Instagram is all about engagement and it is the strategy to focus on rather than follower numbers. It is easy to get wrapped up in watching your follower count go up but focusing on that single number is arbitrary and won’t help your account flourish. People often give up with engagement due to how much time it takes. Building an engagement strategy and seeing it through is a long process, but we absolutely promise that it is worth it. If you aren’t sure where to start, don’t worry, we’re here to help! Here are our tips for not only understanding engagement but also how to apply this newfound knowledge to your account.
Table of Contents
Why Is Engagement Important?
There are a few answers to this question, so we’ll begin at the bottom of the pyramid and work up. At the bottom of the pyramid is Instagram’s algorithm and this algorithm stipulates that to have your content shown to other users, you need to have a healthy follower to engagement ratio. Instagram is a lot different than TikTok, its a platform that has been around a lot longer, for example TikTok engagement is easy to get the platform is so new, but when the company decides to monetise it, they will make it harder for users to get real Tiktok follower exposure. If you have bought followers and have no engagement on your content, you can wave goodbye to your content being shown to others as this is how Instagram weed accounts that do just that. Instagram is focusing on accounts that cultivate a healthy following, so if you have around 5%-10% of your follower number engaging with your content, you are seen as healthy. The second level of the engagement pyramid is how you interact with others, you need to be visibly liking, engaging and following other accounts, this is fundamental in growing your engagement, because if you don’t get your name out there, no one will come to you. At the top level of the pyramid is people engaging with and liking your content. The more you work with Instagram’s algorithm, like other people’s content, the more people will see and like your content.
How Do You Measure Engagement?
Engagement can be measured many ways, it can be how many people have viewed your story, how many likes your post has received or how many comments have been left. If you upgrade your Instagram to a creator profile, you can access as an array of data that can help break your engagement down section by section. Be it demographic, high traffic times and even demographic locations. The more you can measure, the more you can manage, so having access to this information can provide you with all the data points you need to build a cohesive strategy.
Why Do I Need To Measure Engagement?
Like with anything, if you can measure it, you can improve it. You wouldn’t start trying to lose weight without a starting point or an end goal. You need to have an understanding how what your starting point is that you can improve on it. One way you can do this is by looking at your reach. If your target market is located in the USA and it shows that the majority of your audience is based in the UK, then you need to consider why. Look at the variables, could it be the hashtags you are using or is it the time that you are posting
If you are posting your content during your audiences least active hours, then you are never going to reach your target audience. Carefully assess when your target market is most likely to be active, this was you can be sure that you are posting when they are most likely to engage. Once you have understood how to measure engagement, you can start improving it. Don’t flick between variables, just stick with a few core engagements profiles and work on those, you’ll be surprised at the impact that it can have!
Posting content
We’ve established that you need to post at the right time to maximise engagement, but how often should you post? We’re all following that person who posts 6 or 7 images a day of their cat or child, you don’t want to be that person, nor do you want to post once a week. A good benchmark is one post per day, as long as it is high quality content. Quality is better than quantity, so it is always worth banking some images if a rainy day does occur and you can’t get the right lighting for a shoot or the weather isn’t as good as you had hoped.
Like Other People’s Content
We’ve already touched on the importance of this, but we really cannot stress it enough. You need to get yourself out there and like and engage with other users’ content. People enjoy the feeling of being validated, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be on Instagram, so help give them that feeling and in return they will do the same for you. You don’t need to sit on it 23 hours a day, but you do need to dedicate time going through the explore page and engaging with others. It really will make all the difference when it comes to them doing the same for you.
Instagram Hashtags
Hashtags are possibly the unsung hero of engagement, they are what gets your content out there for the world to see, but it isn’t as easy as just making up 30 hashtags in the hope that it gets your content noticed, if it were that easy, everyone would be Instagram famous. When it comes to hashtags, you need to have a good understanding of your target audience, what is currently trending and what hashtags will get your account seen and one of the best ways to do this is by using a hashtag generator.
Instagram now punishes users who use the same 30 hashtags consistently, so gone are the days of us keeping them in our notes in order to cut and paste. There are some that you are still going to be used as they are your fundamentals, but you will need to update, curate and change your list regularly to keep on top of this algorithm. Not only is this good practice, but you may even get your content out to an audience that you didn’t know you had.
Hashtags For Likes
Our favourite hashtag generator is hashtags for likes, because it is so much more than a hashtag generator. When you first start off, you want to evaluate the hashtags that you can use on a post. If you are uploading a photo of the beach, search beach and then hashtags for likes will give you an array of results relating to your search query. These hashtags aren’t just spat out, they have been chosen carefully based on what is trending, what is working for other users and what will get your account noticed. If you just tagged your posts with the most common hashtags like hashtag fitness for example, you will get lost in the abyss that is Instagram and with 95 million posts every day, you want to make sure your content stands out. You need to use a range of more niche related hashtags.
When choosing a hashtag generator tool, ensure you are using a reputable company with positive reviews, this speaks for the brand and ensures your about to engage with a safe service.
If you are unsure where to start, you can evaluate other topflight Instagram accounts and see what hashtags are working for them. Simply type in the account and content you want to analyse and hashtags for likes will get to work. The results that it gives you will demonstrate which hashtags are working best across an array of variables, giving you the most up to date and accurate results. You can do this on any Instagram content, be it your competitors or your friends. This data can give you valuable insight into what is working and what isn’t and then you can adjust your strategy from there.
Things to consider
Engagement is the key driver behind growth on Instagram and without addressing correctly, you won’t see the growth that you would have hoped for. The first thing to do is upgrade your account to a creators account so you can have access to the data that can help you increase your reach, impressions, likes and comments. Once you have access to that data, you can then begin to understand why it is the way it is and work on improving it. Hashtags are possibly the most important part of your engagement strategy, but you don’t want to be going in blind. Hashtags for likes provides their customers with a platform that is not only safe and secure, but expertly created to give you the best trending results available from your chosen subject. Not only does it give you excellent hashtags to use on your posts, it will also analyse and give you valuable insight into other user’s hashtags so you can apply them to your content. Engagement is a multifaceted strategy and one that takes a long time to build, but the organic Instagram growth you will yield from deploying it will be amazing if you can stick to it and commit. Hashtags for likes can take away a lot of the hard work you would otherwise have to do to get your posts out there, so you can concentrate on content and analytics.