Get the most out of Instagram simply by understanding and utilizing its unique personalized elements. Instagram is free, easy to navigate, allows you to keep an eye on competitors, and provides you with marketing features that your business can benefit from greatly. Instagram will ultimately lead you to understand how customers perceive your brand and to identify your brand advocates.
While most Instagram users focus on follower count, your profile views, reach, and website visits will tell you more about what your Instagram marketing is doing for your business, especially from the engagement strategies perspective.
With your business’s account being public, then you can efficiently strategize and track your progress by checking your Instagram Insights for telling metrics. Learn Instagram’s marketing tactics and you will soon see a positive impact on the success of your business overall — from visibility through to sales and returning customers.
How you can effectively work with the algorithm for substantial results in your business:
Algorithms is what determines which users will actually see the content you post and who will not. Specifically, Instagram’s algorithm also dictates the order of the posts, which is based on the performance of posts. This makes continual, repeat engagement on your posts important for building a loyal audience. The more followers your account has means more views and likes you will see on your content, which makes for more effective results.
According to Instagram, there are three main related factors that contribute to the algorithm:
Relationship – If a user previously interacted with a lot of your past content, then they are more likely to see your future content.
Interest – Instagram users who also engage with similar content are more likely to see your own posts.
Timing – The more recent posts are favored and pushed to the top of the feed, while the older posts will show up a little further down.
User Relationship
Real engagement is the most important metric to focus on because it translates into real sales and loyal customers. You want to enforce as much attention to your feed as possible since the algorithm prioritizes content that receives the most engagement. Focus on engaging your followers as much as you can with your posts to form relationships. After all Instagram is a social networking community, so make your followers feel heard and show them that they are prioritized.
Posting Instagram Stories is fun and the most successful way to stand out and inspire engagement. Instagram pushes stories located both at the top of the homepage and throughout the feed. Your Instagram story gets bumped to the front of the line each time you add to it, so it is a good idea to post multiple stories a day.
Monitor your marketing efforts through your insight results to determine your customer interest. When you post consistently good content to Instagram, you will not only improve your engagement, but it is a signal to the algorithm that you are a quality account. This signal is based on Instagram user’s interaction with each other involving similar posts and accounts that they explore. Discover ways to connect with potential customers to maximize user interaction. One way is to add many hashtags after your captions. The use of hashtags is the best way to push your content out to reach the right people and an easy way to gain new exposure since users can search different hashtags to find related posts.
Timing
To maximize the potential of every post, try to have your content post to your feed during your peak posting times. With your Instagram account, you are given the feature to explore your personalized account insights to find out information about your account activity. For example, the Activity Metric section provides information to see how active your account is at different points in the day compared to different days of the week. This tool is great to decide when is the best time for you to upload posts to your specific account.
How often should I post on my account?
When it comes to how often you should post on Instagram, let’s just say the more frequently and consistently you post, the more likely your audience will see and engage with your content. Your ideal posting frequency will depend on you or your business’ goals and the amount of time you can dedicate to your Instagram marketing efforts. Instagram offers a tool that gives you the opportunity to schedule your posts ahead to avoid any inconvenience and ensure no mistakes.