The only thing harder than building a following on Instagram is building a following that actively engages with you. And these days, engagement is king.
It doesn’t matter if you have millions of followers. If they’re not liking, replying, or sharing your Instagram posts, they might as well be ghosts.
So, what can you do? Sit back, relax, and read our top pick of the 6 ways to easily increase Instagram engagement in 2021.
1. Have a consistent posting schedule
The key here is consistent.
There’s a lot of advice on how many times to post a day and exactly when to time your posts. Much of it is contradictory, to say the least.
What remains true, however, is that you want to be consistent with how many times you post.
At a minimum, you want to be posting once a day. Having consistent content keeps your feed fresh and helps make sure you’re always in front of your audience. The more your audience sees your posts, the more likely they are to engage.
Exactly how often to post will be down to what your audience will stomach. Some brands post five or more times a day (we’ve seen upwards of 30!) Others make do with one-two posts.
This is where a little bit of testing and review will go a long way to see what exactly will work for your audience, but start with one a post per day at the very least.
Knowing when to post to Instagram is also very important. People follow many, many accounts — typically hundreds — and you don’t want your content swept away in a tide of competition.
To make sure your posts are in front of your audience when they’re online and at the top of their feed, plan your posting times accordingly. Fortunately, this is a bit easier than working out how many times a day to post.
But, how do you find out when they’re online? Look at your Instagram Insights. It’ll show you when your followers are most active, and with that info you can time your posts to hit when they’re online.
You’ll usually see that there are several times a day when they’re active. Use this information as guidance for when to time your posts, especially if you’re posting several times a day.
The longer people spend looking at your posts, the better. “Time spent on post” is a metric Instagram’s algorithm uses to rank accounts. But more than just boosting your page metrics, it’s also a great opportunity to try to engage with your audience — and in turn, get them to engage with you.
You can increase engagement by telling a relatable story or even just directly soliciting a response. Couple this by reacting to their responses — either by liking or replying to them —and you’ll motivate your audience to engage with you on a more regular basis.
An approach many brands are finding works for them is to actually start with the caption — and find the appropriate image later. Follow this advice and it will make you more journalistic and help you to tell better stories.
This is fourth on our list of 6 ways to easily increase Instagram engagement in 2021. Brands are finally starting to realize something about social media — people are there to interact with other people. Have you realized this as well? Yes, Instagram is meant to be inspirational and even a little aspirational, but people want to see the person behind the post.
To that end, brands are finding much greater success and engagement by removing the veneer of sales and marketing and presenting a more honest picture of themselves. We think you should do the same.
Talk about struggles, don’t photoshop your models (at least not very much), and be candid with behind-the-scenes content that shows how it all works. Revealing your more human side behind your brand encourages readers to reach out and make connections.
Stories bring people together.
While we’re not referring specifically to Instagram stories, they do pretty much the same thing. Bite-sized, time-sensitive, typically more candid, able to take the viewer on a small journey — they’re pretty powerful ways to build engagement.
For longer-form content, Instagram reels are a perfect way to start telling stories with more depth for your audience to engage with.
Combined with a more authentic approach and a direct call to action, you will notice a steady rise in engagement when you start to leverage stories and reels.
Running an Instagram is almost a full-time job. If you’re starting to see success, but can’t quite dedicate the time to keep things pumping, then why not outsource?
FollowFox is one such IG growth agency. They offer an affordable range of packages to suit most Instagram account needs.
This isn’t a bot farm — when you work with FollowFox, you get two actual, real, breathing humans working on your account.
One is your point of contact, who lets you know what’s going on and helps develop your strategy with you. The other is your IG growth specialist, who runs around in the background making things happen.
They use all of the latest, TOS-compliant tricks in the book to organically grow your audience size and engagement. They’ll follow and unfollow relevant accounts, reply to your audience, post on other accounts — all the little things that are so important, but so easy to overlook.
But isn’t this cheating?
Isn’t this just someone else doing your work?
Not really. They don’t post content — that’s still on you! You still need to create the best images and write captions that speak to and engage your audience. You know your audience best; FollowFox is just there to engage them more.
It’s just that they’ll make sure you’re using the right hashtags, and that people who do engage with your posts get a response to encourage future engagement. Things like that.
Using an IG growth agency is the easiest —though, obviously, not the cheapest — way to grow your Instagram in 2021, and they can help with the 6 ways to easily increase Instagram engagement in 2021 that we’ve presented. Check out FollowFox today and see how they can help you achieve success.