Our Top 6 Ways to Improve your Instagram Engagement

Engagement is one of the most important things when it comes to building your social presence. It helps you build brand awareness, giving users a feel for what you are about and provides an opportunity to show your brand personality whilst talking to like-minded people, businesses or potential customers.

To give your brand the social push it needs, we’ve put together our top 6 ways in which you can improve your engagement for your business.

Main Feed Engagement

By engaging on your main feed, you can build relationships with mutual followers.

The Instagram algorithm is very clever in working out who your most engaged users are and these often appear near the top of your feed.

By frequently engaging on the posts in your main feed, you will often find that users will return the favour, liking and commenting on your content and increasing your brand awareness.

Hashtags

You have the opportunity to reach users outside of your following list by simply using hashtags and engaging. Hashtags are a must for increasing your brand’s awareness. We suggest following these simple steps below:

• Pick 5 relevant hashtags for your brand that you think will be most beneficial. For example, where are they located? A location hashtag is always beneficial as you could find like-minded people, businesses or new customers in your area. Think about hashtags that relate the most to your business and go from there.
• In the search bar, you can also see how many people are posting under a particular hashtag. This is useful as you can see what is popular. While popularity is good, a post can very easily get lost under a hashtag with over 20 million views so don’t shy away from the niche hashtags with only 10,000+ posts as you have more chance of your content being seen.

• Engage with 10 ‘Recent’ posts if they are relevant. You can also go onto the ‘Top’ and engage with any here. Recent means they were recently posted and ‘Top’ means the most popular posts under this hashtag

Explore Page

The explore page is tailored to your algorithm so you see posts similar to what you frequently engage with. Instagram has announced that they prioritise Reels and IGTV’s so on your explore page and ‘Reels’ tab you can scroll through and relevant accounts’ content will appear for you to engage with.

The same applies to when you’re posting content. Ensure you’re utilising Reels as your video will pop up in other user’s explore pages which will drive viewers and engagement.

Stories

A blog by Hootsuite, recently found out that over 500 million people use Instagram stories every day. A quick 15-second story appears easier than scrolling through the main feed as more and more people are invested in these mini videos.

The instant reaction emojis also make it easier to tell someone how the story made you feel, however, while this option is fun to use, go out of your way to write a message about that story and spark a conversation which in turn gives your brand more personality but also ups your engagement.

Users Tagged Photos

Ensure you’re engaging frequently with your tagged photos. Maybe a tagged photo has lots of comments about your product/brand? If so go through and reply to those comments – show that you’re contributing to the conversation. Here’s an example of our tagged photos:

Locations

Setting up and using location services can be a great place to engage with your customers. Here are our pointers for using this functionality:

• Checking your own business location is great for engaging with customers that have visited you. It shows you’re actively wanting to engage with your audience and could result in customers returning.
• Search the local area. E.g are you located in Mayfair? Search this location and your business may be located near a tourist hot spot? You will find yourself branching out and coming across various users posts, making all the difference to your engagement.

With engagement, the possibilities really are endless. By using engagement to support your overall social media strategy, you can reap the benefits and work to achieving your goals. For example, if you’re looking to build brand awareness, engaging with new users regularly could lead to new followers and an increase in engagement.

Want to discuss this in more detail? Drop us an email at hello@kitchmedia.com.