With so many businesses competing for attention on Instagram, getting your brand in front of your target audiences can be tough. Traditional practices are to create compelling content, use appropriate hashtags, and publish graphics that grab attention, but there are new practices to add to your strategy in addition to the standard ones.
Let’s explore how to increase visibility on Instagram and grow followers.
- Reels
- Going Live
- Optimal Posting Times
- Encourage Engagement
- Stories
- Ads
- Consistency
- Quality Over Quantity
- Hashtags
Reels
Although Reels aren’t completely new to Instagram anymore, they are still one of its newest features and therefore the media giant, owned by Meta, will boost your exposure the more you use that feature.
But as with anything, businesses can’t simply post a short video about their video and hope it takes off. You need to be interactive, give information, and tell a short story to your audience to captivate their interest.
Going Live
Instagram gives users the ability to live-stream within the app without the use of third-party applications.
Instagram picks up live profiles, puts them at the top of the page, circles that profile with vibrant colors, and couples them with a ‘Live’ Logo underneath the profile picture. The more frequently you go live and come at the top of their page, the higher the chance they will search your profile to check out your content.
Optimal Posting Times
Use actionable data insights to find out when the optimal times to post are. Leverage tools to get social analytics about the best days to post and the best times to post so your content is most likely to be seen.
Whether you’re using a third-party application to schedule your posts, it’s critical to post at times when your audiences are most likely going to see it.
Encourage Engagement
The more interactions you get, the more visibility Instagram will give you. An effective call-to-action (CTA) help to increase engagement.
What do you want followers to do? Click on a link? Post a comment? Like an image?
One simple way that brands manage to increase their engagement is through hosting competitions: Get followers to tag 3 friends in the comments or get followers to like a past Instagram photo forcing them to click on your profile
Stories
The Instagram Story feature holds a rather prominent position on the app. With over 500 million Instagram users actively using stories each day, businesses must start utilizing their use of active story use. That doesn’t mean posting a story now and then, but consistent stories throughout each day.
Only 50% of influencer marketing campaigns used Instagram stories. This means that there is room for new businesses to get in on the effective use of Instagram stories.
Ads
You have the option to boost your post once you’ve uploaded it onto your ‘grids’.
Use the Instagram business insights tool. There, you can see which of your posts have the highest impression rate, and the highest engagement rate.
Boost a few of these and see which performs best. This is one of many ways how data can be used as a guide on how to create future ads.
Consistency
Instagram knows whether you have an active profile or not. The more you post, the better.
When posting onto your ‘grids’, keep in mind three important factors:
- Will followers like and comment?
- Are they tagging their friends in this post?
- Is there a CTA to take users to your profile?
But the main portion of Instagram in which consistency is key lies with Instagram Stories.
By posting to your story daily, you are increasing the chance of reaching users as they click onto their stories throughout the day, which in turn will create more profile views.
Quality Over Quantity
If you’re posting too frequently, without effective CTAs, and with users quickly swiping your content away, you may find yourself on IG’s naughty list.
Ensure the image or video quality is crisp and set to the Instagram dimensions. Canva is a great tool to make your content specific to Instagram sizing requirements.
Get users to engage through:
- Comment for your chance to win
- Double-tap to like
- See our profile for more information
- Tag your friend who could need this
Hashtags
Although you have 30 hashtag spots, it doesn’t doesn’t mean you have to use all of them. Your hashtags will likely decrease in relevance.
You need to be able to classify your content. This means being specific to your niche and staying within it. Especially since Instagram will pick up on the fact that all your posts are within an industry and regardless of hashtags, it will pull up your profile when users type in keywords related to that industry.
Bonus: Focus & Specificity
Do audiences look different across your other social media profiles? Analyze data insights to understand more about the locations and demographics of your followers across all channels so you can improve how you interact with them on each.
What you’ll probably notice is that your most engaged demographic is different across the various platforms.
• Facebook may reach an older demographic
• Instagram & Twitter may reach a younger demographic
• TikTok may reach your youngest demographic
… it all depends on the brand.
Use these types of data insights to create effective marketing campaigns and create specific posts for each platform catered to the audiences served.
Closing Thoughts
We hope you found these tips helpful! Take a look at any of our free Instagram tools to help track social media growth and create posts with an ai writing assistant.
