A tremendous Instagram engagement rate is one of the essential metrics that most brands look for while choosing influencers.
An excellent engagement rate is when your audience consistently engages with your brand and has good content quality. Businesses want to reassure them that the sponsored content resonates with the audience, captivate huge customers, and lead them to action. It means the more excellent the engagement rates, the higher your business collaborations would happen.
How Do You Calculate Engagement Rates?
Engagement rates are determined by:
- The total number of engagements you get for posts
- The follower count
Instagram confirmed that likes, views, re-shares, and comments are very crucial factors for post engagements. When these metrics get evaluated with the follower count, it helps determine the engagement rates.
What are the Benchmarks you need to follow?
There are many benchmarks factors to consider, including the total number of followers in your profile and your niche. Therefore it’s pretty tricky to answer. Macro influencers have a low engagement rate when compared to micro-influencers and fashion designers. Also, it is good to have an engagement rate of 2% to 3% despite the following or niche. That sets up a benchmark for clients while choosing the influencers.
10 Ways to Improve Instagram Engagement Rate
1. Share Carousel Posts
When you intend to post in-feed content, make use of the carousel feature. It is sure to receive automatic Instagram likes when compared to single pictures and videos in-feed. Carousel tends to attract more engagement when all the ten slides are well used.
With the carousel post, you may post before and after images, photo dumps, and threads based on tips with your audience. Use these posts to offer as many details and information as possible; this will encourage the audience to bookmark the content for later, therefore increasing your engagement.
2. Provide a Headshot for your Instagram Handle
While it works for your niche, you have to display your face in your Instagram content. Humanizing your brand leads to 38% more likely to earn likes and likes and 32% more likely to receive comments than those that do not include human pictures.
People are attracted to one another. Your followers would like to be able to make the connection between an Instagram handle and a person’s face. It makes them feel more at ease, which increases their likelihood of engaging with your content.
3. Post at Peak Times
Post your content at times when the audience is most active. The more the audience sees your content, the more engagements you would receive. Understand audience peak times by analyzing the follower insights.
The insights would tell the time in a day, and the day of a week your followers are online. Also, remember the locality of your audience to make sure you share content during the local time. In turn, it will help you schedule content at times when you would acquire colossal engagement.
4. Use Instagram’s Every Capability
While going live on Instagram, it is sure that the popular influencers use every app’s features on the platform. It includes Reels, IGTV, in-feed posts, Stories, and Lives. When you use Instagram consistently, you tend to increase engagement for your profile.
5. Make Use of Instagram Captions
Get your audience captivated on your posts by writing a descriptive caption that sparks an interaction. Not only would you establish a stronger connection with the audience, but you would also increase the likelihood of them engaging with your content if the caption motivates them to share, like, comment, and save.
Make the initial line attention-seeking with emojis, snappy language, additional space between texts or capitals. Try to add value and write up a mini blog-type caption. Include bullet points to describe ‘how-to’s, making them stop scrolling. Also, it is a perfect idea to add queries at the bottom of the caption; that way, you could encourage your audience to share their answers or opinions in the comment section.
6. Utilize Researched & Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags act as an excellent tool that you could use to build reach, take your content to more eyes, and boost engagement rates. Include hashtags wisely and only those that are in your niche. For a time-lapse video, do not use #stopmotion. Also, remember to use hashtags that are calendar-specific, like, #WorldSocialMediaDay or #WorldPhotographyDay. Using these hashtags will put your content in trending conversations, thereby increasing engagement.
Bear in mind to conduct research. Look for hashtags used by others and the ones that are in trend. One of the great signs of following a hashtag is to see if your audiences follow them. Also, ensure to see what type of hashtags others in your space use in their content.
7. Post-Interactive Stories
Instagram’s stories consist of a lot of stickers that let the audience interact with the content directly. Using these stickers is a perfect way to boost your engagement rate weekly. The questions, poll, countdown, quiz, and emoji slider stickers are brilliant tools to motivate audience interaction and drive engagement to the next level.
8. Geo-tag Locations
Like hashtags, geotags help build your reach, take your content to more audiences and elevate your engagement rates for posts. The tool is handy as it helps gain post saves. For instance, if you are at a restaurant, a cafe, or a beach, put your geotag specific to the spot. When your audience sees the post, they may get interested in visiting the exact location, and they are likely to save the post and check back to it at a later time.
9. Do Not Forget The Community Management
Community management does increase your engagement rates. When you communicate with your community, they will return the favor. It is also essential to engage your audience in the first hour of posting because it determines the rate at which your content gets displayed to other audiences.
Also, make sure to comment and like on posts other creators similar to yours, respond to comments & DMs, react to the story, and re-share posts that are valuable to you and your audience. When you share such content, it helps establish a strong relationship with your audience and develop an engaged community.
10. Consistency is the Key
Ghosting your audience is a wrong idea, mainly if you aim to increase engagement levels. When you post engaging content consistently, more of the audience will see your posts, which means they are likely to engage with it. Do not forget about the audience and never leave them behind hanging for days or weeks; this would lead to disengagement for your profile. It is necessary to plan and schedule your content. Make it simple and set weekly or monthly goals you believe that you could achieve.
Conclusion
Always remember that increasing your engagement rates do take time and patience. It does not take place overnight. But when you experiment and implement different strategies, you would notice better results, and more brands want to partner with you. Also, don’t forget to monitor your performance.
Author Bio
Mary Kyle is a content developer and marketing manager who works at Snaphappen. She has written more trending articles on social media and has a handful of experience in delivering engaging content.
