Five Ways to Get Better Instagram Engagement
by Andrew Poulsen, Content Engineer, Sonnhalter In past blog posts, we’ve discussed some of the ways companies can hit the ground running with Instagram and make it a useful cog in their marketing machine. Now that you’ve set up an account, accumulated some followers and fired off some posts, you may be wondering why your posts haven’t performed as well as you had hoped. The reason may be that your posts aren’t optimized for the best possible engagement. What do I mean by that? Well, as you may have noticed, your Instagram feed is no longer chronological. Instead, the feed is actually run by an ever-changing algorithm that is constantly trying to figure out and prioritize and show you posts that you are most likely to interact or engage with. While Instagram hasn’t publicly divulged the specifics of its algorithm, those able to read between the lines understand that getting the most exposure on the platform comes down to engagement, not just “likes” and a regular posting routine. What this means is that the algorithm is specifically looking for posts that users spend time and interact with, or content that will illicit more shares, saves, comments and longer video views. So, how can you get better engagement and overall performance with your Instagram channel? Here are five suggestions! Create content that users will “save” or “share.” Instagram now has a “save” feature which allows users to archive photos and videos into a special folder that they can view later. Saving a post signals to the algorithm that a user found the post to be worthwhile, which helps boost the post’s visibility. Additionally, if a user “shares” a post via direct message, that also scores better for the algorithm than standard likes and comments. As a company, there are plenty of…read more >