The 2023 Guide on How to Increase Instagram Engagement

 Published:  15/12/2023  | Updated:  15/12/2023

Every brand that exists on Instagram should know the ins and outs of making genuine, organic Instagram engagement. If no one engages with your posts by liking, commenting, or sharing them, your whole Instagram page or Instagram account will fail. Instagram marketing without active participation will not lead to tangible business results.

How do you boost engagement on Instagram in 2023?

It takes effort and resources to develop a winning Instagram engagement strategy. However, not everyone has the luxury of devoting a great deal of time to learning Instagram's inner workings. That's why we put in the time and effort to investigate and reveal the secrets of maximizing Instagram engagement.

Let's check it out.

 

What is Instagram Engagement?

Engagement on Instagram refers to the number of likes, comments, and shares your posts receive. However, it is not merely a numerical value. It's a group of measurements that reveal how active your online community is and how well your content is doing at reaching its intended demographic.

Gaining Instagram followers who take the time to like, comment, and share your posts is crucial to boosting engagement. It also demonstrates that your followers are engaged because they have an emotional connection with what you posted or with your company. Those emotions are the driving force behind brand loyalty.

The Instagram algorithm also heavily values engagement as a ranking signal. Early support for a post, Story, or Reel can increase its visibility and, in turn, increase engagement.

When we talk about "engagement" on Instagram, what precisely do we mean? Instagram interaction can be tracked in several ways, including likes, shares, mentions, shares, saves, use of branded hashtags, story likes, story replies, impressions, tags, click-throughs, and DMs.

We'll get into how to locate and interpret such engagement metrics much later on in this article. Let's look into some ways to boost your Instagram engagement right now.

 

How to Increase Instagram Engagement

Successful social media marketers recognize the importance of Instagram engagement because of the platform's widespread use. How to build engagement and get more people to interact with your Instagram posts.

Utilize Reels

If you've been following Instagram this year, you'll know that Reels are the app's current darling. Creating a reel is the simplest approach to expose your work to a wider audience than just your present followers.

Your post has a far better chance of becoming popular and spreading to others if more people see it. If your Reels are interesting enough, they will attract new people to your Instagram profile, increasing your chances of gaining new followers and expanding your reach.

In the next tidbit, we'll go over how you can use Reels' features to your advantage. But if it seems too much, take baby steps.

 

Try Trendy Reel Transitions, Features & Filters

Any Instagram Reel shared has the potential to generate interaction, but the largest gain comes from maximizing view time. This implies the first three seconds of the Reel are quite important if you want to keep the viewer interested throughout the entire clip.

Here are a few of Reels' most important customization options:

• Transitions allow you to seamlessly go from one scene to another, giving the impression of constant motion. To make clean incisions, use the align function.

• Use timed text to highlight key phrases or identify specific sections of your Reel.

• Including currently popular tracks or songs in your Reel is a great way to get more attention.

• Explaining or detailing something with a voiceover, such as a method or a recipe, is a great use for this technique.

• Templates: When you begin with a Reels template, syncing your media files with an audio track is a breeze.

 

Utilize Instagram Stories and their Features

Stickers for Instagram Stories can be a great way to get people interested in and engaged with your brand.

There are a variety of interactive stickers available for use in stories, such as polls, questions, and quizzes.

The question sticker in Instagram Stories is one of the most popular features.

You can use this function to engage in open discussions with your followers, inviting them to pose questions or even taking the floor yourself.

Don't forget to jump on your stories to answer the questions once you've gathered them all.

Engagement occurs whenever a follower engages with a sticker. For your next Instagram Story, why not use one of these stickers?

Add Some Carousel Posts

Socialinsider reports that a whopping 1.92% of Instagram users interact with carousel posts (and 2.33% when using all 10 carousel post slides).

You should use this to your advantage and boost participation. Don't assume that your fans would flock to your Instagram content carousel just because you randomly selected some images and called it a day. Incorporate videos into your content strategy for more engagement. Put them to use by

• UGC (User Generated Content)

• Customer Reviews

• Views of the Product, Multiple

• Images of the Transformation

• The Brand Story

• Product Tutorial

Ten chances to increase interaction from just one post's carousel. Yours awaits, so don't waste it.

 

Key In on Instagram SEO

For a long time, mastering the algorithm was essential to have your work shared. We won't advise you to go against Instagram's guidelines. However, we will also recommend that you focus on Instagram SEO (search engine optimization).

Instagram Using search engine optimization (SEO), you may increase the visibility and engagement of your Instagram posts in user keyword queries. Users who found your material through search engine optimization (SEO) are extremely interested because they sought it out.

To score highly in search results, you should learn which terms people enter into search engines to find articles like yours. Speaking of that...

 

Get to Know Your Audience

Finding out who you're writing for is the first step in maintaining their interest. Knowing what interests and drives them is essential to producing material that resonates with them. Here's the procedure:

• You need to create buyer personas. This is a perfect illustration of your desired clientele. What problems do they have and what do they want? What are some of their favorite pastimes? What kind of employment do they do? When do they typically work?

• Consider the Instagram insights and statistics. You can learn about your target market's characteristics here. To get the audience demographics, go to "Insights" and then "Audience." Find out information about the people who are engaging with your content, such as where they are from and what gender they are, by looking at their demographic information.

• Check out who you are up against. Who reads and responds to their social media updates? To what are they exposing you? How do they communicate with the people who follow them?

• Put social listening apps to use. You may use this to monitor how often your brand or specific products are mentioned. Listen to what individuals have to say and resolve their concerns.

Posting Consistently & at the Right Times

The more information you provide for your audience, the more likely they are to engage with you. Keeping your followers and fans up-to-date and interested in your content formats and what you have to offer is a must.

We just highlighted how important it is to post meaningful content at optimal times. It's unlikely that many people will interact with your posts right away if you publish them when they're sleeping.

You can get a heat map of when your followers are most active on social media by using a program like Hootsuite Analytics. You can also ask for precise suggestions regarding when it's ideal to post to maximize exposure, interest, and interaction.

Incorporate Call-to-Actions

The effectiveness of calls to action (CTAs) has been shown time and time again.

The best strategy to increase interaction with your Instagram post is to include a call to action, in the form of a question.

Try several approaches to your inquiry. Inquire about their thoughts, make suggestions, and find out what they would like to see more of from you.

You can get people to interact with your calls to action by directing them to the link in your Instagram bio.

You can get around Instagram's rule on including clickable links in captions by making use of a link in a bio tool like Later's Linkin.bio.

Linkin.bio allows you to create a clickable Instagram feed. Users can navigate directly to the pages you specify by tapping any button or image in your bio after clicking the link.

This might be the landing page for your newest product, a blog article, or even your personal YouTube channel!

Create a Giveaway!

Gifts are always popular.

Given this information, it's clear that giveaways should be a part of your Instagram marketing plan. To be effective in 2023, freebies must be tailored to both the recipients and the brand they represent. The correct incentive, be it a product, service, or experience, will drive participation in any campaign.

The giveaway structure of "tag," "follow," and "share" as entry requirements is an easy and clear approach to getting lots of interaction with a single post.

Make Your Content Unique

Instagram, as you may have seen, is mostly a visual platform. You can succeed on the visual appeal of the platform without being (or possessing) a professional photographer, but it helps if you can make photos that stand out.

If you want your photographs in the mainstream to be liked, commented on, and shared, you need to do something that makes people stop scrolling and look.

You may add some pizzazz to your feed postings with any number of available tools. They also help you maintain a uniform aesthetic on Instagram, thus increasing engagement and the likelihood that your followers will notice and engage with your posts.

You might also try incorporating audio with your feed posts. Simple testing should help you see how your user's feeds and own audience respond to this new feature, but it's still too early to tell how it will affect audience engagement in general.

Utilize the 'Add Yours' Sticker!

It's never been simpler to start a viral challenge with your target audience than with the advent of the Add Yours sticker.

The Add Yours sticker might be the key to user engagement for everything from summer highlights to producers urging users to contribute humiliating childhood images.

As a skincare brand, you may ask your customers to describe their morning rituals. If you're a photographer, you could also have your followers vote on their top images.

Stickers are all the rage now, and for good reason: they have the potential to attract hundreds of new followers with just one post. What a whopping 0% participation rate!

Write Intriguing Captions

Instagram captions have a maximum character limit of 2,200. Although brevity is often preferable, don't be shy about filling up the page if you've got an interesting tale to share. Good captions, of any length, provide background and reveal the character of your brand.

You can always count on National Geographic to provide excellent examples of longer-form storytelling with Instagram captions.

Answer Comments & DMs

It's only courteous to reply when people start commenting. When you participate in a conversation, your followers will feel more connected to you and more eager to continue the dialogue with you. You can expect them to ignore you in the future if you ignore them.

Extend and increase your Instagram engagement horizons beyond your profile and interact with others in your field. Like and comment on posts from your most loyal followers, share industry-related content, and look for other opportunities to be an active member of the Instagram community. If you give some of your engagement love away, you'll get it back tenfold.

Share UGC

We don't broadcast on social media; we have conversations. One of the best ways to engage your audience is by showcasing their work. Share a post in your narrative about a wild Club Night in which your clothing brand was tagged.

They will be overjoyed that you took the time to hear them out, and you may even inspire some of your other followers to mention you in posts.

Sharing user-generated material in your main feed requires permission from the content's original originator as well as proper attribution. Branded hashtags are a great method to collect user-generated content, but that doesn't give anyone the right to reuse whatever they find using that branded hashtag.

Measuring Your Instagram Engagement Rate

Formula Based on Reach

Use this method to calculate the efficiency of your content about the number of people who see your posts or follow your account.

You can use one formula to calculate the average engagement rate for your entire profile, and another to calculate the rate for a single post.

The first formula is (likes+comments)/(reach*post) x 100.

Second Formula = First Formula / Total Number of Threads

Even though this technique is helpful because reach is a more accurate indicator than followers (because not all of your followers will see all of your posts), the reach can fluctuate for several factors outside your control.

Formula Based on Followers/Engagement

The abundance of web resources that employ this equation makes it simple to compare your site's performance to that of your rivals. The equation is elementary:

The engagement rate is calculated as follows / (likes + comments) x 100.

Because of the way the system works, not every one of your followers will see your posts simply because you have a high follower count. The reach rate is the ratio of the number of people who saw your post to the total number of people who follow you. You can tell a lot about your page's health based on its reach rate.

Formula Based on Impressions/Engagement

This equation for your engagement rate uses your engagement as a fraction of the number of times your content has been seen and is widely used.

The engagement rate is calculated as follows = (total likes+ total comments) / account impressions x100

The total number of times your material has been displayed on a screen is known as an impression, while the number of individuals who saw it is known as a reach.

To gauge the success of an advertisement, tracking impressions is helpful. Ad impressions, and how they connect to your ad reach, frequency, and CTR, are important metrics to keep an eye on when analyzing things like ad fatigue.

Formula for Total Impressions/Engagement

All interactions, including likes, comments, bookmarks, and shares, count toward the total. You can get a comprehensive picture of your content's and page's performance with the help of this metric.

The engagement rate is calculated as follows = (total likes + total comments + total saves + total shares) / account impressions x 100

Things to Consider When Measuring Engagement on Instagram

To gain a sense of your genuine engagement, in addition to analyzing quantitative data (which is required for calculating engagement rate), you need to look at qualitative data. Qualitative analysis has the advantage of being adaptable to meet both immediate and distant needs.

Select a goal that aligns with your approach by consulting the list of encounters we provided earlier.

Check the comments (if any) under that post if you prepared content intending to increase the number of comments.

Where do opinions stand? Do we have any automated commenters here? Is the input being provided by the public useful? Direct messages, mentions, and hashtags are all amenable to this sort of qualitative examination.

Instagram has been plagued by bots and spam comments, so it's vital to look beyond the raw stats to see how the platform is impacting your business.