We’re sharing 6 powerful ways to boost Instagram engagement for fast organic growth:

1. Post Regularly

Every time you put an Instagram post out into the world you get a golden opportunity to gain exposure with your audience. Unfortunately, many of us get caught up in life, our business, other aspects of our day-to-day life and end up posting without intention, posting on-the-spot, or not at all. Making the time for posting consistently is important to helping you increase your instagram engagement rate.

How?

When your audience uses the likes, comments or shares function with your post they are deciding how much engagement weight they want your content to hold. The more weight, the more likely it is that Instagram will continue to push your content to them. Pushing new posts out regularly gives your content the opportunity to build up engagement with your audience and gain insight thus creating an opportunity for high post performance.

Remember, your content doesn’t need to be perfect, but it should align with your brand messaging.

What to do: Create relatable Instagram content, find a way to entertain within 3 seconds, post regularly, check your post stats at the end of the week, use a free social media scheduling tool like Later, Planoly, Hootsuite, Canva, Buffer etc to allow you to plan content weeks or months in advance.

What not to do: Stress about posting 15+ times/ week, post content that doesn’t relate to your brand, post sporadically, post without intention or thought, manually post everyday and not schedule your post in advance.

2. Find Creative Ways to Build up Your User Generated Content Portfolio Through Influencer Marketing

If you are looking to boost your Instagram engagement and grow your account quickly, one of the best ways to do so is through influencer marketing (nano influencers, micro influencers and macro influencers). Influencer marketing gives you plenty of user generated content to choose from that has been created by people who are actually using your products or services, and can communicate how they work from a unique POV. Influencers and creators will post their reviews, testimonials, product photos etc. to their platform to showcase to their audience, and then provide access to their content for you to repurpose on your own brand’s platform.

Not only does influencer marketing help your account grow, it also gives you insight to post performance with different audiences as you will be able to use an influencer’s stats against your own.

What to do: Find influencers that have a very similar target demographic or audience to yours, pay your influencers or create collaboration agreements if you are giving out free products, review stats on both accounts, encourage them to be authentic and real, use unique hashtags that will result in growth.

What not to do: Use influencers that don’t relate to your brand, require your influencer to follow a large list of do’s and don’ts for posting and not provide creative freedom, over pay an influencer or provide too much product (agree to terms reasonable on both ends.)

3. Use Your Instagram Stories Every Day

It’s important, now more than ever, to start using your Instagram stories on a regular basis. We would encourage you to get into your Instagram stories every single day, up to 10x/ day.

Your Instagram stories offer something really valuable that your feed posts don’t, and that’s the human connection. They also have incredibly high rates of engagement when compared to feed posts. When you work through an Instagram story you can show, in near to real time, behind the scenes, thought processes, fun day in the life etc. and the best part is your Instagram stories don’t need to be curated to perfection the way a feed post does as they disappear in 24 hours.

The most important part is that you are showing your audience the real you, in real time and allows for a genuine connection. At the end of the day, people want to see that you are relatable and can continue to trust in your content.

What to do: Connect your Instagram stories to your feed post, encourage your audience to engage by asking them questions and using Instagram stories sticker features, use filters or apps such as Canva to create branded stories in a short amount of time.

What not to do: Post unrelated stories (be sure it somehow connects to the content you put out there/work that you do), be fake with your audience or unauthentic, stage or script your stories, not include engaging content that allows for interaction with your audience.

4. Use Your Instagram Reels and carousel posts

One of the more recent updates to Instagram is their shift to focus on videos (reels) over static images. However, this does not mean that Instagram will not prioritize your images, it just means that creating more reels can boost your average engagement rate and your account can be found by a wider audience.

You can also measure your engagement by testing carousel posts against your reels to figure out what your audience prefers, or simply play with a mix of both against static images.

What to do: hook your audience in the first few seconds, make it fun, tell a story or show behind the scenes, have a CTA (call to action), answer your audience’s questions, use creative edits and transitions, use trending sounds.

What not to do: make a long video with no hook, have no CTA, use no stickers, texts or sounds, answer no questions, take too long to get to the point.

5. Best Time of Day to Post

Did you know by posting at the wrong time you could be limiting your Instagram engagement rate?

Figuring out when your audience is most active online can result in a quick win for engagement.

Spend some time monitoring and tracking your analytics to learn when the best time for you to post and then measure your engagement over the course of the week using those times. Every platform is different so it’s essential to figure out the best times for your audience. Remember, it’s not about being everywhere at once, but about being there when your audience wants to see your content.

What to do: track best times to post for your audience, adjust posting schedule based on when your audience is active.

What not to do: post randomly and inconsistently, post at a time not convenient for your audience, not track the optimal times to post.

6. Use Hashtags

Understanding which hashtags have the ability to drive more eyeballs to your posts is really important when it comes to increasing your reach, amplifying your brand and getting your content to the right people.

To effectively use Instagram for your business you’ll have to choose the right hashtags. These are the hashtags that you know your audience is using. Here are some ways you can find those hashtags:

• Check your competitors. More than likely they will have hashtags that will also be relevant to your niche.
• Learn from influencers that are in your niche and identify the most relevant hashtags
• Use free social media tools such as a hashtag calculator that generates suggested hashtags based on your keywords
• Make the hashtag relevant to the post
• Make a hashtag unique to you or your brand
• Keep it short and simple. Generally the sweet spot is between 8-10 hashtags per post.
• Include your hashtags in the caption. Recently there was a big shift where accounts started posting their hashtags in the comments. Instagram has confirmed that this does not boot your post and that posting your hashtags in the comments will not give you “better” results compared to posting it in the caption.
• Don’t try to hit the hashtags that have over 1 millions posts

What to do: use 8-10 relevant hashtags, include your hashtags in the caption, check other influencers or similar accounts for hashtags suggestions, and use third party tools for hashtag optimization.

What not to do: overuse hashtags, use irrelevant hashtags, use another account’s unique hashtag, post hashtags as a comment.