What Are The Best Ways To Improve Instagram Engagement?

Improve Instagram engagement remains as one of the most popular social media networks out there, primarily because of its way of connecting people through art. And if you’re one for reaching audiences, you’ve probably thought of using Instagram to reach your audiences through unique graphics and artwork featuring your products and services. If you’ve been doing this for a while and not seeing results, you might wonder what exactly is going on. You might have extremely good graphics, or extremely good photos. So why aren’t your audiences reacting well? Thing is, Instagram engagement isn’t just about getting good images out.

• Keep In Touch With Your Industry
• Maintain Engagement With Content Outside Your Posts
• Rely On The Right Keywords And Hashtags
• Use The Power Of Words For Your Captions
• People Relate To Other People

Improve Your Instagram Engagement With These Ways

A lot of people and brands have followed social media marketing as a means of expanding their reach to their audiences. However, not a lot them actually succeed in completely making sure their ways of “engaging” with their audiences work. Some people think likes and shares automatically dictate one’s “success” in engagement, but this isn’t the case. If you want to follow these Instagram engagement ideas, remember first that in order to improve Instagram engagement, you need to be able to communicate your branding in the first place. Here’s the many ways you can do that:

Keep In Touch With Your Industry

You don’t necessarily have to treat everyone else in your industry or niche as competition. It’s important to establish your presence in your market as a reliable brand or service. This mostly can be done by relating to what other people post as well. Instagram follows a basic rule: and that, it’s engagement feeds engagement. This means interacting with other users will likely increase the likelihood of exposing your brand to others as well. Make sure your posts and comments are directed to consumers, customers, and other figures in your market so you can increase traction to your brand.

• Don’t forget to talk to your customers. When you look into successful pages, they make it to a point to become a page that is “alive” for audiences. Make sure you connect to people in your audience base and that content you release appeals to their interest in your brand.
• Communicate with both related and rival brands. This doesn’t mean be friends with them, but rather make sure you operate in the same field but on different aspects. Letting your presence known can definitely make the landscape a more dynamic and engaging sphere.
• Tap into your critics as well. When people look at your brand critically, make sure you see what they’re looking at, and that you respond appropriately. Sometimes, critics that see you respond critically to comments can have change of hearts.

Maintain Engagement With Content Outside Your Posts

When you want to maintain engagement with your fans and audiences, you can’t just rely on engaging with them “when you post” content. You need to remember that engagement is a thorough process, and it encompasses a huge part of your marketing strategy. When you want to make a post about a particular subject, make sure you engage with related content. A few hours before and after posting is very effective. This at least increases the likelihood of your posts appearing on top of the newsfeed of other people looking into that content as well.

• Don’t limit engagements in your posts. See if you can find related posts outside your feed and look into those as well. It helps to let your presence known beyond your feed so both potential and old audiences will be aware of your presence.
• Respond to comments if possible. If you can, try to respond to comments and feedback on your posts. This can give life to your feed and let people know that your brand is something they can relate to and something they can check for comments, remarks, and useful pieces of information.
• Maintain your branding throughout your interactions. Don’t lose your voice and message when engaging with your audiences. This lets them know that you’re consistent with what you’re pushing for and you want to connect with them.

Rely On The Right Keywords And Hashtags

That’s right, we need to rely on keywords as well. When we deal with engagement and establishing an effective Instagram presence, it’s almost as if relying on SEO. And like anything in SEO, you’ve got to rely on the right and proper keywords to gain traction on concepts and themes you want your posts to “rank” in. Long-tail hashtags are detailed and specific, which means they will likely reach your intended audiences. You need to mix these up with other short-tail keywords, and a bit of strategy in terms of placement and keyword choice as well.

• Don’t forget to see which hashtags work for your particular theme, post, and field. Hashtags can be a lot of work, but they do increase traction to your posts given the right effort. See which hashtags are popular given the context of your post and brand environment.
• Check which keywords work with your audiences. It helps to go outside Instagram and check keywords you can actually rank with, and apply them as hashtags and captions. This can definitely push your traction in the SEO sphere and make you more appealing to more audiences.
• Combine your hashtags with meaningful captions. A lot of people tend to push hashtags after the caption, but you can experiment to incorporate them inside your captions. See which strategy works, and switch up the location of your tags when you feel it necessary.

Use The Power Of Words For Your Captions

Instagram posts aren’t always just about pretty photos and awesome graphics, though. It helps to always remember that while pictures write a thousand words, captions still “ground” the photos you post in to reality. Good captions allow you to express the messages behind your posts. Long and detailed captions make stories, while short and on-point captions can give precisely what people need to see. Find the right balance between writing meaningful captions and witty ones. Then you’ll surely be able to establish a good following amongst your audiences.

• Be wary as to how exactly you want your captions to work. See which words, keywords, and hashtags actually work for your particular image. You can determine the way as to how you can actually get them working properly to your advantage.
• See whether you need a long or a short caption. You need to see whether long or short captions work in the context of your image. Some brands connect with their audiences more with longer captions that share long stories. Short, punchier captions are straight to the point. See which ones work for your particular theme.
• Find out words and phrases people in your field regularly use. When your field has a lot of slang and vocabulary, try incorporating those into your captions to see if they stick to your chosen demographic.

People Relate To Other People

You don’t necessarily have to limit your Instagram posts to just your brand alone. Also, You can actually increase traction and your engagements by posting photos of people – possibly yourself, your staff, or even your customers, and you don’t necessarily need models, too! It’s easy to weave people into your Instagram posts, and boost engagement. You can share posts from customers and people you’ve met, you can even share photos from your staff. There are a lot of possibilities with how you can showcase people into your posts. Point is, when people outside your company see faces in your Instagram page, they will likely associate your company with something that is “alive” and something they can relate to. This humanizes your brand.

• Show them who you are! Sometimes, showing the people behind the scenes lets audiences know that your people too, and you have actual lives. If you show how good your company policies are by showing people that are happy, your brand might be more likable.
• Models work to your advantage too. If you hire models that can work with products you have, you can actually have a product showcase that is more human and more approachable. This greatly helps if you want to add a more empathic spin to your branding.
• More people show more emotions. If you use dynamic emotions and actions in images, you give the impression that your brand is alive and thriving. Don’t underestimate the power of natural motion when showing your brand in action, as this highlights the human qualities of your marketing.

Instagram Engagement: It’s Not Just Aesthetics

With the above in mind, it’s important to consider that in order to improve Instagram engagement, in doesn’t just lie on how aesthetically pleasing or appealing your posts are. Just like art appreciation, it takes a whole lot more than just producing “cool” artwork or graphics to get and grab your audience’s attention. Always remember to create meaningful content that can resonate with your branding message and your values. This allows you to not just make appealing art, but art that actually “speaks” to your followers. Remember, the key component in engagement is communication, even if it happens directly or indirectly. This means your artwork should always provide an avenue for your audience to communicate with you.