Not long ago, increasing reach and boosting engagement on Instagram was a fairly straightforward task. Working with the chronological feed provided a decent and, most importantly, predictable effect. However, with the introduction of the algorithmic approach to feed formation, traditional techniques have become less effective.
Thanks to artificial intelligence, users now have access to 90% of posts from their friends. This has significantly increased the overall amount of time users spend on Instagram. But how can you expand your audience reach and improve your view statistics?
We offer you 10 reliable ways to effectively increase your reach and engagement when working with your Instagram audience.
1. Quality Content Creation
Posts of questionable quality tend to have a small reach. The same goes for cross-posting and copying materials from external sources. The Instagram audience is interested in engaging content, exclusivity with vibrant and memorable visuals. It is through such content that you can captivate and engage your audience effectively.
Naturally, your publications should align with the format of your target audience. However, this alignment should be striking! Avoid cluttering your feed with mediocre images that lack any distinctive features. Focus on high-quality content and exclusivity that gives users a sense of celebration and involvement in something unique.
2. Storytelling
Publishing interesting Stories on Instagram greatly contributes to audience engagement. The prime placement of Stories at the top of the main feed leaves little chance for users to overlook them. Easy to create, Stories are a powerful method for attracting and retaining your target audience.
3. Interactive Content
It's a well-known fact that an active and engaging account attracts more attention. Audience activity can be expressed in various ways, depending on your goals and objectives. For example, e-commerce businesses can showcase new arrivals on their Instagram feed by posting a carousel of colorful photos in their Stories.
Trust and engagement from your audience can also be enhanced through live broadcasts. It's not necessary for every stream to be lengthy. Sometimes, just a couple of minutes of interesting or amusing live content can significantly improve communication with your audience. By the way, live broadcasts are given priority in a user's feed.
4. Encouraging User-Generated Content
According to Crowdtap research, user-generated content is trusted 50% more by the audience and is perceived 35% better. This is especially noticeable when compared to posts from commercial accounts, which are often associated with advertising.
Encouraging user-generated content is not difficult. You can showcase examples of user creativity along with testimonials on your page or offer discounts for publishing photos with your product. The number of motivational ideas in this case depends solely on the creativity of the page owner.
5. Generating Questions and Running Giveaways
Questions and giveaways on Instagram have a good reach among the audience. They create a motivated call-to-action for the audience to engage in actions beneficial to the account. User engagement can take various forms, including asking users to caption a post creatively, requesting them to draw a picture, share their impressions, and more.
The key to engaging questions and giveaways is an interesting topic and simple answers. However, this form of engagement should not be used too frequently. Constant questions and contests can become tiresome, so there should be reasonable intervals between them.
6. Determining the Optimal Posting Time
The algorithmic nature of the Instagram feed does not diminish the importance of posting, especially if the posts are published at the right time. Well-timed posts can help increase reach, and active engagement will prompt the algorithm to show your content to more users.
The best time for posting on Instagram is generally in the evening, but it is not a guarantee of high reach. The optimal posting time should be chosen based on analytics. This is where the functionality of a business profile comes in. Instagram Insights, an analytics tool available to business profile owners, can help determine the time period of highest activity among your target audience.
To increase reach in a personal account, you can observe the date of publication. Simply make notes in a separate file or notepad of the times when users are most active in responding to your posts. Although the manual method requires more time for analysis, its accuracy is quite high when applied correctly. You can also use scheduling services for delayed posting.
7. Administering Contests
Almost every aspiring blogger faces the challenge of administering contests. This is because a large audience has its own control preferences. In this case, specialized services like You to Gift can be very helpful. Their automated algorithms independently analyze the fulfillment of participation conditions and create a systematic database of users.
The functionality of these tools allows for various contests with a truly objective selection of winners, facilitated by the presence of a reliable randomizer. Some of these services have their own audience, which can also participate in the contest. Several of these tools are absolutely free.
8. Assessing the Popularity of Formats
Research conducted by NewsWhip has shown that posts with photos lead in terms of likes received. However, when it comes to the number of comments, videos hold an unquestionable lead. It is difficult to say which of these factors is more valuable.
It is fair to assume that users put more effort into writing a comment than simply liking a post. Therefore, posts with a higher number of comments are given priority in ranking. However, this conclusion does not apply to all posts because photo or video content is not suitable for all situations.
9. Utilizing Advertising Tools
Advertising on Instagram can be quite costly, but achieving full impact without advertising is difficult. The active monetization seen on the most popular platforms has also affected this social network. These are the conditions set by audience reach leaders, and one must take them into account.
However, there are solutions available on Instagram even for limited budgets. Proper internal targeting, taking into account the interests of the target audience, can yield good results even with small advertising expenditures.
10. Automating the Promotion Process
Achieving high audience reach results can be done through process automation. There are numerous tools that allow for automatic data collection, competitor tracking, contest management, scheduled post publishing, and many other audience engagement actions. Of course, working with these tools requires certain skills and experience, but this issue can be resolved by involving specialists.
FIVE STARS, a digital agency, provides a comprehensive range of services related to Instagram and other social media promotion. Our over 10 years of experience has allowed us to achieve a leading position in Moldova in terms of SMM promotion. We know how to increase sales, generate more calls, and improve conversion rates. We are ready to provide documented evidence of all the conditions, timelines, and technical operations carried out by our specialists. Give us a call, and we will offer you the best solution for Instagram promotion!
