Our goal is to make content creation as easy as possible in the app while providing you with training materials to supplement your content and grow your brand. Although having great content is instrumental to your success, engaging your audience with your content is everything.
The way you can start to think about engaging with your audience is via Instagram. Instagram is your strongest tool for customer engagement and brand optimization. The better you understand Instagram, the more can you grow your digital business channels.
Instagram is more than posting a pretty picture of your self. In fact, it's an analytical machine. An algorithm. Instagram, the machine, has no idea what you post. It merely uses a series of mathematical algorithms to promote the posts that are the most "successful." Instagram measures your posts/accounts' success based on the following principles.
Instagram’s measurements of success, listed in order of importance
- How many times do you post per week/day?
- Are you using hashtags?
- Are you getting comments on your posts? Are the comments growing?
- Are you getting likes? Are the likes growing?
- Are you responding to people’s comments and liking other people’s comments and pictures?
- Are you doing Instagram Stories?
Once you learn how to “play” their game, you can start paving your way to Instagram stardom. Before stardom, Instagram wants to know that your input matches what their algorithm is looking for.
Make sense? Great! Let’s discuss growth and engagement tactics.
Posting frequency
The top influencers (who likely have 1 or 2 people posting on their social media for them) upload content between 4-6x per day. Instagram loves this kind of posting frequency and will reward you for your efforts.
If your not yet quite that ambitious, posting 1x per day is the bare minimum. 2 posts is preferred in the early stages of growth. Remember, it may seem like a hassle in the short term but your posts will pay off in the coming months!
Hashtags
Using hashtags is half art and half science. What we mean by this is, like Instagram, hashtags are algorithmic. Certain tags will take off and do incredibly well. Their popularity in the short term will continue to grow the hashtag in the long term. At the same time, getting creative with your hashtags is also an important skill. Here's how we break down the science and art aspects of hashtags.
Science:
- You must include hashtags in every post!
- Your post is pretty much useless without them
- Post 6-11 tags in the picture (and more in the first comment if you'd like!)
- Use hashtags that have 50,000 to 5 million tags. Tags over 10 million are not that useful (your post will be competing with too many other eyes).
Quick ex! Take a look at the image above which was captured when searching #workout. All of the tags that the search function came up with are useful with the exception of plain old, #workout (which has over 97 million posts). If you want a larger audience to be able to find your post, stick with hashtags in the 50,000 to 5 million range.
Art:
- Tags should be related to your post. For ex, if you're posting ab workout then tags like #coreworkout #absworkout #core #absworkout #obliques #6pack are great!
- Tags should also relate to:
- Location
- Time of year (season, holiday, festivity)
- Things that are trending #solareclipse
Use your creativity and follow trends
Creativity can go a long way here so come up with a tag that's authentic to your brand and use that in addition to content related hashtags in every post. And as we mentioned before, pay attention to what's trending! If there's a recent world event that has gained a lot of social traction, post about it! Hashtag about it. Show your community that you're engaged.
Up your engagement ASAP
The best of the best on social are experts at getting people to tag them in their stories, post about them in their pictures, and respond to them in their comments. Instagram measures this engagement by adding up the number of tags and comments related to your account--the more you can get your followers to tag you, the more followers you'll acquire!
#60secondclub
Gary Vaynerchuk (one of the top 5 experts in the world on social media) runs something called the 60-second club where he gives a small gift to one person who comments "#60secondclub" within the first minute of one of his Instagram posts. Not only does this strategy drive comments on his account, it also gets people to turn on push notifications for every time that he posts. Brilliant!
Getting people to tag you in stuff
We'll go into more detail in a later article, but there are so many things you can do to get people to tag you!
Ask questions or provide a call to action in your posts:
- “Who’s working out with me today?”
- “Who tried making my banana smoothie this week? Tag me in a picture!”
- “Tag your workout partner if you appreciate them!”
- “Send me a flower emoji if you are having an amazing week!”
Instagram Stories:
- Tag a follower using their Instagram handle in one of your stories
- Call people out and request for them to tag with you!
- “Want to see who finished my morning granola bowl recipe this week! Tag me in your final pic before you dig in!”
- Do as many of these as you can, every day!
Using tags to get reposts
Getting in the habit of hashtagging
One way you can use tags to get people to repost you is by tagging some of the major players in health and wellness. This can be anything from brands to magazines to publishers. Because their accounts have such a large audience, tagging them can be an avenue for your content to get more views!
Examples of who you can tag in your pictures:
- Brands
- Publishers: Popsugar, Men's Health, Women's Health, etc.
- Feeder accounts (these are accounts that are dedicated to re-posting pictures of other people): Yogajournal, fitnessgirlmotivation, popsugarfitness, fitness_men
- Locations
When you do this, tag some of these accounts in your post, you increase the odds that they repost your content. Just one brand or feeder account can drive hundreds of followers if you get reposted--totally worth it!
Other Thoughts:
- Always try to improve your picture quality - people are drawn to quality images on Instagram
- Bring friends into your pictures and videos - take over one another’s social media
- Be funny or motivational - people love both comedy and daily motivation