12 Ways to Increase Instagram Engagement Rate

Why does your business need to be on Instagram?

Many content creators made Instagram their main or only source of income. So Instagram now is much more than just a photo album to share with friends. If your product/service still doesn’t have an Instagram account, it’s high time to consider creating one. And here are some reasons why.

1. Well, first of all, Instagram is a perfect way to expand the reach of your business and attract new prospects. Instagram reports that over 900 million people can be reached by ads on Instagram. Average engagement rate is 1.49% for all post types in general, which is great considering it’s 3.39% for Facebook. Over a billion active users use Instagram for a month. 
   
   
2. People don’t like having to do a lot of actions to get the desired. In 2020 Instagram as well as Facebook introduced new e-commerce features to facilitate the purchasing process. If you set up an Instagram shop, people can make an in-app purchase without being redirected to your website. 
   
   
3. If you decide to run paid ads, Instagram has lots of targeting options. You will be able to reach your target audience in addition to your followers by promoting your own posts.
   
   
4. Instagram is a ready-made platform with an appealing visual organization. It would just be a shame not to use such an opportunity and snatch your share. Instagram already has over 900 million audience and growing. Go and grab your piece of glory among these users! 
   
   

If you’re already on Instagram and wondering how to measure your success on the platform, you can’t underestimate the importance of knowing your Instagram account engagement rate.

 

What is an engagement rate?

Engagement rate (ER) measures your audience’s involvement in your content. When evaluating your account’s popularity it’s not only the number of followers that matters but likes, comments, shares, Stories and video views you get. 

 

ER shows your following’s loyalty and real interest in your content or brand. When going for influencer marketing you should consider this number. The number of followers doesn’t always reflect the account’s real popularity. That’s why micro-influencers are trending - their following can be small but show an unprecedented level of engagement compared to an overall size of the audience. 

 

The average engagement rate on Instagram for a post by a business account is 0.96%. If your ER is somewhere near 1% it’s already a good level. 

 

Low engagement rate is bad because it hurts your account’s credibility. Seeing you have a million followers and get on average 20 likes per post, people are going to logically assume that they are fake. You don’t need that so keep reading the article to know how to improve your Instagram engagement rate. 

 

How is Instagram engagement rate calculated?

Instagram engagement rate is usually the ratio of the number of likes and comments to the number of followers. You need to count the overall number of your likes and comments per post and divide that by the total number of followers. Multiply the result by 100 to get your account engagement rate. The formula would look something like this:

As for the paid ads on Instagram brands usually count the number of impressions. So that the number of likes and comments is divided by the number of impressions instead of followers. 

You can calculate ER manually or use online engagement rate calculators. 

 

Best strategies to increase your Instagram engagement rate

1. Hashtags

Yes, it may sound not only obvious but also old-fashioned because people are driving away from excessive use of hashtags and many prefer not to use any. Yet consider the fact that 81% of people use Instagram to search for products or services. How are you looking for a product on Instagram? If you don’t know what or who you’re looking for, you type in relevant tags.

I’m not talking about the most popular hashtags of wide use like #love #fashion #instagood and so on. Don’t use tags with millions of associated posts. There’s no sense in betting for those. You should rather choose hashtags specific to your niche and keep them simple.

To find the right hashtags for you, you will need to go searching for what tags are popular on Instagram for your type of product or service. For example, #watches has 17.6M posts, if you specify whether you’re selling #watchesformen or #watchesforwomen, the results will narrow.  

You can also add a city like #watchesberlin to specify the search result even more.

You can also use the services like HashtagsforLikes to find relevant tags to target.

2. Tag location

Like hashtags, location tags will make your page discoverable by search. It sounds only obvious that small local business must tag their location so that people could find their brand. There’re not many options for search. Tags and Places is practically all you can search for apart from inserting the account name directly.

3. Post regularly

Whether your account type allows you to post multiple times a day or two times a week, what matters is consistency. Once people get used to you posting once a day, don’t get lost for weeks or overwhelm your audience with 5 posts a day. Both case scenarios may eventually harm your statistics and decrease your following.

In the first case because people might think that you’re no longer active and unsubscribe on the next clean-up. In the second case, you will start annoying people. If your constant flow of content will in addition be of low quality, you’re gonna lose your Instagram followers. 

To help you organize your posting you can use special tools to schedule your posts. Instagram has recently provided API for third-party services to visually plan and schedule Instagram publications. There are platforms like Tailwind and Buffer where you can do that.

4. Create a recognizable brand

It’s important to keep everything you post consistent with your brand style. It would be great if all your social media were organized in one style: your logo, similar color scheme, and fonts. This way when a person following you on Facebook, for example, comes across your profile on Instagram, they will recognize your brand. They might feel more trust in it and decide to subscribe.

5. Use Instagram Stories

According to the stats 58% got interested in a brand after seeing it in Stories and 50% went to the website to make a purchase after seeing a product/service in Stories. Don’t ignore Instagram stories. Not too spammy, but at least 2-3 Stories a week wouldn’t harm.

Some people are too lazy to scroll the feed or it’s so overwhelming that your post may remain unnoticed. It’s a fact that many people like scrolling Stories more than posts. 

Moreover, Stories can be less polished but more real and laid-back because they only exist for 24 hours. In addition, you can save Stories in Highlights, categorize them so that people could discover what you posted in the past.

Use polls in Stories. Fashion bloggers, for example, let their followers select their look of the day by giving two options for each piece of clothing and accessories to choose from.

Influencers as well as practically anyone with no matter what size of following are actively using Instagram stories question stickers. Question stickers will help you reveal more about yourself if it’s a personal blog or your brand/service.

6. Aim at your target audience

Even if you initially built your buyer persona it might evolve or transform in the course of developing your brand. In a while, after analyzing activity on your account you may find out that your content or product resonates with another or more narrow type of audience.

Be flexible. Try to keep the balance between sticking to your key idea and adapt to your audience’s needs. It even may happen so that your audience on Facebook will differ from the one on Instagram as well as their needs. You can use Instagram Insights to monitor and analyze your audience.

7. Write good Instagram captions

Well, you can write anything. However, what effect will it have? Who are you trying to impress and what goal are you pursuing? These are some of the questions you should answer before filling the captions that will help you boost Instagram engagement rate.

The info under the photo should be aligned with your overall conception. Brands using social media as an e-commerce platform should reveal maximum information about the product. People are lazy, you don’t need to leave them with unaddressed questions on their mind so that they would need to go google additionally.

If you’re a blogger, you must bring informational value to your followers. Topics will vary depending on your niche. Keep the tone of voice relevant to your blog style and don’t hesitate to address followers directly so that they feel involved. It will help increase interaction by engaging in discussion.

You can leave a burning question and raise a discussion, or just ask users to choose the best of two photos you post. After all, why not include CTA in your caption? You can encourage people to like and save your recipe/checklist/exercises for future use.

8. Combine all Instagram features

Rumor has it Instagram algorithms favor and make the profiles using all available features more visible. Post carousels and Stories, experiment with different types of videos in Stories, Reels, or IGTV.

According to Instagram statistics, Instagram videos get over 2 times more engagement than Instagram photos. It shouldn’t be too polished or professional, videos are just naturally more engaging than photos with text captions. It can be a quick product review or a Q&A. You can utilize such easy-to-use video editing apps like InShot, Quik or Magisto to patch up your video.

9. Share quality content

Remember that whatever tricks you’re using to get more interactions it’s your content that matters most. Pay attention to all the details: starting from the captions and ending with the visual organization of your account. Select one style of background and theme for your grid layout. You may not bother too much about it in case you’re managing your Instagram on your own, just stick to one filter and color scheme.

10. Create saveable or shareable content

If you create useful content that people can share with their friends, it will allow you to reach more people. It can be funny relatable memes, informative posts that people can get back to in the future, checklists with films worth seeing or best places to spend the weekend. People will save such posts for themselves or resend them to their friends, thus expanding your Instagram reach.

11. Engage with people through comments and DMs

Don’t forget to interact with your followers by replying to their comments and direct messages. You shouldn’t leave people waiting too long, try to address users’ questions as soon as possible.

Join discussions in the comments both in your own and accounts of other people. It’s good to interact with accounts related to your sphere. Like, comment, share others’ posts in your stories. It may result in mutual following and reposting.

In addition, you can collaborate with similar accounts. It will let you exchange audiences and increase your Instagram following.

12. Leverage user-generated content

You can also utilize user-generated content. UGC is any type of content created by your followers and featuring your product-related content. After all, all you do is for your fans/customers, by reposting their content you can show them that you care about them.

 

Conclusion

Instagram is a very competitive space. The platform is oversaturated with all sorts of blogs and profiles. It’s a tough challenge to stand out in the crowd.

 

Nevertheless, I hope the above strategies will help you boost engagement on Instagram. Try 1 or 2 you like most this week and test their efficacy for increasing your engagement rate.