Social media

Aug 4, 2023

How to increase instagram engagement: the ultimate guide

Maria Ruocco

Growing your brand on Instagram can be time-consuming, especially when compared with rival TikTok.

Despite this, growing a personal and commercial brand cannot be done without this platform.
The conversion rate of visits that come from this platform, although lower in number, turns out to be higher than other platforms on many occasion.

The question that now arises is:

How do I increase my Instagram engagement in 2023?

In this article we will explore some unavoidable strategies to optimize our growth strategy on Instagram and increase our engagement rate.

Engagement Rate

Why Instagram engagement is so important?

Engagement is a calculation that shows the ratio of the number of people who follow you to the number of people who interact with your content.
The higher the value of this number, the more solid is our community and the more reliable is our profile.

The number of people following us can be easily identified from our personal page.

The concept of interaction, on the other hand, consists of various ratios. It normally takes into account the number of:

comments
likes

It is important to consider that Instagram's algorithm is to date constantly fluctuating, so it also takes into account other interesting elements, such as:

Impression (i.e. the total number of times your content is viewed);
Reach (i.e. the number of individual views of your content);
Website clicks;
Profile views;
Number of followers;
Post saves;
Post shares.

How can I calculate the engagement rate on Instagram?

Thus, there are several methodologies for calculating Engagement Rate that may differ in complexity or depth of analysis.

General Engagement Rate calculation:

ER= [(like + comments)/ followers] x100

Here are some more in-depth examples:

Engagement Rate by Reach/Coverage:

Statistical calculation of user engagement by averaging the interactions received on the sample of the last 10 posts

ERR = (last 10 photos likes/number of followers) x 100

Engagement rate per post:

Calculating the engagement your followers show toward a single piece of content
ERpP = (total interactions of a single post/the total number of your followers) x 100

Engagement Rate per Impression:

Calculation of a u many times, a given piece of content has appeared on a feed, but without the user necessarily lingering on it
ERpI = (total interactions for post/the total number of Impressions) x 100

What are the reference values of the involvement rate?

Though to date there is a lack of official guideline data on ideal engagement rates, these can be identified by ranges of followers owned:

1-5 thousand followers= 5-8%
5-10 thousand followers= 4%
10-100 thousand followers= 2-3%
100 thousand followers=2%
more than 1 million followers= 1.8%

Intagram Bio

Optimize your name for search queries
There are only two factors that Instagram's query takes into account in searches: your name and your username. Try to keep both names similar.
Insert your links
Don't forget to insert the web to your website. If you have multiple links (e.g., web and blog), you can use applications that allow you to concentrate all the links in one space (e.g., linktr).
Share your contact information
Have you ever been looking for the location of a venue or wanted to contact someone to ask about their services and couldn't find the information on Instagram? Well, don't. Share (depending on your business) phone, e-mail address, location and opening hours.
Describe yourself or your activity
your bio on Instagram is one of the few opportunities you have to literally write your intentions in text. With a limit of 150 characters (about two sentences or 25 words), you will need to make every word count so that the platform and people coming to your profile can understand what you are about: What do you generally do? What makes you different?
Add hashtags
Hashtags make content searchable. Creating your own could help your content come across more easily and allow more people to come across your

Instagram Stories

Engage with your audience through Instagram Stories stickers

Instagram stories are the fastest and most effective way to interact with your followers.
A useful instagram feature is that of stickers because they help you build a community around your personal or commercial brand.

Among the most engaging stickers are:

"Add Yours" sticker to reach out to lots of contacts
Question sticker to have direct conversations with followers. Followers' interactions with these stickers count as engagement
Instagram question sticker
Survey sticker to understand your followers' preferences and make them feel part of your choices or simply to challenge them with some fun fuct that they have to guess
Instagram survey sticker

Create and share easily recognizable memes and stikers

In instagram stories you can add custom memes that allow you to build a sense of familiarity with your community.

Stories must be engaging and interesting

If we analyze the pages of influencers with high engagement, we immediately realize that they interact a lot with their community.
They tell a lot about their lives and seek a comparison with their audience.
Tell anecdotes from your life and make your community feel part of your life.
If, on the other hand, it is a brand, it is important to build an image in line with the brand's values through stories.

Feed

Create and share easily recognizable memes

As we have seen with Stories, it is important to create content that identifies us and that our followers can easily interact with.
With the right meme, users will interact more with the post: they will comment, share and like.
All of this will improve your engagement rate.

Create posts with graphics and colors that people want to share

This is content that arouses emotions in the public and, by sharing them, allows them to share their thoughts through the words of others or to make their point of view understood on a topic or, even more simply, to share information with the their followers. For this reason, the contents that are statistically shared the most are:

inspirational and funny quotes;
infographics;
scientific information and explanations.

Instagram post collection

Share useful information and use the carousel format

Carousel posts allow you to publish up to 10 images in a single post.
The instagram algorithm seems to appreciate this type of content so much that it shows it more than once in the user feed.
These greater touchpoints with users obviously increase the possibility of receiving likes, comments, shares and saves.

The potential of this kind of post is very high, which is why it is equally important to share high-value information to increase the chances of interactions.

Use hashtags but not randomly

Hashtags are a tool that allows you to reach a potentially higher number of people because they allow you to attach a label to your posts that allows the platform to categorize that content.

Think of hashtags as keywords that will be searched by users of the platform. Therefore it is important that the hashtags you use are adherent and in line with your post to increase the chances of clicks on your post and, consequently, the levels of involvement.

The limit of hashtags that can be inserted in a post is 30. Try to make the most of this opportunity by inserting relevant and adequate words. Numerous studies have shown that, on average, posts with 30 Instagram hashtags received the highest engagement rates.

Caption

Clear information displayed in an easily accessible way

The caption of your posts should be extremely clear and not redundant. Use essential words and don't overdo it.

Also try to arrange the text in a form that is easily understood at a glance.

If I just want to see the ingredients of a recipe, I hope the content creator has written the ingredients in a list and separated them from the rest of the text;
Otherwise, given the difficulty in accessing the information, I could skip the post.

Add a call to action

With a call to action, people who read the caption are asked to perform a certain action.

This is an easy way to get more engagement from your followers since this way they feel "authorized" to be able to perform that action. You can ask them to perform any type of interaction such as commenting on the photo with a recommendation or sharing the post with all the people who might find the content very helpful.

Do not forget that instagram does not allow you to insert any link in the post description.
However you can place a link in our bio. This link can refer to our blog or our shop for example. So if the post you published is in line with the content of the link, you can invite your users to click on the link they find in the bio to facilitate access to that information.

Tool for content creatore suggestion: to create your content use Editby

Collaboration

Publish some posts in collaboration with other people

One of the most recent features that have been launched by instagram consists in the possibility of sharing posts in collaboration with another profile.
Collaboration posts offer the benefit of reaching the community of the person who collaborates with us as well and sharing views, comments and likes.
The increase in interactions obviously translates into an increase in the engagement rate.

Host giveway on your profile

Everyone loves gifts and giveaways are nothing more than products or services that are given away, following a draw, to one or more followers who win the contest.
The giveway allows you to reach a large audience of people thanks to the sharing of the post and the great interaction that occurs with the post itself.

The calls to action we recommend you include within a giveaway are:

ask to like the post;
ask to follow your profile;
ask to use a specific hashtag;
ask to share the post in stories;
ask to tag at least two (real) accounts in the comments.

To reach a wider audience you can also think about organizing a giveaway of your products or services with a person with a large number of followers who operates in your target niche to make sure that followers are interested in receiving those products.

Time and Analytics

What time should I post on instagram?

Given the importance of interactions to increase engagement rates, it's important to publish our content when our audience is most active.

The Instagram algorithm prioritizes newer posts and this means that, all other things being equal, the newest post will appear higher up in the feed than an older one.

In general, the best times to post are when people take breaks from their work. The weekend is generally the worst time to post since people use social networks less to focus on their lives.

Referring to this general data it has been tested that the best time is:

Monday 👉 12:00 PM
Tuesday 👉 9:00 AM
Wednesday 👉 11:00 AM
Thursday 👉 12:00 PM
Friday 👉 2:00 PM
Saturday 👉 9:00 AM
Sunday 👉 7:00 PM

How do we know when our audience is most active?

To understand when the greatest number of our followers are online, it is necessary to rely on the analysis functions of Instagram: in the article When is the best time to post on Instagram? you will find all the steps to access the analysis of your profile.

When analyzing the best time to post, remember to also consider these factors:

when does your competition publish?
Post in your audience's timezone?
Are you consistently visible over the long term?