Content creators who are using Instagram as a marketing channel will only find success if their posts get seen. That requires making sure that every one of them gets plenty of views, likes, and follows because only posts with lots of engagement wind up at the top of others’ feeds.
The first step to climbing Instagram’s popularity ladder is usually to find an official website that sells IG followers. From there, though, content creators will need to adopt effective strategies for keeping followers engaged. Read on to find some tips that can help.
1. Be Authentic
The key to success on Instagram is to build a follower base that is fully invested in an account’s posts. Just posting promotional content is never going to create the level of investment required to start boosting follower engagement. Content creators, whether they’re influencers or business owners, need to create content that feels authentic. Think sharing behind-the-scenes photos or videos, highlighting different employees or valued customers, or sharing user-generated content—with permission, of course.
2. Develop a Pre-Engagement Strategy
It can be helpful to start building anticipation for especially valuable posts in advance, which requires developing a pre-engagement strategy. Content creators can start by engaging actively with related posts from other bloggers and audience members around an hour before posting. This generates a larger number of viewers willing to reciprocate with likes, shares, or comments on the post, drawing in more attention and further increasing follower engagement.
3. Tell a Story
Instagram isn’t just for sharing photos these days. It’s also a fantastic platform for telling stories, which is a great way to connect with an audience. Instagram knows how much its users like narrative-driven content and created Instagram Stories to accommodate it. Content creators often find success using Instagram Stories to build out a company or creator narrative and share more authentic, less-polished content that will keep followers engaged and coming back for more.
4. Leverage Group-Based Marketing
Also referred to sometimes as clique-based marketing, this technique involves partnering with multiple influencers or micro-influencers within a niche to promote a brand or product. The reason this can be such an effective technique for boosting engagement is that many of the same users can be expected to follow multiple influencer accounts within the same niche. When they see multiple followers promoting a brand, it changes group norms and creates an impression of popularity, driving more followers to the partner’s account and helping to keep engagement rates high.
5. Get a Boost from a Popular Account
If a post gets a comment from a high-authority user with a large following within the first hour or two of posting, it can boost visibility significantly. The algorithm’s prioritizing of well-connected posts helps to explain why it’s so effective to engage with other Instagram users on their own profiles and form collaborative relationships. Boosting overall visibility also increases engagement rates. The more people who see the post, the greater the chances are that some of them will like, comment, or share.
6. Include Others in the Conversation
One great way to get other users to engage with a post is to step up tagging and hashtag strategies. Both of these mechanisms allow content creators to actively draw others into the conversation, which increases exposure and boosts engagement. People who have been invited into a conversation are much more likely to participate than those who just happen to overhear it, and the same logic applies here.
7. Post at the Right Time
Content creators can only engage followers while they are online, so optimizing content posting times can be a fantastic way to take full advantage of opportunities. While it’s possible that followers will scroll through their feeds and see the post later and then get engaged, it’s less likely because Instagram tends to prioritize newer content in users’ feeds. Do some market research to figure out when followers and the rest of a potential consumer market is online, then save the highest-value content for that time window.
Keep up the Hard Work
Getting a solid following isn’t enough to boost engagement rates on Instagram or to start converting followers into true brand loyalists and ambassadors. That takes ongoing work. Business owners who want to create successful Instagram marketing campaigns that continue to draw in new customers and keep their existing ones engaged need to be at the top of their games every day, posting, responding to comments, and engaging with other people’s content. It takes a lot of work, but over time, that hard work will pay off.
