3 Strategies to Increase Your Instagram Engagement

Instagram is not just about how many followers you have anymore! It’s about engagement.

So first off, what is engagement?

Engagement is simply how much your audience interacts with you.

It’s measured by the number of likes and comments that you get.

So to calculate your engagement rate, you’re going to add up the number of likes and comments that you have and divide that by the number of followers and multiply by 100.

Yes, it requires a bit of math!

Some like to average out their engagement number throughout their last few posts.

So why is engagement so important?

Brands look at engagement to see how active and responsive your audience is.

This way, if they do want to work with you and for you to promote their products and services, they can gauge how much your audience is interested and if they will buy whatever it is you’re selling.

When you work with a brand or sponsor as an influencer, you are providing advertising services for them.

Another thing to know is that Instagram is an advertising platform so they don’t show your post to all of your followers.

They want you to put some money behind your content, and that’s why you’ll never see 100% engagement or even 50% engagement.

It really depends on the feed and the number of followers, but most accounts under 300,000 see 1-3% engagement and those under 50,000 see around 3-10% engagement.

Here are the top 3 Strategies to Increase your Instagram Engagement:

1. Post Great Content.

If you want a like (or what they call a double tap) or a comment, you’ll want to post content that elicits a response.

Would someone want to like your post?

If it’s not visually appealing, or has bad lighting and isn’t really attractive, they may just keep scrolling.

Does your content make people want to comment on it?

Make sure you are thinking about this when you’re creating your content so that people will engage with it.

2. Include a Call-to-Action in your caption.

A Call-to-action can be anything like: Comment below with your next travel destination, or something that’s related to your post.

If you’re doing giveaways, you can ask them to tag 2 friends and they can enter an unlimited number of times.

I once got over 1,000 comments on one of my posts because of this strategy.

You can ask them questions, or give them choices, or just tell them what you want them to do.

3. Participate in Comment Pods or Boost Groups.

This is basically a group of people who like and comment on each others’ posts.

Now, some people think this isn’t right or it’s not authentic but I am in comment pods where I do like the people in it, we’re in the same niche and I want to comment on their posts.

The pod or group is just the system and a way to remind each other to look at each other’s content.

With your feed and the algorithm, you can’t really know if you’ll see posts that you want to see so if you form a comment pod or boost group through Instagram direct message - it’s a system and a way to make sure you see each other’s posts.

This really helps boost engagement.