Grow Your Instagram Engagement With These 5 Tips
With billions of visitors per month, it’s no secret that the Instagram platform is oversaturated. It’s normal to feel lost in the sea of active posts while trying to grow your e-Commerce brand’s Instagram – especially when there are boosted posts to boot. However, Instagram has been and always will be a content creation platform that inspires organic content featuring everything from the raw to the polished. It also happens to be one of the preferred platforms for millennials and it’s powered by user engagement
Engagement includes everything from likes to follows, DMs, reshares, comments, tags, unique hashtags and more. Instagram engagement is important because it feeds the algorithm robot. Instagram is likely to continue recommending your content to users if the algorithm recognizes that user as a prior engager of your content. Ever notice that if you are viewing a particular account’s stories a lot or liking their posts their content continues getting pushed out to you again and again? That’s all algorithm magic at its finest.
Things we can do to support Instagram engagement include:
1. Don’t Fake It Til You Make It
Much like it is bad business practice to buy email lists for your email newsletter, it’s also not a great idea to buy likes or bulk like/follow from “engagement groups”. These engagement practices won’t really get you into the camp of the qualified followers you want. Remember, you want active leads for your e-commerce business, not spammy, filler accounts. Not to mention, Instagram can penalize or even shut down your account entirely for this kind of behavior. Literally nobody likes a bot!
2. Creativity in Stories
Hands down one of the most creative hack features to increase Instagram engagement is stories. Use features like stickers to add visual appeal to a content post and also to do polling (i.e. would you buy this/that, have you watched this video yes/no). The questions feature can be used for an AMA (ask me anything, for any noobs out there). You will find celebrities often doing this (check out @dom_monaghan_ for an example) and it spurs lots of active dialogue with one’s followers.
Reels can also be created in story and help you create more standalone videos with effects, music and more. This feature is Instagram’s video rival to Tik-Tok. Creating a reel doesn’t involve knowing too many hacks but there are some operational procedures to learn. Other features to try out include boomerang, slow mo, and super zoom. Keep things light and (fairly) spontaneous. Stories are not designed to be perfectly polished. Even the top celebs leave typos in them!
✔️Top Tip: Instagram is notorious for cutting off videos too short in story upload. Give a buffer of space at the end to overcome this. You’ll thank us later.
3. CTA All Day
Instagram organically lends itself to the love of all marketers: calls to action. This directly weaves into engagement and how to grow your business on Instagram. Hyperlink to your website for email newsletter signup right in story. (This feature used to be more limited but is now available to all.) You can also get people to listen to your latest podcast episode, read your latest blog post, see your latest landing page and more (use linktr.ee to store multiple links in one go). Other fun call to action hacks can be done in comments with “drop an emoji below”. Tell people the exact emoji to put or give them a choice between several emoji choices to do polling. The account @dearmyanxiety does this quite well. You can also have fun with engagement in totally offbeat ways like the always entertaining caption this challenges.
4. Use Data, Data, Data
Use data in Instagram analytics. This offers you an inside look at all kinds of follower stats you could imagine. What city, country, time zone, gender, age group and more of your followers is all at your fingertips here. Using data we can examine questions like:
✔️At what time of day is my brand’s audience most engaged?
✔️Does my product appeal to a specific gender on this platform more than another?
✔️Which of my posts has performed the best?
✔️What age range is interacting with my content?
Then, follow up with your team to consider:
✔️Are these demographics authentic to my brand’s end user?
✔️If not, what about my tone or content needs to change?
Remember, in considering how to grow your Instagram you want to maximize viewership of people who will actually be sharing and buying your product.
5. It’s All About Consistency
Like any content creation platform, consistency is key. Sometimes the content creation grind can get ya good, so change things up with other Instagram practices like story takeovers, giveaways, and doing Instagram lives. Make posts to announce lives beforehand and meme or clip segments from after. (Just don’t become like this.)
One of the Instagram creators we love the most for creativity is @mrshinchhome. There’s also @orlandobloom, a great follow because he posts inspirational quotes and humanitarian actions to rally behind which are definitely among our many passions. Be mindful that people will be following a variety of people, e-Commerce brands, places, and things. It’s a busy platform and you want to create content that provides users with your brand’s unique imprint (and ideally keeps them coming back for more).
Let Your E-Commerce Brand Thrive on Instagram
Be consistent, especially in stories. Users will enjoy coming back to your story content as a habit, people will get used to watching the same accounts, and the algorithm amplifies your content when people consistently engage with it. In short, consistency will literally feed the robot!
Here at Adquadrant we pride ourselves on supporting e-commerce brands with the best strategies for growing their Instagram engagement. Reach out to us and lets discuss how we can help your brand.
About the author: Julie Ann Howlett is a freelance writer who enjoys marketing, entrepreneurship, and writing. She has degrees in science and teaching and has done advanced coursework in data analytics. She runs her own small businesses and is especially passionate about gender equity in STEM, technology, and business. You can connect with her on LinkedIn via customized note.