We know it’s not easy to create engaging Instagram content. It’s hard to predict what will blow up the likes, or the comments, or share to story.
There is no easy formula to do it either. You can follow all the ways to make a post engaging, and see no engagement. That said, it makes it much more likely long term to improve your engagement!
In today’s article, we give a couple of pointers for all you Instagram creators. We will dive in-depth into what you could do with your content to ensure people engage with it as much as possible!
If you are struggling with reach on Instagram, why not also check out our guide on increasing reach on social media!
Ask questions
The easiest way to get people to engage is to ask questions.
Say you are a tech page, and you are posting about the latest camera released. The best way to get people to engage with said content is to ask questions regarding the camera. “What do you think of the specs?”. “Are you impressed with the new sensor?”.
Asking questions that are relevant to what you are posting, as well as easily answerable by your audience, is a nearly guaranteed way to make people comment on your page. Usually, if your questions involve some sort of agreeing or disagreeing, people will 95% of the time like the post if they agree. Win-win!
Give solutions to common problems
Giving solutions to problems is the most common non-obvious way to drive engagement.
If you are a beautician, you could create content based on your frequently asked questions. This will immediately drive engagement, as you are giving people answers or solutions to questions you already get asked a lot. People who are in your interested audience pool will usually find these interesting, and engage well with this content.
However, do not copy and paste other people’s solutions. We see time and time again accounts which copy other people’s posts regarding solutions, which is a bad idea. People would have likely seen those already, meaning they are highly unlikely to engage with your posts.
Psst… just in case, we also think you should checkout our guide on social media strategies!
Short, sharp, and sweet
No one goes on Instagram to read essays. There is a good reason Tik Tok has blown up so much over the last year or so. It’s because people have very short attention spans, and only want to see short-form content.
While it doesn’t immediately drive engagement, creating short, sharp, and sweet content makes it far more likely for people to take their time to view it. With more people viewing it, it’s more likely that they will engage with it!
Use easy to read language
While this point follows closely with keeping things short, sharp, and sweet, we can’t forget about using simple language and wording to process.
As mentioned before, no one goes on Instagram to read essays. For this same reason, you wouldn’t write your content in a way that makes it seem so! Keep language simple and easy to read, as it’s more likely people will take the time to read and engage with the content.
Not only that, keeping language and wording easy to read helps your non-native English speakers in the audience. That in turn, increases the number of people that can engage with your content and thus statistically, helping increase engagement!
Give a call to actions
While it might seem annoying to some, asking people to take action is crucial. We analyze hundreds of website and social media profiles every month and so many are missing strong calls to action.
Simply put, you are leaving a lot on the table if you don’t do this. It has been proven time and time again that asking people to take specific actions (e.g. “click the link!”, “follow us!” etc.) increases the likelihood they will take these actions. We tried this ourselves with Instagram reels, and every time we asked people to like and follow if they enjoyed the reel we saw a spike in engagement and followers!
Conclusion
While it’s impossible to draw up an exact formula for perfect engagement with every post, it is not impossible to create engaging Instagram content.
If you follow the points we mentioned above, we guarantee you will see a more consistent engagement that increases greatly over time.
Don’t forget, if you are struggling to come up with all this content, why not check out our guide on creating a months worth of content in just one day!
What do you think? How do you ensure your content is engaging on Instagram? Let us know in the comments below!