Are you trying to bring new and sustained engagement to your Instagram profile? Instagram has over a billion users active on the platform. This makes it challenging to get your account noticed, especially if you are new to the social site. If you are starting a brand-new business, you have to build up a follower count from scratch. The entire brand-building experience on social media is connected to how many impressions and reach one is able to get for their account. In addition, one needs a great engagement rate to be pushed up on the ranks of searches and home feed visibility; these factors have led many Instagram account holders to buy Instagram likes, follows, and other forms of engagement. However, you do not need to be heavily reliant on paid services to enhance your IG account’s engagement metrics. Managing your Instagram handle requires skillful planning and execution. With a bit of practice, you can soon create one of the most potent engagement-building strategies for yourself.
What are Instagram engagement metrics, and why is it so important to pay attention to them?
Simply put, engagement metrics lets you know your profile’s performance on Instagram. They are your means of tracking your progress in brand-building, audience reach, sales conversions, and leads. As a business, all of these are important for your venture’s success.
Here are the main types of engagement metrics you cannot afford to ignore while trying to build up your brand on Instagram:
- Content-follower engagement metrics – This measures your real-time engagement vis-a-vis your existing follower count.
- Follower growth rate – This tracks the speed at which your follower count increases or decreases over a set period of time.
- Hashtag performance rate – As you know, hashtags are akin to SEO optimization on Instagram. It is important to track which hashtags fare better in building your reach and visibility.
- Content Interaction rate – It measures:
- How many have viewed your content?
- How many have left likes, comments, saves, and shares on your content?
- What type of content gains what kind of engagement rate for your profile?
- Ad and promotion-related metrics – This is the engagement rate generated by placing paid advertisements and promoting select content through the use of Instagram and Facebook ads.
- Referral engagement rate – This is the engagement rate generated on your Instagram content through the redirection of traffic from other sites and URLs.
While most of the above engagement rates can be tracked using Instagram’s inbuilt analytic tools, you may want to invest in professional services or software to get the rest. Once you know where you stand in terms of engagement generation, you will be able to plan your Instagram activities better.
What can you do to bring in better account engagement for your IG page?
Jumpstart your way to increasing your account’s engagement on the social media platform by following these simple tips:
1. Set up a business account
Switch to a business account if you have a personal one open on Instagram. This gives you the advantage of having a default public setting that has a broader audience reach. In addition, it makes several other in-built features of Instagram available to you, which will further make growing your account’s engagement rate easy for you. For instance, Instagram’s inbuilt analytic feature called Instagram insights is available only to business account holders on the platform.
2. Have micro goals in place
Although growing account engagement is a goal in its own right, you must break it down to time-bound definitive goals to streamline your online brand marketing. Ask yourself if you want to build engagement and traffic from:
- A specific audience demographic.
- On certain types of content.
- Which posts do you want visibility enhanced on?
In addition, consider if you have a purpose for which you are aiming to increase your engagement rate. This can be something like:
- Gaining more visible space on Instagram’s search ranks.
- Drawing traffic to direct sales conversions.
- Spreading information about your brand and its services.
- Working for a social campaign.
- Gathering support for non-profit monetary events.
3. Use Instagram Analytics
As mentioned, Instagram Insights become available for use free of cost for all Instagram business account holders. Use this tool to track different types of engagement metrics. This will, in turn, help you determine:
- What audience demographic should you focus on to strengthen your engagement rates further?
- What time of posting brings the best engagement and audience traffic to your content?
- How often and when should you schedule your posts?
- What budget should you realistically set aside for post promotions and advertising?
- What kind of post formats bring the best audience engagement for your account?
4. Tailor Your Posts keeping in mind your micro-goals
Once you know how to track your engagement rate, it is time to focus on the actual content creation to enhance impression and reach. Some tried and tested engagement enhancers on Instagram include:
IG Stories
Although they remain on the platform only for 24 hours, Stories are popular for posting both photos and video content. Stories are visible only to your existing followers, so if you want to concentrate on improving content-follower engagement metrics, you must definitely ace the use of IG Story. You can:
- Add polls, surveys, and quizzes to your Story segments to grow audience engagement organically. If your content is attractive, your followers are bound to interact with the call-to-action in these question posts.
- Add infographics, filers, gifs, and memes.
- Add swipe-up links for directing audience traffic to landing pages with more information or opportunities for e-commerce.
Go Live
The unedited real-time nature of live broadcasting is a great crowd puller on Instagram. Interact with your audience during live sessions by asking them to:
- Place their queries and feedback in your comments.
- Pinning up comments for sustaining discussions and building customer-client conversations.
- Saving your broadcast as an IGTV video for more viewers to check out even after your broadcasting has ended.
Create behind-the-scene content
Whether you create photo or video content, behind-the-scenes contents are an excellent way to draw audience engagement to your profile. This type of content does well as part of Stories and regular posts as they present your brand in a more humane light.
Create content that promotes brand familiarity and goodwill
If Instagram users can connect with your brand, they will genuinely interact with your content and visit any links you put up as part of your posts or captions. Create posts that provide information about you and introduce all aspects of your brand to your target audience. You can do this by:
- Publishing interviews, reviews, and other mentions in blogs and digital media.
- Collaborating with Influencers to introduce your brand to your Insta audience.
- Tagging and mentioning collaborators and fellow IG users related to your content in your posts. This will also make your posts visible to their followers as well. Be sure to seek permission before tagging others, as this may backfire on you if annoyed IG users report you or leave poor reviews.
Create CTA posts
The best way to generate audience engagement is to ask for it authentically and genuinely. There are several ways you can incorporate CTA into your posts:
- Create captions that end with asking your audience to like, share, save or comment on your post.
- Create fun contests with audience engagement as an essential prerequisite for contest participation. You can, for example, ask participants to:
- Like or save your post,
- Tag fellow IG users in the comment section,
- Share the contest on their posts and Stories with you tagged in the post.
- Add CTA buttons where applicable. Depending on where you reside, you may be able to add:
- Shoppable CTA buttons and tags on your posts,
- CTA buttons on your profile information for inquiry, purchasing of products, making appointments, or booking services.
5. Use promotions as and when necessary
Instagram lets you create full ads or promote already made posts to boost your impression and reach. In addition to selecting your budget and target audience, you can also specify CTA links here and define where you wish the traffic generated to be directed.
6. Collaborate and partner up with fellow IG users
Team up with influencers or with fellow IG users from your niche industry to grow your engagement rate. In addition to reaching out to a more extensive audience network, collaborating lets you focus on content creation better as it builds social proof.
7. Use auto-scheduling and automated responses
Schedule your posts to keep a consistent posting strategy. Build audience anticipation for fresh content by posting at the same time and frequency. You can draw a growing engagement rate if you maintain a predictable posting schedule, especially with formats like IGTV videos.
In addition, create some generic automated responses that enable you to reply to DMS and comments promptly. The faster you engage with engagement left on your posts, the higher your visibility will be on Instagram. This, in turn, creates opportunities for organic traction of a better engagement rate:
8. Add clickable links as and when you can
Influence your viewer’s engagement behavior by placing clickable links on your profile and post as frequently as you can. You can add a:
- Swipe up link in Stories.
- URL in your profile bio.
- Contact button in your profile information or posts.
- Buy/book now call to action buttons on your profile.
Shoppable posts which turn your Instagram content into a direct shopping experience for your visitors. This feature may not be available in your country, but if it is available, it is an excellent way of earning through Instagram in addition to building audience engagement.
9. Invest in visual branding
Get your target audience to recognize your brand and its products at a glance by being consistent in your choice of music, photo, and audio presentation of content on Instagram. Be consistent in your choice of color scheme, fonts, and hashtag usage to build brand recognition. An easily recognized brand draws better engagement from visitors and followers than an unknown one.
10. Hold contests and offer special promotions
Create limited-time deals or discount offers on your products and services periodically. If you connect this to your Shoppable posts or Facebook catalog, you are sure to generate traffic, sales, and overall engagement on your IG content.
11. Have a strong hashtag strategy
Hashtags are to Instagram what primary and secondary keywords are to SEO search. You can add up to thirty hashtags to your posts and Stories. You can also add up to ten hashtags to your reels. Great hashtags increase your impression and reach. They help you feature higher up on the Search and Explore tab. The more your content is visible to your target audience or beyond, the higher is the possibility of viewer engagement with your posts. Choose your hashtags with a lot of care and research, as Instagram algorithms only boost posts that do not contain hashtags that feel like spam. Some tips to get your hashtag strategy strengthened:
- Enhance your caption and your profile information with vital hashtags relevant to your niche and your content.
- Create hashtags that are unique to your business.
In conclusion
Increasing one’s account engagement rate is not a solitary goal. It goes hand-in-hand with larger goals like growing an audience, building brand presence, and creating better sales and traffic conversion opportunities. The best way to boost your engagement is to build a mutual relationship of trust with organic and active followers. Try out some of the tips listed above and check for yourself how your IG account is faring to attract better engagement. You will not be disappointed. Experiment and track your performance metrics to better understand what brings the best engagement rates to your Instagram account.