Instagram Marketing: Tips to Keep Your Audience Engaged
Instagram is not just about sharing amazing pictures, videos, and infographics with your audience. It is a powerful platform that can take your business to the next level when used properly. In view of this, it is important to keep your audience engaged to ensure that you remain relevant to them.
What does Instagram engagement mean?
Perhaps you are wondering what Instagram engagement means. Basically, Instagram engagement refers to everything that affects the interactions between your brand and your audiences. Notably, engagement is usually dependent on the content on your page.
In general, Instagram engagement usually include the following metrics:
- Followers
- Comments
- Likes
- Shares
- Saves
- Branded hashtags
- Tagged and untagged mentions
- DMs
- Click-throughs
Top tips for increased Instagram engagement
So, let’s check out the top tips for getting lots of Instagram engagement from your audience.
- Be authentic
If you want to get and retain Instagram followers, you must be authentic. Many Instagram users want to relate with honest individuals and brands. Therefore, if they feel your profile is fake, they are bound to avoid you like a plague.
Given this, you need to remain authentic. Share the behind-the-scenes story of your brand. This helps people to see the people that make your business function. Also, be humorous and don’t hesitate to show your humanness.
- Post consistently
As a brand, your audiences are constantly looking forward to hearing from you. So, if you don’t post consistently, you are bound to lose many of your followers. Even whenever you post, some of your followers will be unwilling to engage it.
Depending on your brand, you should consider posting content 1 to 3 times every day. Consider posting sometimes in the morning and later in the evening. Since most people use the internet during these periods, they will likely come across your posts. With these regular posts, your feed will be always fresh. As a result of this, it will be difficult for your followers to forget about you.
- Post awesome images
No one wants to read long posts on Instagram. Therefore, you should rather focus on sharing amazing images with your followers. Make sure your images are clear and meaningful.
Notably, you don’t need to invest thousands of dollars in professional photography. If you have a good smartphone, it can come in handy for taking pictures for your Instagram page.
- Share user-generated content
As the name suggests, user-generated content is content created by your audiences. This could be a review of your product or service made by one of your existing users. Otherwise, you can create a challenge and ask your audience to create videos or pictures.
Share these pictures or videos on your Instagram page, and you will be amazed about how followers will be happy to like, share, and comment on the content. Such content can also encourage more people to follow your page.
- Share carousels
Carousels refer to multiple pictures posted as a single content. According to Hootsuite, carousel posts are capable of getting 3 times more engagement than normal Instagram posts. This tells you that carousels can come in handy whenever you need to boost the engagement of your Instagram content.
- Craft astounding captions
Although Instagram is all about posting great pictures and videos, the importance of amazing captions cannot be overemphasized. On Instagram, your captions can contain as many as 2,200 characters. So, you shouldn’t hesitate to use these captions to your advantage. Use it to show the personality behind your brand or just write something witty or thought-provoking.
However, you don’t have to use all the characters as long captions can be quite boring to the viewers. Keep your captions simple, meaningful, and eye-catching.
- Respond to comments and questions of your audiences
Many brands are fond of posting content and disappearing into the thin air. They don’t engage with their audiences in the comment section; hence, they remain largely unresponsive to their followers. While this may keep your audiences curious at the beginning, you will soon lose many of them as they don’t see the humanness behind your brand.
You should avoid such a pitfall by responding to the comments of your audiences. If anyone has a question for you, don’t hesitate to answer them. Regular responses will make it easy for your audiences to relate to you. Hence, they will look forward to engaging with your regularly.
- Post videos
When compared to pictures, videos are more interesting to users. Besides, videos allow you to make your content more informative. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that videos get more engagement than pictures.
While you must make sure your videos are clear and relatable to the audience, you don’t have to spend your lifesaving on them. There are tons of free or affordable tools you can use to edit your videos without much hassle. Many of these tools are also easy to use; hence, you don’t need a professional video editor.
- Utilize live content
Going live is another unique way to share video content on your Instagram page. According to Livestream, most audiences prefer watching a live stream to reading written content. Therefore, going live can assist you to keep your audiences engaged for an extended period.
You should understand that live content can be done in numerous ways. This could come in form of a live how-to guide to describe how customers can use your product or service. Otherwise, you can do a live Q&A event to answer numerous questions that your followers may have.
- Use hashtags
For every content you share, Instagram allows you to use as many as 30 hashtags. Although you don’t have to use everything, make sure that each of your posts contains the right hashtags. It should be noted that the right hashtags can draw more people to your post. Thus, they may engage your post with their likes and content or even follow your page.
So, if you are serious about keeping your audience engaged on Instagram, you should take note of the tips described above.