Instagram has more than 700 million active users throughout the world. And like and engagements are the biggest reason for people to get obsessed with Instagram. The post discusses increasing engagement on Instagram and getting more likes. The topic is split into two parts—the first part of the post briefs about the actual content part. You need to be doing with your photos, how you need to be editing your photos and what kind of existing content you need to be producing. The second part of the post briefs you little tricks of the Instagram algorithm.
Tips for Content Strategy on Instagram:
The first thing you need to do is to post vertical content, and whether it be photos or videos, you need to make sure that you are posting vertical content. It’s been proven that vertical posts get more engagement. People like to see those vertical posts. There are some reasons for this:
1. First, it’s just simply more aesthetically pleasing, and you’re looking at your phone vertically when you’re browsing through Instagram. So, it makes sense for your post to be vertical as well. It also has a lot to do with the portion of the screen that the photo takes up. When someone’s scrolling through Instagram, and they see your post takes up their whole screen. They’ll be more likely to engage with it rather than if you posted something horizontally or square where it takes a tiny portion of the screen up. And it’s a lot easier to scroll through and skip.
Most of the photos that Instagram is promoting on explore page are verticals. So, it makes a lot more sense and boosts your chances to go the vertical route. In most of the niches, the horizontal posts perform worse than vertical or square ones.
2. You need to study what page is like yours or what even your competition is doing. Let’s say you’re male, and you’ve been hitting the gym. You’ve been growing those biceps. You want to get it to the bodybuilder niche; you want to start a fitness page for yourself. In this case, you would make bodybuilders and see what posts are performing well for them. You need to scroll through their page and find what posts were getting the most likes, comments and engagement. You need to transform your post to get more likes and attention to your post.
3. Another thing you should pay attention to is something called watch time. This is a term that YouTube coins and is often thrown around for YouTube videos but is also relevant to Instagram.
On YouTube, that means how long the audiences spend watching your videos and on Instagram, the same thing, but it also applies to photos. Instagram wants people on their app if possible. That’s why they have teams designing things to make them as addictive as possible for us. The more time people spend on Instagram, the more ads they see, and the more Instagram gets paid for showing the viewer those ads. The longer you can get people to look at your posts, the better it will perform. Instagram things that a lot of people are spending a lot of time looking at this post. If I show it to more people, they will spend even more time looking at it, and more people will spend more time on our app.
That’s why videos perform very well. When you’re watching a video, you’re spending more time on that post than if you’re looking at a photo. But if you’re only posting photography or something like that, there’s still something you can do. So you need to post multiple photos within one post. When you do that, the audience will spend more time swiping through the post and like it. And this will boost your watch time, and that’s good for Instagram.
You should post lighter photos, and people engage way more with posts that are kind of like bright and light rather than the dark and dim ones. This is extremely easy to do. You don’t even have to make specific content for this purpose. You must go to the editing app before you post, and it’s very easy.
Tips for the Instagram Algorithm:
Let’s brief about Instagram hashtags and a couple of things you can do with them and improve your hashtags.
1. A good way to find a hashtag for your niche is to go on your explore page, scroll through the top bar, and find the niche you’re in.
Let’s say you post animal content. You would go on the animal’s tab, scroll through, and slowly scroll through there, and you’ll notice a little post with hashtags in them. If you go on them, you can see the full hashtags, and if you scroll through more, you’ll see more hashtags. When you scroll through your niche, you’ll see certain hashtags pop up. So, you’ll want to start using those on your list of hashtags when you post. So, it can boost your chances of getting viral, getting more engagement since Instagram like these hashtags.
They’re on the explore page for everyone to see. Getting ranked on one of these explore page hashtags is much more beneficial for you than just a normal one that Instagram doesn’t care about.
2. Another thing about tags is that many people put a giant list of hashtags in their caption when they post, and there’s something better that you can do. When you put a list of hashtags in your caption, it just looks greasy, messy, and just a bad vibe. What you can do is take those hashtags right after your post and drop them into the comment. Once you get a couple of comments, they’re hidden away, and people can’t see them. It works, you still get ranked, but you don’t have to get that greasy look on your caption.
If you want to hide them even before people start commenting, what you can do is go on your notes, do something where you place a bunch of periods 7 or 10, and put your hashtags. If you copy this and put it in the comments, it will not show up as many hashtags. It’ll just show up as a couple of dots and a little button that people press to expand.
That’s a kind of aesthetic thing but still if people don’t see the eyesore of having a bunch of hashtags in your caption. That could potentially improve your likes. The right hashtag can help you to reach a targeted audience. If you want more likes, you can buy likes for the Instagram post as well. The main reason for buying likes is to get instant fame within your fan base. More likes mean more famous people.
3. Another very small and simple thing you can do to have the potential of really boosting your engagement is to add your geotag. That’s a little thing that pops up when you post something under your username. When people tap on the username, they’ll see many posts for that location, and Instagram will rank for those posts. If you get ranked as one of the top posts, many new people will see that post and potentially engage with it.
It’s kind of like having one extra, compelling hashtag if you think about it. It also doesn’t have any negative stigma around it, like in the use of a hashtag. So, do that with your post.
4. The last algorithm things and probably the most important of these algorithm tips is to reply to your comments. As we all know that Instagram looks at the first couple of hours after your post was posted to see how well it does with your followers before it goes ahead and promotes it on the explore page.
So, you do it for your next post, and more people will comment back to you.
So, replying is a huge deal. Even the biggest people on Instagram reply to their comments when they first post.
Take Away: You should always remember that if you want to get more likes and engagement on your Instagram, you should always be very consistent with your Instagram post. Hope the above Instagram tips will help you to get more likes and engagement for Instagram post.
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