Ways to improve your engagement on Instagram in 2022

When followers are interacting with your posts and your content, you grow your brand, get more monetization opportunities, and become a more successful influencer overall.

The question is: How do you get more engagement? It’s not easy. Many users on Instagram can be passive, just scrolling their feeds to pass the time. You need to get your followers to actually like, share, and comment on your content. If you want to increase your Instagram engagement this year, you just need to follow these tips.

What is an engagement rate?

Before we move on to the tips, it’s important to understand what an engagement rate is. Engagement rate, or ER, is a measure of how often your audience is interacting with your content. Engagement rate can be calculated by the number of engagements you get compared to the number of followers you have. Engagements can mean likes, shares, views, and comments. 

Obviously, you want your engagement rate to be as high as possible. When you have a high engagement rate, more brands are going to want to work with you and pay you for sponsored posts. Now that we know what an engagement rate is, let’s dive further into those metrics you want to be striving to increase.

What metrics should you look at?

So to recap, your engagement rate is calculated by comparing the number of engagements your posts get and the total number of followers you have. If a large number of your followers are engaging with your posts, you have a high engagement rate. Keep in mind that a low percentage isn’t always the worst thing, depending on your follower count. Those with millions of followers are going to have a lower engagement rate than someone with one hundred followers. However, who do you think brands are more likely to work with? 

With that being said, most brands like to work with influencers who land somewhere in the middle. They have enough followers to have an audience but not so many that they’re not affordable for smaller and medium-sized brands. With that in mind, let’s look at the engagement metrics you should pay attention to.

• Followers: As we said, follower count is important, but it’s not going to determine whether brands will work with you. If you have 10k followers and great engagement rates and you appeal to a niche audience, brands that also operate in that niche will look to work with you.
• Likes: It’s easy for your followers to like your content — just a double tap and they can add a heart to your like count. While this metric is worth considering, it’s probably the lowest form of engagement because it doesn’t take much commitment.
• Comments: Comments are a little more involved than likes. A post with a lot of comments means that people are having reactions to the post. You can also read these reactions and find out how people actually feel about what you posted. Comments are definitely a more useful metric for engagement than likes, as they’re easier to analyze.
• Shares: Sharing your content or reposting it is a great measure of engagement. It means that they want others who follow them to see your posts or your content. If someone with a large following does this, it can do wonders for your audience. Shares and reposts are one of the most desirable metrics when it comes to measuring engagement.

How to grow your social media account

As you learn what resonates with your audience, you’ll be able to create higher-quality posts for them and grow your audience. As you learn to grow your audience, you can also learn how best to engage them. Now that we know about engagement rate and the metrics that go into calculating it, let’s talk about how we can up those metrics.

10 tips to engage your followers

Here are 10 tips that will help you engage your followers in 2022 and beyond:

1. Be consistent

Be a consistent presence on their Instagram feed. This means that you need to post regularly, using all of the tools Instagram affords you. To truly stay top of mind and top of feed, it helps to post Stories and create Reels in addition to your regular posting.

If you’re posting on a regular basis, you give your followers more chances to engage. But being consistent means more than just posting daily or multiple times per day. It also means being consistent with your quality. If you post every day but you only put effort into a post every once in a while, your followers aren’t going to be engaged. Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward and delivering content that is always high quality.

2. Show your face

This won’t apply to everyone, but if showing your face is advantageous to your niche or social media presence, you should do it. People like to know who is behind their favorite account, and it helps to humanize the account for your followers.

3. Post interactive Stories

Posting Instagram Stories is always a good idea, but you can really up your engagement rate by making your Stories interactive. 

Instagram Stories allow you to include polls, sliders, quizzes, countdowns, questions, and other features that your audience can interact with directly. Not only does this make them participate in your content, but it can also give you insight into your audience and help you curate and tailor your content for them.

4. Make engaging reels

Instagram Reels have become extremely popular since they’ve been introduced. Reels are another way that you can get your audience interested in your content. The right Reel even has the potential to go viral, which can really increase your audience and engagement rates.

Pay attention to the trends you’re seeing on Reels and consider whether any of them could work for your niche. If you can hop on a trend, you can possibly reach followers you wouldn’t reach otherwise.

5. Host a giveaway

Everyone likes free stuff. You can get a lot of engagement on a post by hosting a giveaway. The key is to make the giveaway as beneficial for you as possible. Typically the way a giveaway works is that you make a post about what you’re going to give the winner, and then you ask everyone to like and comment to enter the contest. 

This post will likely get more likes and comments than most posts do. But if you really want to make the most of a giveaway, you should also require commenters to tag one or two friends to enter the giveaway. This will introduce tons of people to your page, potentially getting you more followers in the process.

6. Respond to comments

Many accounts let their followers just cast their comments into the void. They might get likes from other users, but they rarely get interaction from the poster themselves. If you want to really engage with your audience and show them you care, responding to comments is a great idea.

Followers will love seeing their favorite creators like and respond to their comments, and it will encourage them to engage more in the future.

7. Share more content with carousel posts

Carousel posts are posts that contain more than one image or video. These posts can be more interesting than regular posts and can keep followers looking at your post longer. Plus, you have a better chance of them liking at least one of the pictures or videos you’ve included.

Carousel posts are great for sharing more information and content all in one post. Make sure to take advantage of this feature, but you don’t have to overdo it. Just use carousel posts when it makes sense to do so.

8. Include calls to action in your captions

Don’t forget to include calls to action in your captions. This will encourage your followers to engage with your content or click through to things that you might be selling. 

For example, if you’re just looking to increase comments on a post, you could ask a question in the caption. This will encourage your followers to provide their answers, giving you an opportunity to respond to their comments and extend that engagement loop!

9. Support other Instagram accounts

Instagram creators need to stick together! If you have a brand or another person in your post with an Instagram account, make sure to tag them. They’ll likely return the favor anytime your account is featured on their page, and you’ll both help each other increase your audience.

10. Be authentic

The number one rule to keep in mind is to be yourself. People are always drawn to authenticity. If you’re passionate about your account and you’re genuine with your posts, people are going to be attracted to that and become loyal followers.

When you’re authentic and you build a loyal follower base, you are naturally going to get more engagement.

Join Beacons today!

Beacons is another great tool for increasing your Instagram engagement. With Beacons, you can build your own mini-website in minutes that your followers can visit to find your merch, your other profiles, and much more. Our powerful link in bio tool can direct fans right to your income streams, making monetization easier than ever.

Find out why so many content creators are already using Beacons. Sign up for free and get started today!