How Instagram is Playing a Crucial Role in Brand Engagement

Instagram is probably one of the biggest and most popular social networking platforms on the internet worldwide. According to various reports, Instagram crossed the billion-user mark by end of 2020. The same year, Instagram was ranked among the top five most downloaded app on the App Store and Google Play Store. Instagram registered over 13 million downloads by June 2020 and in 2021 ranked second only to TikTok in terms of downloads. 

The app is most favored by the Millennials and Gen Z with over 63% of Americans saying they check their Instagram accounts daily. Instagram’s user base has grown steadily and consistently among the younger crowd. This also makes Instagram users the most dedicated lot too as they frequently log in to the app every day. This huge consumer base makes Instagram an excellent level playing field for brands to ensure brand engagement.

What is Instagram engagement?

Instagram engagement is much more than just counting the number of followers and views you get on your posts. Social media engagement measures the interaction that your audience has with the content you upload. 

There are several factors that make the metric that helps gauge user engagement on Instagram, such as:

• Shares 
• Comments 
• Likes 
• Saves 
• Followers and growth 
• Mentions (untagged and tagged) 
• Branded hashtags 
• Click-throughs 
• Direct Messages (DMs)

These metrics showcase clearly the evidence of user activity on your content. These metrics help to measure the interest your post develops with the users/viewers. 

Brand engagement is extremely essential. The higher the level of interaction and activity on your posts, the higher is the user engagement with your brand. Additionally, a strong engagement tactic is extremely crucial to score higher with the Instagram algorithm. This higher the engagement is on content; it is more likely that your content is boosted through the newsfeed and attracts even more attention. 

There are several free tools available online that can help you to measure the level of consumer engagement on your Instagram posts. These tools provide you with the data and information you need to gauge the impact of each post you upload on Instagram. Instagram data analytic tools are also helpful in finding your engagement rate. 

What is the ideal engagement rate for Instagram?

The amount of interaction on the uploaded content in relation to the number of followers on the account determines the engagement rate for the post. In simple words, engagement rate is the percentage of people who viewed your post and actually took an action, such as liking, saving, commenting on, or sharing the post. 

There are several ways to calculate the engagement rate. First off, you can calculate the engagement rate in terms of post, impressions, reach, or followers. Actually, an ideal engagement rate is defined by your specific social media marketing goals. According to social media experts, the strong engagement rate on Instagram is between 1% and 5%. However, the acceptable engagement rate is subjective and relative to your specific industry and the consumer base. 

Tips to Increase Brand Engagement on Instagram

Try some of the following tips and tricks to enhance brand engagement on Instagram:

1 – Know your audience 

It becomes easier to create impactful content when you know the type of audience you are catering to. Your target audience demographic is extremely helpful in defining the type of content you should post, the brand voice to adopt, and even determine the frequency of posts for ideal consumer engagement. 

2 – Be authentic 

Social media users prefer honesty and reliability over being flashy. So, you should share content that does not seem like a smooth marketing campaign, rather the content should relate real-life experiences that help consumers connect with your brand or product. 

For this, you can try sharing behind-the-scenes footage of an Instagram story, write captions that show a cheeky sense of humor, etc. 

3 – Share interesting images

Instagram is a visual-centric social media platform. Thus, it makes complete sense to share unique and interesting images for your brand campaign. 

Even if you are not good at graphic design or photography, you can hire an expert or choose to use any of the many freely available photo editing or image-creating tools. 

4 – Keep posting carousels

Carousel – the Instagram feature that allows you to create posts with multiple images – is an awesome way to improve brand engagement. Studies have shown that using carousels in social media branding campaigns are thrice as effective as regular posts. 

Add to this the fact that the Instagram algorithm often boosts the carousel posts to followers who did not engage with it the first time, thus giving your post multiple chances to gain engagement with the followers/consumers. 

5 – Post video content

Video is extremely eye-catching and inherently engaging. Hence, posting videos is likely to receive over 38% more engagement as compared to images on Instagram posts. 

Try to keep the video content as simple as possible. Shoot it now, edit is quickly, and post it with a few unpolished aspects for authenticity. You can choose from a variety of different, easy-to-use video editing tools available online. 

6 – Create impressive captions

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, a simple yet engaging caption can add even more value and impact to the picture. 

Instagram allows up to 2,200 characters to be added as captions to images. It also allows up to 30 hash-tags in a post. You should use these to the fullest. A good caption can help add context and highlight your brand’s personality. 

7 – Develop memorable content

You should also include reference material in Instagram posts which makes your audience want to save the post for future use in their Collections folder. There are several different approaches to creating save-worthy content but being simple and to the point is the best way to go about it.

Conclusion

Instagram keeps growing as one of the leading and most popular online social networking platforms. With tens of millions of users logging on every day, it also provides an expansive, excellent and unique platform to ensure consumer and brand engagement.