6 Step for Using Instagram Successfully
Using Instagram Successfully
Do you use Instagram to promote your business or your personal brand? Instagram is a great way to expand your business’s reach and engagement with your customers. Instagram uses an algorithm to prioritize which posts your followers see.
It’s important to learn how to hack the Instagram algorithm, so you can get more engagement for your business or brand.
Here are 6 key ways to work with the Instagram algorithm to help grow your audience.
Number 1 – Cultivate Audience Interest
- Use free Instagram schedulers, like Facebook Business Suite or Hootsuite, to plan and schedule all your Instagram posts, captions, and hashtags in advance so you can be more consistent with your posting strategy. Posting regularly on Instagram is very important.
- The most important engagements for feed ranking are comments, likes, reshares, and views for videos, which is helpful to know as you plan your content and captions.
- Although it is not listed as a key engagement indicator now, it could also be worthwhile to optimize your content for saves — especially as Instagram has been hiding likes in more countries.
So, if you want to grow your account, you may want to focus on getting people to save your Instagram posts! By tapping the “bookmark” icon in the bottom right corner of an Instagram post, that post gets added to your saved posts, making it easy to find again.
The calculation for “true engagement” includes not just likes and comments, but also the number of times your post is saved:
Engagement Rate = (Likes + Comments + Saves)/Impressions x 100
Number 2 – Build Relationships
The Instagram algorithm wants to prioritize posts from your friends, family, and other accounts that you care about. Instagram figures out who you care about the most, based on how you use the app, for example:
– People or accounts whose content you like
– People you direct message
– People you search for
– People you know in real life
Instagram will try to calculate this relationship (and your interest level) as soon as you follow someone by serving you their content and monitoring how you engage with it.
Number 3 – Timeliness
Not only does the algorithm pay attention to how much engagement your Instagram post gets, but it also looks at how long ago the photo was posted.
- Instagram’s algorithm cares about when you posted, because it always wants to serve you the latest, most interesting posts.
- By finding your personalized best time to post on Instagram, you can hack the algorithm to increase your reach and get more likes and followers.
Number 4 – Post Frequently
If you are a frequent scroller, your feed will look more chronological, since Instagram tries to show you the best posts since your last visit.
If you check the Instagram app less often, your feed will be sorted into what Instagram thinks you will like, instead of chronologically.
Number 5 – Follow Other Accounts Carefully
If you follow a lot of people, then Instagram has more options to choose from, so you probably will not see all the posts from every account.
It could be worth systematically removing inactive or “ghost” followers.
If a large percentage of your following is inactive, they could be doing more harm than good for your account’s algorithmic ranking.
Number 6 – Usage
If you spend enough time on Instagram, you can even run out of new content to see. Once this happens, the algorithm will serve you suggested content from new accounts — based on your previous interactions.
However, if you only spend a few minutes in the app each day, then you are going to just get the day’s highlights from the algorithm.