Instagram is a powerful social marketing tool that helps business owners build their brand and cultivate a follower’s outreach.
In fact, many small businesses – from fashion retail stores to jewelry, cafés and hair saloons owe much of their success to Instagram marketing. With over one billion people using the platform monthly, business owners can easily generate more sales leads and bring in more audiences ready to turn to potential customers when they use the right engagement tools.
But, how can business owners significantly increase engagement rates to increase their ROI and generate more sales?
The truth is that there’s no quick way to achieve this. Engagement is only valuable on the platform when it comes from real accounts, and brands can only build organic engagement when they put in real effort. This article discusses proven effective tactics to help brands increase likes steadily, saves, comment, share, and lasting organic engagement.
How to Increase Engagement Rates
1. Get Creative with Your Content
The first thing online brands need to understand is that daily using the same content strategy won’t increase engagement rate as users search for more exciting publications than photos.
Instagram was initially used as a photo-viewing platform, but in the last ten years, the platform has evolved to be more than just sharing photos. In fact, you can now find features like stories, carousels posts, ads, highlights, video, IGTV and many more on the platform. What does this mean for business owners?
The more business owners can use these different features and vary the kinds of content they curate, the better and higher the engagement will be. People now have the means to create different content that captivates their audience. So, instead of sticking to a photo-content strategy, live videos, ads, and even short videos will create to attract the organic audience business owners need to build engagement.
2. Learn About Your Audience
Making content for people you don’t know is one of the hardest things anyone who strives for more engagement can do. Why? The demographics of your viewers will determine the type of content you should curate, the brand voice, and the perfect time to publish the content mix.
Before posting any content, entrepreneurs need to understand the type of audience they have – from knowing when they come online to knowing the type of content they like, it’s important to find that working schedule that would make it easy to grab users’ attention.
3. Post on Strategic Hours Daily
It can be tempting to public photos and videos almost every hour of the day. However, the reality people fail to understand is that with an increasing number of posts also comes lesser likes, saves, comments and shares.
But, how do people know when to post? There’s no simple method to this process. It all boils down to finding the right balance through research. Try posting three times in a day and observe which contents get more views in the shortest time possible. Do this for a week, and you’ll find the difference in engagement patterns. Once you know when to users you have and the time they frequent their IG page, work on publishing engaging content that they can’t help but view.
4. Be Authentic
IG users are known for their perfectionist online lifestyle (hell, that’s the trend)! But, sometimes, it is better to be authentic than always showcase a perfect lifestyle. A polished and professional marketing campaign will not always generate the engagement results you envision.
Publish content that goes beyond the sophisticated ensemble they see. For business owners, show the audience a part of the not-so-perfect behind the scene footage they don’t usually get to view. Let people feel like they know the deepest secrets of your brand, but in a sense, you only show them what you want them to see.
Another way people can reveal their authenticity is by sharing comments on socio-economic and cultural issues and adding a touch of humor to their captions under their posts.
5. Use Relatable Memes
Talking about adding a touch of humor to the caption, business owners can create content meant to be funny. Using memes.
Today, memes are popularly used among social media networks because they aren’t simply creative graphics; they are an engagement tool that helps people forget their worries. For instance, a meme could be created to represent a challenge people face today. But, instead of feeling down, it warms the reader’s heart since the situation is quite relatable. In essence, memes aren’t just funny; they are creative and relatable.
By creating the right meme that would arouse viewers’ emotion, users increase their engagement rate as they get more likes, comments, shares and saves. But business owners would think memes are for non-entrepreneurs. Understand that no matter your niche, there’s always that chance to create a catchy meme. Business owners can use trending photos and branded texts to create a meme to attract followers. Alternatively, business owners can research user-generated-contents that would portray the brand voice.
6. Add a Powerful CTA
Sometimes, the best way to get engagement is simply by asking nicely. Users may love your photo, video, reel or ads. However, there’s also a high chance of them forgetting to click the like button when they finish watching the video.
By adding a strong call to action, you notify them of something they forget and prompt activity from likes to comments and shares.
7. Embrace IG Reels
The IG reels feature was added in the summer of 2020. While it acts almost the same as that of TikTok, Instagram reels have risen in fame today to be a feature that helps build engagement. People can publish short multi-clip videos with reels while adding filters, lighting, and audio effects.
If you’re familiar with how Instagram works, you know that new features will always get a boost in the algorithm. So, when your creative reels appear on explore page, it gets seen faster than standard short videos. You also get to connect with thousands of followers worldwide, thereby building a robust and engaging community that would increase brand recognition.
8. Find New Ways to Interact with the Community
Planning a paid campaign can be challenging for small business owners due to a lack of funds. However, there are various ways to get the audience pouring in. A good example is hosting giveaways and contests. Since curating tons of content for the business page is tricky, contests will also work great to encourage organic followers’ outreach. Plus, contests are typically engaging since users will have to do something to begin the process.
On the other hand, publishing tutorials that consist of useful tips and tricks on different topics or in-depth demos on a particular product people find challenging can build engagement rates. With such tutorials, users believe that the brand has the right expertise and skill to solve their problems, so they always come back to check for more info.
9. Go Live
Another way to grab users’ attention is through the IG live feeds. When people use Instagram live to stream live videos, they can easily connect and communicate with their audience and share new info, which will mean increased engagement. Recent statistics reveal that users would rather watch a live stream than view images or read a post.
With live videos, you easily get to answer questions followers might ask; you’ll also get the comment section filled with comments pouring in throughout the process. For business owners, it’s easy to build engagement rates using Instagram’s new live shopping feature.
10. Use Relevant Hashtags
Understand that hashtags will always be a reach tactic, and the greater the organic reach, the higher engagement levels you get. So, if you’re considering new ways to build strong interaction, hashtags should be a must-use strategic tool.
However, IG hashtags can also be a double-edged sword. Why? When used properly, they drive some serious traffic and boost interaction in your community. Overdo it, and the published content will come off as a spam account. Research reveals that content with an average of thirty hashtags received the highest engagement rates, while posts with more than thirty hashtags received less engagement.
The trick to maximizing interaction level with this tool is to ensure that the hashtags tap into niche communities that resonate with the brand. Hence, users and business owners need to be strategic about their hashtags to gain the right engagement they need.
11. Post Carousels
Carousels are an Instagram feature that combines multiple images. Although one of the newest features, this is one of the most effective tools to drive interactions with your content in 2022. Statistics even reveal that carousels posts have the highest engagement rates than every other IG feature, with a global rate of interaction of 1.01%.
Ways to Measure Instagram Engagement Rates
A brand’s engagement rate shows how much interaction a published content earns relative to followers’ outreach. In simple terms, it details the percentage of people that have seen the video, photo, meme or short clips. If you’re wondering how to get that number. Users can calculate their engagement rates by impression, reach, post, or followers, depending on their social media goals. Accessing these metrics can be difficult if you don’t have an IG business page since you can only get them through the IG insights tool.
After calculating this data, how do people know they have a good engagement rate?
How to Know a Good Instagram Engagement Rate?
How Instagram a “good” engagement rate varies. However, many social media marketing experts will tell you that a strong interactions value would range between 1% to 5%. So, if your number ranges 4.59%, you don’t have to worry about low engagement rates.
Statistics reveal that many businesses fell short of these engagement rates in 2021. Below are the global average Instagram interaction rates for most IG business pages in 2021.
- IG posts: 0.82%
- IG photo contents: 0.81%
- Published videos: 0.61%
- Carousel posts: 1.01%
The number of followers can also affect the number of interactions in any IG user account. In 2021, statistics reveal that users with less than 10,000 followers had 1.18% engagement rates. This is much higher than those users with followers between 10,000 to 100,000 followers, as their rates ranged 0.94%. Users with more than 100,000 followers had the lowest engagement rates with only 0.75% input from followers. This signifies that the more followers in an account, the less interactions the user receives.
The Takeaway
A social media marketing campaign isn’t always a bed of roses. For the business to get the amount of interactions they need and drive traffic to their page, it would take consistent effort and luck. Hopefully, with these 11 tactics we discuss above, IG users will find the task of boosting their engagement rates much easier.
