Social media platforms change with alarming frequency these days.

Source: Neal Patel

For years, Instagram was a haven of chronological posts that almost guaranteed engagement as long as you timed your post correctly and shared something interesting.

But that reality is no more.

Recent changes offer users more control over their feeds, which means it may be getting more difficult to engage with your audience.

Instagram’s users may be able to see fresher posts, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll ever see your content.

That means you’ll need to change your approach if you want to stay at the top of the Instagram pile.

And to do that, you have to know what actually works for other brands who have cracked the code.

This post will give you nine ways to do just that.

But first, you have to understand Instagram’s current landscape and how it affects your brand.

Breaking down the Instagram landscape

In 2016, Instagram announced their efforts to favor the moments you “care about the most” in your feed.

Since then, marketers have been looking for ways to optimize their content and stay ahead of the Instagram algorithm to keep engagement levels high.

As you’re no longer guaranteed to show up in a chronological feed, you have to find a creative way to stay in front of your online audience.

And as the press release indicates, Instagram’s current algorithm filters content based on your user’s previous behavior.

So in theory, the more your audience interacts with your brand, the more they’ll see your posts.

That isn’t exactly great news for most marketers though.

The overwhelming tendency is to treat engagement as the number one metric on Instagram, and all of these changes have caused engagement to go down.

So success on Instagram requires brands to find new ways to continue building engagement and follower count. But to start engaging with Instagram users in the first place, you have to know who they are and what they’re like.

First and foremost, Instagram users are predominately young. Your audience is primarily millennials for now, and they have different shopping patterns than previous generations. And perhaps even worse, the average user misses over 70% of their feed.

That means even your best content isn’t guaranteed to be in front of your audience no matter what you do. So if it’s so hard to get views and engagement, why focus on Instagram at all? To understand that, you have to understand the raw marketing power of visual engagement.

According to research, visuals are a more retainable form of sharing information and news. We retain vastly more information from things we see, which means visuals are important. That makes Instagram, which is a primarily visual channel, an essential part of many brands’ digital presence.

Brands that create visually-appealing or artisan items often rely on Instagram to engage with their audience when blogging. They use Instagram as an essential piece of their social media sales funnel, so success on this platform is life or death. And studies have shown that people buy items they see on social media all the time.

More than 42% of social media users have made a purchase simply because they saw it in their feed. So finding a way to break the algorithm in your favor and increase your engagement can help your brand push sales through Instagram.

And to do that, you have to create content that resonates with your audience and fosters interaction between your followers and your brand. Thankfully, there are plenty of proven methods that will let you accomplish that on a regular basis.

The nine solutions in this post are data-backed and brand-approved methods for boosting engagement. And the first one you can start using right now.

• Solution #1: Use Instagram Stories
• Solution #2: Hire a professional
• Solution #3: Stay true to trends
• Solution #4: Fire up live video
• Solution #5: Post at the right time
• Solution #6: Reach more people with hashtags
• Solution #7: Use an influencer
• Solution #8: Share user-generated content
• Solution #9: Host a contest

 

See all of the details here!