5 easy ways to increase your Instagram engagement

Growing your Instagram Engagement (ER) means making your audience take a certain action on your posts: comment, send you a DM, respond to your polls or stickers. In today’s article, we’re sharing our best-kept secrets on how you can increase your Instagram engagement.

Measuring Instagram Engagement

How do you measure engagement, and how do you know if there’s a problem with your content? Well, your engagement rate is measured by two things: the number of engagements you get and your impressions. The engagement types that matter to Instagram are comments, likes, views, and re-shares. To find your ER, you need to divide the total engagement number on a post with the overall impression number and multiply by 100.

The Engagement Rate fuels the platform's algorithm. When the Instagram feed is loading, it shows relevant content to your audience. Bottom line, the more engagement you get on your posts, the more followers are likely to see it.

There are many things you can try to boost engagement, but speaking from experience these are five powerful ways to really boost it:

Create carousel posts

For in-feed posts, share your content as Instagram carousel posts. A carousel post is a post with multiple photos or videos that can be viewed by swiping or clicking. From experience, this is proven to have a higher engagement rate than single posts or videos.

You can use this type of post to share before and after pictures related to your niche. You can make a thread with tips from your industry. It’s also a great way to share a lot of information, you can add more details than in a single post. This way you can encourage your audience to save the post, share it, or take any other action that will best benefit you.

Time the posts wisely

Post your content when you know for sure that your audience will be online. The more people see your posts, the more engagements you’ll be likely to receive. Use the follower analytics, to find out demographics about your audience. The insights will tell you what day and the time your audience is the most active. Also, their location can tell you when to schedule your posts so that you can maximise your engagements.

Use Instagram to its fullest potential

Successful brands use all the tools available in each platform. Instagram has in-feed posts, stories, IGTV, reels, lives, so use all of them, accordingly. This gives your audience more ways to interact with your content.

Captions rule

Captions keep the audience longer on your posts. Not only does it give the chance to further connect, but you’re most likely to get them engaged if you encourage them to do things like, comment, or save. Your audience has a short attention span, so the first line must catch their eye. Add an attention-grabbing first line, add emojis, try adding value in the caption, provide `how-to` guides. It’s a good idea to add a question at the end of the caption to engage your audience to answer in the comments, or send you a DM with their response.

Consistency above all

Lastly, be consistent! Post regularly, so that more followers can interact with your content. Forgetting about your followers and leaving them hanging will only cause them to unfollow you. Schedule your posts ahead, so you don’t forget and find out the frequency for posting that works for you.

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