Instagram has seen some huge changes in the last 12 months which has meant sudden drops in follower numbers and shadow banning. Here are some of the easy ways you can boost your engagement with your followers without hacks or dirty tricks.
- You can receive 79% increase in likes when you add a geotag to your post. You can change the location to the suburb, city or state. Sometimes I just use the Somewhere in Australia option.“Geotagging is a technical term for storing the latitude and longitude of your current location with your photo. This data is collected by the GPS device in your phone or tablet and is accessible to Instagram if you grant permission.”
- You can receive 56% increase in engagement when you use another user’s handle or account name. It might be easier to find them if you follow their account first and have liked a couple of their posts recently.
- There is around 38% increase in engagement when your picture includes a person or a face. Similar results have been found in blog post engagements and with Facebook posts with genuine smiling happy people.
- Videos aren’t the best option on Instagram, with 36% higher engagement of photos over video. This might be because videos tend to take a long time to download in the app and can be easily missed in someone’s feed.
- You can receive just over a 12% increase in engagement when you use at least one hashtag. The current limit is 30 hashtags on a single post. If you include more than 30 tags on a single photo or video, then your comment won’t post.
Some general guidelines for increasing your engagement is to stay on Instagram and post comments on other people’s photos just after you have posted to your account. Write an engaging caption and ask your readers’ questions that they might want to respond to or include your call to action.
If you are reposting someone else’s image always ask permission and give credit back to the original account and, or photographer. You might like to batch your photographs and images in an afternoon, and then save them in Google Drive or Dropbox and post when you are ready to use them, or alternatively use the Plann app (https://plannthat.com/).
Never pay for followers and be careful about using third-party apps which post to or interact with Instagram on your behalf as these techniques could be penalised.
