Get More Engagement on Instagram

Do you use Instagram for your business? I love Instagram! It’s so fun. (Follow us here!) And there are a lot of industries where Instagram can make a big impact for your business, such as realtors, hair stylists, dog walkers and veterinarians. (My vet’s office posts a lot of photos on Instagram and I love it. The Internet loves animal pics!) It’s a great way to keep your clients engaged and up to date on what you’re doing.

But did you know there are ways to get more engagement from your followers? It’s true. You can post a simple photo or photos with a caption and that’s great, but you could be getting more engagement on your posts. Here are some simple tricks to help your followers get more involved.

1. 1. Don’t simply post more often. Just posting frequently can actually cause engagement to decrease for you. DO use stories to reach your customers. A story is just a feature that disappears after 24 hours. They also don’t appear on your profile grid or in the main Instagram feed. If you want to post multiple times a day, this is the way to do it.

1. 1. Post your links in your bio. If you want to share your blog posts on Instagram (which we do), and you also want your users to click through and read the post, guess what, links that go into your Instagram caption are NOT clickable. Instead, put “Link in the bio” and update your bio with the freshest link. Yes, this takes more time to do and you have to change it frequently, but it will result in more clicks.

1. 1. Post when your users are most active. I like to post in the mornings when I’m fresh and can write my posts, but that isn’t always the best time for your customers. It can vary wildly according to industry. Experiment with different posting times to find the best results for your audience.

1. 1. Add video. Instagram isn’t just photos! Create short videos of things that are going on, share video messages with your followers. Adding subtitles to your videos is a sure way to grab attention for people scrolling through.

1. 1. Use hashtags. But don’t just guess, use a tool like Hastagify to find a great one that is seeing results. The point of a Hashtag is to attract views from people looking for most posts on the same topic. If nobody is looking for that topic, then the hashtag isn’t very useful.

1. Create a poll! Nothing says user interaction like asking a question. Fun fact, goofy and silly questions tend to get more responses from the audience.

It takes a little more time and effort to start increasing your online engagement, but it can pay off big when you get an increase of interactions and more followers!