I guarantee it could be doing more
As the algorithm strengthens, so does the difficulty of getting your posts seen. Don’t engage with an account for a certain amount of time? They will no longer appear on your feed. Gone are the days of perusing your feed and seeing posts from everyone you follow chronologically.
How to beat the algorithm
As it stands only 10% of your following will see your posts. If the post is well received at this stage, then it will reach the remaining 90%. Getting the most exposure relies on receiving initial success.
Getting engagement rests on giving it out. So get following and engaging with relevant accounts to reap the benefits.
How can you increase engagement?
Get your captions right and use hashtags to your advantage. Don’t piggyback on to irrelevant hashtags, but handpick ones of relevance. Now you can follow hashtags, so this is a good way of getting noticed. But, don’t get too keyboard happy here as Instagram register greater than 30 hashtags as spam, and resultantly blacklist offenders.
Equally think your captions through – if it’s a new service your promoting or a product, is there a clear CTA? Your audience need to know what action they are supposed to take when viewing your post.
If it’s a competition or giveaway, asking a question garners a huge amount of engagement and will get your post more views.
Don’t forget stories
Stories allow you to provide in-the-moment updates, as well as being a place that you can promote and drive traffic to your most recent post (or a blog post or item with the ‘swipe up’ feature).
The accounts you engage with the most will be the stories that are closest to the front of your feed.
Focus on quality and being relevant
Posting for the sake of posting won’t produce the best engagement and it will also make you appear less authentic to your followers.
The algorithm rewards consistency of posting, so focusing on producing quality content at regular intervals will be most beneficial – it’ll also pay to post at times when your audience is active.
Join a pod
The idea behind an Instagram Pod is to let everyone in your select group know when you’ve posted. Then everyone visits the post and likes it. Then the post will receive a bump in engagement and is considered a good post by the algorithm.
Pods work when formed with groups of like-minded individuals, within the same industry or with similar interests. Plus, everyone will need to be committed and give all accounts the same attention.
Get your account right
Plan out your content – be proactive and reactive. Keep posting. Use a clear CTA. Utilise stories. Engage with your audience (and do it fast). The new algorithm punishes users for taking longer than an hour to reply to comments, so get to it quickly to maximise how many people your posts reach.
Interested in finding out how you can use social media strategies to get your employer brand out there? Get in touch to discuss the packages we offer.
