Every month, Instagram has roughly one billion active users and is currently one of the most popular social media platforms. Despite the effectiveness and convenience of running ads on Instagram, there are various ways you can market your business in addition to the paid ads portion of your marketing strategy. In this article, we’ll be going over the following:
- How do I measure my engagement rate?
- Why is my engagement rate significant?
- What can I do to boost my engagement rate?
How do I measure my engagement rate?
Before measuring your engagement rate, we’ll first need to define what counts as an engagement. For the most part, this is typically when someone likes your post, clicks on it, comments on it, or shares it with someone else. This total is then divided by the number of impressions the post has and multiplied by 100 to calculate your engagement rate.
Why is my engagement rate significant?
Calculating your Instagram engagement rate may not seem necessary initially, but if you want to understand your social authority and gauge your audience’s interest, this is one way to measure it. If your target audience finds your content appealing and relevant, your engagement rate will reflect that by being higher. Review the content that gets the most likes, shares, and comments to get a feel for what your audience likes to see but keep in mind that what your audience finds relevant will likely change over time.
What can I do to boost my engagement rate?
In this section, we’ll cover a few strategies you should implement to help increase your Instagram account’s overall engagement rate.
Post Regularly
After you’ve figured out what your target audience wants to see, post this content regularly. It’s up to you to determine how often you want to post but consider having something up around four times a week. Note that posting too often could also be detrimental if users find it to be overwhelming and decide to unfollow your brand if they feel their feed has too much of your content. Nail down a schedule to post consistently and experiment with different times to post to see what’s optimal.
Write Captivating Captions
Pay attention to your brand voice when you’re coming up with the captions for your posts. Some brands are more formal while others lean more towards lighthearted copy. Regardless of your style of writing style, you’ll want these to remain consistent with all posts on your other social media platforms as well. Try out different lengths of captions and see what kind of hashtags work best for you. It should also be noted that simply adding as many hashtags as possible could be considered as spam by the algorithm used by Instagram so be sure to take the time to optimize this feature. After all, Instagram was built on hashtags.
Maintain Consistent Branding
This is similar to the last point in the sense that consistency across all your social media platforms is key. When you’re creating your username for Instagram, it should match or at least be incredibly similar to all your other social media handles. Visual content that you put out should provide a coherent experience for your audience across all platforms too. The goal here is that users are able to identify that something is from your brand because they recognize the style of your photos.
Engage With Your Audience
A great way to boost engagement is to let you audience know that you’re listening to what they have to say. Even though there’s the option to turn off comments, leave them on! Take the time to read the comments on your posts and reply to some of them. They might not be asking a question but acknowledging their excitement or support is a great start towards cultivating a strong relationship with your followers, especially if they feel that you can be easily reached.
Engage With Influencers
One way to build up brand awareness is to follow and interact with other accounts, specifically the ones that are involved in your industry. For example, if your brand is in the beauty and cosmetics industry, interacting with influencers who are also in this space will get your name out there and could potentially lead to more followers from those that follow these accounts. You could even share products with them and ideally get to the point of both you and them posting about each other. Not only does this build up trust between you and potential customers, it’s a great way to organically build up your own following and expand your reach.
Incorporate CTAs
A call-to-action, or CTA, is anything that encourages your audience to take action. This could be anything from having them swipe up in your story or asking them to tag a friend in the comments. If you choose to direct people to your site’s homepage or even just a landing page, you have the potential to turn that simple click into a lead. If you’re looking to have your followers tag their friends in the comments, you’ll be able to boost engagement while also increasing your brand awareness as people share your brand with their friends and other followers.
If you’re worried about whether or not your content is good, take a look at your engagement rate since it’s usually a good benchmark to determine where your customers stand with regard to your brand. Use these tips in when you’re uploading your next post and take the time to experiment to find what works best for your audience!