Less than ten years ago, no one could have thought that Instagram could have blown up so much, let alone think of people using the platform to earn money. Today, there are many influencers and content creators who have made it huge thanks to the work they have done in maintaining a good Instagram profile. However, what was once a niche segment to enter has become a giant battlefield, with thousands of people trying to become famous on social media platforms. With such an exponential increase in competition, it is essential that you remain up to date with methods that you can and should use to ensure that your Instagram engagement is always up and better than the people you are competing against.
Here are some quick and easy tips you should keep in mind to ensure your Instagram engagement does not die down:
Collaborate With Other Creators
Collaboration is a very effective way for two creators to grow together by essentially sharing their fan bases for mutual benefit. Of course, who you can and cannot collaborate with is a rather lengthy discussion you need to have with yourself, but the fruit that comes out of this effort is worth the work put into it. Recently, KSI and Logan Paul collaborated all over the internet after their boxing match, which helped boost sales for their Prime Energy Drink – a classic case of the benefits arising out of collaboration.
Be Regular With Your Posts
The algorithm on Instagram is a hungry monster that you need to feed regularly. One needs to ensure that they only go for a short time without posting a story or post from their profile. As per multiple studies done in 2021 and 2022, the sweet spot for maximizing user engagement on Instagram is posting anywhere between 3 and 14 times in one week, depending on the number of followers you have; this allows the post to reach more people and the audience to interact with your account. Keep in mind larger pages need to post less frequently than smaller ones, as their posts automatically have more traction.
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Use Proper Hashtags
Your hashtags help you to be discovered across the globe and in specific locations. One good idea will be to check the trending hashtags across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter if you are trying to target a particular area. Overdoing hashtags will make your post look clumped up, while underdoing them compromises the potential reach and engagement that you could be getting. While you can use a maximum of 30 hashtags per post on Instagram, the best engagement is generated by posts with somewhere between 10 and 20 hashtags.
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Contests and Giveaways
If you create something that users can buy, you can organize a giveaway or have special contests for followers. These steps encourage people to follow you or your page, as there is an incentive for them at the end of the process. You can also organize contests and giveaways for coupons from popular websites such as Amazon; this also ensures a positive relationship between you and those who follow you.
Analyze Your Account
Just promotion through brute force will only yield meaningful results if you habitually analyze and correct the mistakes you are making while promoting and marketing your account. Even if you have never studied social media and brand management as a subject in any of your courses, as a content creator, you must understand how to track different metrics and KPIs of your account and check how individual posts have performed. You can only formalize a way of promoting your account properly after continuous evaluation and improvement.
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Use Cross Platform Promotion
If you have a presence across multiple social media platforms, you must ensure that your target audience and existing audience base get to Instagram, irrespective of where they started. Hence, all your other accounts and handles, including those on sites and platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, should have a mechanism to divert people following you on that platform onto your Instagram account.
Run Advertisements Smartly
Whether you like it or not, a lot of people have to pay Instagram to promote their accounts in the early stages to ensure it has a good setup. While this step is optional for all content creators, it does help you get a head start compared to the competition. However, it would help if you were careful about the platforms and people you refer to for Instagram promotion – increasing followers through click farms will ensure that you have many followers but not that your individual posts do well. If the reach of your posts is compromised, it automatically means that your Instagram engagement is also compromised.
Feedback and Content from Users
Comments are a great way and metric to check the level of engagement you are getting on your Instagram. A post with only likes and shares without comments often dies out faster than one where people are engaged in conversation and discussion in the comment section. Thus, you must ensure that the audience responds to your posts by liking them and adding comments to drive Instagram engagement further.
You can build a similar story around the concept of user-generated content, which is beneficial in multiple ways:
- It takes the pressure off your shoulders to prepare entertaining and engaging content.
- It builds a strong relationship between the people following you and submitting their posts and you.
- But not least, user-generated content is an excellent way of having a lot of comments on your posts, as the users promote the content that they made themselves more aggressively and passionately than something you would have made for them.
While social media is largely an unpredictable platform, with everyone vying for your short attention span, we believe that following the above steps as closely as possible would give you a great chance to edge out your competition in the long run.
