A Beginner’s Guide to Increasing Instagram Engagement

If you are looking to grow your Instagram account, you know how important audience engagement is. Putting effort into creating content just to have it go unnoticed is disappointing and does not help you grow your audience. Increasing your Instagram engagement is more that just creating great content- it takes strategy to build that connection with your audience.

What Is Instagram Engagement?

Instagram engagement is the measure of how your audience reacts to your content. This covers anything you post: photos, Reels, and stories. Post engagement metrics include likes, comments, saves, and shares. Other metrics cover direct messages, link clicks, story interactions, and mentions- basically anything that your audiences to interact with you on Instagram. Focusing on your Instagram engagement is important because it lets you know that your audience is seeing your content and taking the time to interact with it. It can also help you figure out what type of content they like, which can help boost you on Instagram’s algorithm. Tracking your engagement rate is pretty simple and can help you hone in on areas that need some extra attention. There are formulas you can look up to calculate your engagement rate, or you can use a free calculator like this one from Hootsuite.

How To Increase Your Engagement:

Much of increasing your engagement is simply trial and error, however, there are some tactics that can help you achieve your goals more quickly. Posting a variety of content can help you quickly boost your engagement. Reels, carousels, and regular feed posts all serve different purposes, and using all of them together helps grab the attention of your audience and encourages them to interact with you.

Instagram stories are another great way to help increase engagement. Because stories automatically disappear after 24 hours, they create a sense of urgency for your audience to watch them. Stories also appear at the top of user’s feeds, making them stand out more than posts. Another big benefit of stories is that you can add interactive polls, stickers, or Q&A’s. Although these are little things, they help drive up engagement and have your audience checking back to see what you’ll post next.

One of the new updates that Instagram introduced recently is the ability to post audio on any post, meaning that you can add audio over your photos or carousels. Although it seems simple, adding audio (especially trending audio) can help increase your reach and engagement. Putting music or a sound over your posts helps set the tone and adds and extra layer of entertainment.

Put your focus on creating content that your audience will want to save or share. Instagram values content that users deem worthy of saving as it signals strong engagement and content that is worthy enough that user’s do not want to lose it. This can be tricky, but tutorials, info-graphics, or tips are often content that users want to hold on to. You can also encourage users to share your post with someone that would benefit from the content of the post, or someone who relates to what you have shared.

Make sure that you have well-written captions to help encourage and direct conversations regarding your posts. Asking a question or posting a “hot take” can help spark a discussion. It is important to make sure that you are not saying anything disrespectful or offensive, but rather something that will lead to a friendly discussion.

Increasing Instagram engagement takes some effort and planning, but once you start to learn what your audience likes it will start to come naturally. How to you encourage engagement on your Instagram? Do you like to interact on other account’s Instagrams or are you a silent follower? Let us know in the comments!