There is no lie in the fact that a planned Instagram strategy can either make your brand or take it down. Regardless of your business is online or offline based, small or large- a well-planned Instagram campaign provides a great opportunity and advantage for every business. A strong presence on Instagram enhances the entire experience of running the business and makes it vastly more visible. The idea is to not only use Instagram for engagement but also to drive the target audience to your company’s landing page, to educate them about your work and services.

Perhaps one of the most important things that Instagram does for a business is to provide the business owners with a way to engage with their customers in a whole new way. It allows you to personally interact with your customers and form a bond of trust with them. You can share photos and videos to keep your customers and potential customers updated about the current business events and latest offerings. 

You can also acknowledge the grievances of your customers by addressing their concerns and asking for their opinions to enhance customer satisfaction. 

Instagram is arguably the most popular social media platform that connects marketers with their respective audiences. It is also the most convenient network for most marketing platforms, with multiple opportunities emerging in different niches. 

Here are 7 hacks that you can use to boost your engagement.

1. Write strong and compelling captions

A catchy caption will make people spend as much time on your posts as possible. Long and compelling captions have started to act as new blog posts and have the ability to get your posts much higher engagement. Instagram’s algorithm recognizes how long people spend on the caption and whether they are reading it or not. People tend to save posts that have long captions as they may not have the time to read the caption immediately so, they save it for reading it later.

Asking questions in the caption and your audience answering them in the comment section can make a difference in impacting your engagement. More than ten comments within the first hour of publishing your post can boost your engagement statistics and help you get on the explore page.

2. Publish posts that your audience would want to save

Instagram allows you to save posts for later which plays a crucial role in determining your posts reach. Initially, when there was no save feature, the most important factor in the Instagram algorithm was the number of likes and comments your posts received. However, now with this feature, it can be deduced that if people are saving your posts, it means they want to see your posts on their feed. Since Instagram only wants to show the users relevant content, it will significantly boost your profile visibility if people are saving your posts.

3. Making use of the polling feature on your story

This feature boosts your visibility as it shows Instagram that users are engaging on your posts. As there is no option to ‘like’ stories, there are only a handful of factors for Instagram to determine the engagement of your stories. The better the engagement would be, the better will be the reach, which would automatically lead to more views and more impressions. Using polls on your Instagram stories can be a great technique to boost your engagement as they are simple and fun. Even simple yes/no questions, agree/disagree polls work great.

4. Publish carousel posts

A carousel post is a series of one to ten pictures or a mix of them posted as one. Carousel posts are a powerful tool to convey a message and create a valuable presentation. This is also the most underrated feature on Instagram, as the majority of the users do not use this enough because they believe that carousel posts get lower engagement as they get comparatively less number of likes. They forget that getting likes is not the only thing that matters.

According to statistics, carousel posts get saved three to five times more than regular posts. Also, carousel posts help you boost your engagement because every time someone swipes up repeatedly on your posts, it’s a sign for Instagram that people want to go through it all. Each of the swipe acts like a ‘like’ and, therefore, grows your reach.

5. Using appropriate hashtags and one specific hashtag on your story

Never overlook hashtags. Hashtags are probably one of the most powerful features on Instagram. Make sure that you have a collection of relevant and appropriate hashtags that are used by your target audience. Do not use irrelevant hashtags or hashtags that are too popular as they have too many posts under them, and you probably don’t have a chance to enter the popular section with these hashtags. 

Using hashtags on stories works as well. You can also check the exact number of people who see your story after putting up a particular hashtag and figure out which one works best for your account.

6. Post more Frequently

The elemental thing you can do to increase your reach is to post more frequently. You need to update your feed regularly if you want your account to grow. If you are using a business account on Instagram, you can check when most of your audience is online by going to your analytics and publish your posts at that time.

7. Reply to comments as much as possible

Replying to all or at least most of the comments and starting a conversation in the comments can double your profile engagement. Comments are another very important factor for determining your reach, and the first hour after publishing the post is especially crucial. The longer the comments are on the comment section, the better it would be for your engagement. Spark up a conversation in your comment section by asking questions in your caption.