8 Tricks That Will Increase Instagram Engagement

The article has been updated. First published August 24, 2017

With the introduction of the algorithmic feed on Instagram, everyone is bad. Every account is losing audience, and now it’s almost impossible to go back to old metrics.

Left, posting to my account a year and a half ago. On the right is a photo of 11 July 2017

In 2015, I freely gained 1000 likes, now I barely 200 likes. You can suffer and cry for a long time, scold Instagram and remember the past, but this is not my option. My option is to get my thousand likes.

Photo content

Learn to make quality content. Quality content for your audience. Each additional like increases organic reach by several dozen people. Any accounts have more likes on really cool photos than others and reach many times higher. And you can upload a photo to Instagram from a computer using SMMplanner.

Get rid of dark, blurry, dirty photos. We get rid of dies and plaques in photographs.

On average, 4 times fewer likes are typed by posts with text on photos

Use a corporate identity to stand out.

An account that shows concern for content

Get rid of cheats

If your account has a lot of bots or subscribers that are dead weight, get rid of them. Subscribers who do not respond to the content do not bring anything good. Instagram algorithms, of course, look at how people react to content, if the algorithms “see” that many guys from Moscow do not like your content, then other subscribers from Moscow do not need to show your content.

To learn how to properly set up ads, pay attention to the course for beginners “Total Advertising: Facebook and Instagram”. Read more about it at the link above.

Remove bots, non-target audience, mass followers. Mass followers – who have more than 1500 subscriptions. 100% of your account is not interesting to them. Remove the audience that is definitely not your target audience, if you can isolate it by gender, city, country, and so on. For example, shops from Voronezh should clear the account of the Arabs! But the phytonyash blogger SHOULD NOT REMOVE THEM! Who will like it?

You can find out how many bots you have, through Livedun, we analyze the audience of the account.

Cleaning optional

But here everything is bad

Remove bloggers via AML. Alexey Tkachuk has prepared an instruction “How to clean bots”. Read the instructions first.

Create a smart hashtag strategy

The value of hashtags on Instagram is highly overrated. In my opinion, it’s perfectly acceptable to say that hashtags don’t work. BUT! Study your audience, perhaps by some hashtags they are looking for information on Instagram.

Don’t use junk, spam, or blocked hashtags.

I got to the Tops dozens of times, including by high-frequency hashtags, but I never got even a serious increase in likes to talk about it. Ordinary people don’t follow the hashtag #Voronezh

Previously, to get into the top 9, you need to get more likes in the first minutes than other people using this hashtag. In principle, you can team up with friends who also want to be in the top 9, you share hashtags with each other and like each other as soon as you have a new post.

Formally, the “TOP 9” technology is now obsolete. Because of the personal hashtag feed.

Find your rhythm and time to post

Algorithmic feed killed all that importance of posting at certain times. I changed the posting times several times, mainly the dynamics of the set of likes changed, but not the engagement in general terms.

If you want to get into the “stream” of a quick set of likes, study the statistics of Livedun, test the time that you have not tried yet.

Dynamics of likes. I got the most likes in the first two hours of publication and in the morning of the next day.

Best time to post

Test the frequency per day, per week. Test different content formats.

Call to action

Add a call to action to your content. Ask the audience to do something, add provocation. Many bloggers, in plain text, ask their subscribers for likes. You can test this idea among your audience, but most likely, because of the words “comment”, “like”, your organic traffic will decrease. This is what the ViSi article says. But, what’s stopping you from checking?

If begging for likes doesn’t help, try playing games with your audience.

Instagram gang

An Instagram gang is an association of bloggers into one group, mainly in order to like each other’s content. They say that a like from an account of 5,000 followers is more valuable than from an account of 300 subscribers. Therefore, such updates are taking place. The gangs also exchange news and observations on Instagram.

Abroad it is called Instagram Pods, here I heard “Instatimes” and “self-help groups”. I like to call them gangs. You can find your gang in the Telegram chat “Instagram Experiments”.

I’m too lazy to look for a team and somehow organize the work, but I would team up with Voronezh bloggers

Use Instagram stories actively

This is a cool theme! Through stories and live streams, you can reach the audience that does not see your news feed, interest them in yourself and thus raise organic reach.

Thanks to the active use of Instagram stories, I increased the reach of one account by 50%.

I told you how to promote on Instagram stories

Interactive content

Contests, sweepstakes, games, riddles, chats within the account. Each interactive content gains reach more than half the usual. But do not participate in the giveyas. Giveys are not officially banned, but there are numerous cases when they lost an account because of them.

The fortune-telling game gains hundreds of comments per day

Let’s summarize

We will have to live in the conditions of the algorithmic Instagram feed, and that magical time when every subscriber saw the content will never return. Therefore, we must:

Make bombastic photo content
Get rid of cheats,
Learn to use hashtags
Find your publishing mode
Find out what a CTA is
You may have to join the Instagram gang
Actively use Instagram stories
Often hold games, contests and sweepstakes.

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