How to Increase Engagement on Instagram

Published in

Marketing And Growth Hacking

5 min readJun 17, 2018

Instagram is the fastest growing social media platform in 2018 and is expected to pass 1 billion users worldwide this year. The average user also spends more time on Instagram than they do on Facebook. Here are 5 simple tips that will increase engagement levels for your brand on Instagram.

Begin with an End Goal

Why are you posting on Instagram? If you’re just posting up a few photos and hoping for the best you’ll get nowhere. Be focused on what you want to achieve and have a plan to achieve it. Here are the considerations that will be the basis of your strategy:

What are your objectives? Is it to drive traffic to your website, clicks, to increase brand awareness or to make sales?
Who is your target audience? What does your existing customer or potential customer look like? What would they like to see?

Engage and Encourage

Responding to favourable comments with a simple ‘Thanks’ seems pretty obvious. However, engagement on social media means, well, being social. Leverage your customers/ fans/ supporters/ employees to create content. There are more of them than there are of you! One of the biggest benefits to implementing a good hashtag strategy is to grow and engage with your community. These are existing customers, influencers and potential customers. Do a search to see what hashtags the most popular photos in your community- competitors and influencers for example- are using and use those tags on your posts. Run competitions for photos taken using your hashtag, a great way to increase your reach and gain followers for your brand.

Get Visual

People are viewing your posts on a mobile device- the vast majority on a smartphone- so make your photos/ videos jump out at them. Always take photos in portrait format to get more screen space and engagement. Strong visuals, little or no text. Don’t post a photo of your menu, post a great photo of your food with a link to your menu. Better still, post a short video. ‘ Sell them the sizzle not the steak’.
Posting photos with #nofilter? Your camera lens is a filter! Instagram is not a document of record. It’s an app with zillions of photos- and videos- that people are scrolling past at speed . You need to jump off that screen. Utilise Instagram's filters, or for more advanced users, make up a Photoshop filter to give your feed a strong and consistent look and feel. Light and bright or lush and luxurious, use colour to catch attention. Use [this guide…] of basic techniques for combining colors more effectively.

#Hashtags

Using hashtags properly is essential. Up to 30 hashtags are allowed but 12 to 15 seems to be the best amount to use. Instagram hashtags are an easy and free way to get discovered by users that are interested in your niche. Hashtags under the following categories should almost always be included:

Category- Your niche/ product/service.
Description- What is your photo of?
Expertise- Your particular area of expertise, eg #florist, #personaltrainer.
Community- Your community would be something like the hashtag #dronestagram for instance that is used by most drone photographers.
Location- Where you are. If you’re a bricks and mortar business in a big city use the hashtag for the exact area- eg: #NottingHill- rather than #London. However, if you offer a city wide delivery pizza service then you can use #LondonPizza

Post the Right Stuff at the Right Time

What should you post and when should you post it and how often? Here are the key factors to bear in mind:

What is working on your competitors’ Instagram accounts? Check out the most popular accounts in your niche and get inspiration for your content. Photos obviously work best in terms of likes. However, mix in short videos and Instagram stories and use the statistics given by Instagram to measure feedback.
There is no perfect time to post on Instagram. However, in general, the best times to post are between noon and 1pm and early evenings between 7 and 9pm. Wednesday and Thursdays are generally best and Sundays worst. The important thing is to use your own Instagram account stats- available with a business profile- to see when the best time to post is.

Conclusion:

Instagram was the fastest growing social media platform in 2018 for any B2C business. So now is the time to get serious about it.

The tactics outlined above will help you achieve a deeper level of organic engagement on your posts. However, as always content is king! The most important factor is to post content that people want to see, read, watch and share.

About the author: Paul Henderson has developed content strategies for companies including Bloomberg and Microsoft. He has developed his own profitable digital travel business and advises Fintech startups on their content strategy. In 2017, his content received over 2 million engagements- mainly organic- on social media, websites and blogs.

You can view more articles about social media marketing on [his blog….]