The social network Instagram has long evolved from photos for friends to a powerful channel for achieving business goals. There are sales, reputation, recognition, loyalty, and much more. Even the most popular global brands are engaged in SMM promotion on Instagram. And an important criterion for assessing your activity is the engagement of users.
This metric can tell you a lot about your profile. For example, how and who reacts to your content, what users like and dislike, and most importantly – whether your presence and promotion in the social network pays off.
Engagement is counted by the number of user interactions. Every time your post is liked, commented on, saved, or shared is an interaction.
Other indicators of interaction also include direct messages, link clicks, mentions, use of hashtags, and responses to your stories.
So why is engagement so important for SMM promotion on Instagram and business?
First, it’s gratifying.
Second, the higher the engagement, the more followers you’ll bring in, and the more you’ll sell your services or products.
Third, engagement is one of the most important ranking factors of the social network algorithms itself. Thanks to high engagement, your posts will be higher in users’ feeds, will get into the recommended ones and, accordingly, more people will see your content.
To calculate engagement, you need to decide on the formula for this calculation. Here are the most popular ones:
To do this, take the amount of activity with your posts over a certain period, divide by the total number of subscribers and multiply by 100. This method will show you how subscribers are interacting with the content, but it won’t show you how many subscribers in total have seen your post.
Here, SMM experts use the same formula as the first option, but instead of the number of subscribers, we put the total number of impressions.
These two options are shown for a general understanding of what adds up. If you are engaged in SMM promotion, then these indicators will count for you certain services, for example, in our agency SMM specialists use Liveduna.
So what is it, the required level of engagement?
It’s all relative and depends on the goals and tools you’re using for promotion. The average engagement level for most profiles by impressions is 1.7%.
Before you measure your level of engagement, think about which interactions and on which content are most valuable to you. For example, a post with a prank can significantly raise your overall engagement level. That’s good for algorithms, but is it good for sales?
Don’t get hung up on the numbers, but look at the progress. If the engagement level is going up – that’s good, if it’s going down – it’s worth figuring out why.
Now that we’ve figured out what engagement is and what it affects, we’ll tell you how to increase it. These methods are not a magic pill, because what works for someone may not work for you. But it’s necessary to try if you’re seriously engaged in SMM promotion on Instagram.
Simple posts, carousel posts, igtv posts, video posts, stories and live feeds. Use different formats to understand what content your audience interacts with most often.
Our experience shows that engagement is higher with carousel posts that contain both photo and video content.
A simple example. What do you think is better for dance studio engagement? A post with a picture or a video?
Of course, it’s the publication with video that will have higher engagement.
For many years the posts were estimated by the number of likes, but even Instagram wants to hide their number and is testing it at full speed. You can get likes, but comments are harder to get. And then there’s saving to favorites and reposting the post to history.
It’s easy to like a post. Two clicks, and the user is already looking at the next post.
A comment shows that the post is catching on and the user wants to express an opinion.
Saves show that the user is interested and wants to come back to the post later, and a repost shows that the user wants to share the information with friends.
By the way, Instagram algorithms also like saves, reposts and comments more. And that means more people will see your post.
Communicate with your audience! Many companies forget this simple rule.
If your post is commented on, engage in conversation and ask questions. This way your subscribers will understand that you are really thinking about them and are ready for an open dialogue.
And to keep comments coming, be the first to ask your audience questions right in your posts.
Add more interactivity to your Instagram stories. Use post-it polls, questions, quizzes, and other stickers to increase engagement.
They work as a call to action and invite your followers to interact with the content.
Find out when your posts are seen by the most people and publish at those times. You can do this with the help of services, our SMM specialists use Liveduna service.
This will get more interactions and become more popular for Instagram ranking algorithms.
You need to know what resonates with your audience. What topic and type of posts. When you know this, you can emphasize content in the right style.
To analyze, you need to count the engagement rate of each post over a period of time. That way you’ll understand what your subscribers like. Next, it’s just a matter of giving people the content they want to see, the one they interact with more.
These seemingly simple and trivial tips can really increase engagement on your instagram and increase sales. Many companies forget that they are not present on social media for themselves, but for people. It is these tactics of SMM promotion for people on Instagram that will achieve the most ambitious business goals.
