How do you increase engagement on Instagram?

How do you increase your audience’s engagement on social networks: Instagram, Facebook, and others?

What is engagement?

Engagement is your audience’s activity and one of the main metrics of the efficiency of your work. If your audience responds, likes, comments, reposts, engages, takes part in polls, and so forth, it is always a good sign. It means the audience is interested in your content and wants to interact with you.

Another important role that activities play is prior user experience. If a person interacted with you earlier— liked your posts, commented, and so forth — your new posts will be shown to that person more often.

Community management

How do you stimulate people to interact with you – to comment and to take part in discussions? By default, a lot of people don’t write anything. You need to take special actions to engage people. Community management can help you to increase your audience’s activity.

Community management is a technology that uses special tools that help to stimulate and to spark interest in your audience. Using those tools will increase the number of likes, comments, reposts, and then will consequently boost your reach. Your posts will be seen by more people.

Community management tools

Polls

Ask a question and write possible answers. On Facebook, you can do it with the help of in-built tools, but on Instagram, it can be:

• a poll in a post, i.e. a question with numbered answers and users’ options in comments;
• automatic poll with questions and possible answers in Stories.

Call for action

Call for action can look as follows:

If it was interesting for you and if you enjoyed my post, give likes.

It is a good tool for Instagram, but it is better to avoid it on Facebook. Facebook currently tracks such activities and even might decrease your reach.

Questions to your audience

From time to time ask questions in your posts:

Have you ever experienced the same?

What do you think?

What do you use?

If it is a video, ask questions during the video itself:

What interesting things have happened to you?

People’s answers contribute to prior user experience. Moreover, it is your interactions with users.

Questions from your audience

Suggest asking questions in comments, but most importantly make sure to answer them, because your audience won’t forgive it if you don’t.

Promotional consultation

You announce in advance: “Tomorrow I am going live to answer all your questions on the topic” – and you name a certain topic. You go live and answer all the questions you have received from your audience.

Crowdsourcing post

A crowdsourcing post is a post like:

Recommend something to read.

What is there worth to seeing?

Where can you buy a…?

…and so forth. Together people will create a certain knowledge and advice base.

Introductory posts

An introductory post is a post where people can introduce themselves, tell others what they do, what they are looking for, and how useful they can be.

Networking:

• unites your community;
• helps you understand your audience better;
• helps people find the intersection of interests;
• increases the engagement of your audience.

Condition post

An example of a condition post can be:

If a post gets two thousand likes, I will run a live session.

I will post special materials.

I will make an explanatory video.

…and so forth. On Facebook, this tool doesn’t work, but it works perfectly on Instagram. Indeed, it increases the number of impressions you get by 20-30%.

Content advice

Ask your audience for content advice:

What topic would you like me to review in my posts?

Your main aim is to make your content meet your audience’s wants and needs, interests, tasks, and problems. As a positive side effect, your audience’s engagement will increase.

Competitive activity

Once a month you award the most active user with a small gift from you. There are special services like JagaJam.com that allow you to track the activity and help to choose the most active users of your community.

Comment competition

You give a certain task: answer a question, continue a phrase, think of an idea, make a slogan, and so forth. People write their ideas in comments. This tool helps you to interact with your audience and increase engagement.

Last comment game

On Instagram, this tool doesn’t work yet. You write a post, and the person who writes the last comment on the day of the publication wins a certain prize.

Like-time

It is a format for Instagram, and the idea is that all participants give likes to each other.

Live

Live is an online broadcast when you talk about something, run a workshop, or answer questions. Real-time videos always have significantly more engagement than recorded videos.

We have described the main community management tools. If you use at least some of them, your engagement will increase, your audience will more actively interact with you, and as a result, your reach will boost.