile of people that follow me to see where they’re based and where they’ve been.
I know I have a large European audience, but also quite a few followers in the US — enough for it to be significant in my posting habits. So it would be reasonable to post in the afternoon or evening to make sure my posts are up during the waking hours of both sets of followers. The tricky bit is figuring out exactly what time, as I’m trying to cover a huge range of time zones. Again, I think it’s safe to assume a lot of my followers work a normal 9–5 schedule, so my aim is to post outside of that when they’re more likely to be checking their phones and have the time to browse instagram. Over so many time zones, there isn’t a catch-all time to post — although 4pm (UTC) is a decent universal time. My solution is to tailor certain photos to certain audiences. I’ve noticed people love a photo that they can connect to personally — an alternative view on somewhere they’ve been or live.
Similarly, you need to consider the day on which you post, and what your audience may be doing at that time. As a general rule, I’ll only post Sunday — Thursday. Why? Simply because this is when I believe people are most likely to have the time to look at Instagram and engage with my account. They’re less likely to be away from their phones for a considerable amount of time and are more likely to be looking for inspiration during their work week, or as they prepare for the week ahead. Although people are active on Instagram on Fridays and Saturdays, it seems confined to updating their own accounts. Generally engagement is lower these days — they open the app, post and close it again.
3. 30 Minutes or less
As I mentioned earlier, it’s clear within 30 minutes of posting, how many likes a photo will get. I can learn relatively quickly each time I post. While analytics tools will give you great insights that you can put to good use, I believe there’s still something to be said for understanding the human behind the follower. This is quite scalable too. Providing you’re posting the content your followers are most engaged with and at the right time, it’s reasonable to predict that each post will get (in my case) likes from 8–10% of followers. So if I choose to post 4 times per week I can expect between 4000 and 5000 likes that week.
4. Creativity is king
Contrary to what some say, Instagram is a creative platform. Although I enjoy the validation from likes, sometimes I choose to post photos that I know will be less popular. I can predict it even before I even post. Yet, the less popular content has almost no negative effect on the number of followers. It shows me that you can build an audience through quality content over the long-term — you won’t live and die by a single post. With Instagram’s much talked about algorithm slowly being introduced over the coming months, it’ll be interesting to see how this affects engagement, and whether it benefits larger accounts in the way the popular page does.