Instagram Engagement is Dropping. Here Are Our Top 6 Tips to Combat It.
Have you noticed a drop in your Instagram engagement this year? With a growing increase in Instagram accounts, the platform is becoming more and more competitive and brands are seeing this result in a decrease in engagement.
A new report from Trust Insights’ has shown that from January to July this year brands are seeing a drop of almost 20% in their engagement!
With the rising number of Instagram accounts, we can expect these results to continue declining.
So if you’re a business using Instagram to promote your products or services, how do you combat this and stand out amongst the noise?
Here are our top 6 tips:
1. Make it easy to be found by using relevant hashtags that your ideal customers might use, search for, or follow. Instagram introduced two updates this year in relation to hashtags. The first was the ability to follow hashtags and the second is the ability to filter out certain types of posts within a hashtags search that you don’t want to see, effectively training Instagram to learn your preferences. These two updates have made it more important than ever to use appropriate hashtags. If you’re a local business or a restaurant, you’ll also want to add geolocations where your ideal customers are.
2. Ask questions in your posts to encourage engagement. Carousel posts are a great format for this. Place the question on the first slide and the answer on the following slides to keep people swiping right. Another good format is to place the question in your post and the answer in the caption. This way people will need to pause and read your post to get the answer. The more time people spend on your post, the better as Instagram will take this into account and show them more posts from your account.
3. Empower your followers by asking for their feedback. Are you wanting to get feedback on a new product you have released? Or, feedback on some new product or service ideas? Include posts that encourage your followers to give their feedback and opinion in the comments.
4. Run giveaways to reward your followers for engaging. What benefit do your followers get from engaging in your posts? Entice them and reward them with giveaways. This is a great way to increase your engagement and followers at the same time. And it doesn’t have to be a product. It can be anything that your target market might want, like a 2 night stay in a resort or a gift voucher.
5. Use video content. Did you know viewers will retain around 95% of a message seen in a short video, but only 10% if the message came in the form of text. Why would you risk not using video content? If you’re camera shy, there are other options. Video content can come in many forms including animated and stop motion posts.
6. Use stickers in your stories to encourage engagement. Instagram’s story stickers are a fun way to harness engagement with your followers. Use the poll stick to gather feedback, the quiz sticker to educate your followers, the question sticker to answer FAQs and the new chat sticker to start a conversation.
That’s a wrap on our top 6 tips to combat the engagement drop. Have you found success with any other strategies? Contact us and let us know.