Instagram is a huge social media platform and has also grown to become a very useful business tool. If you are using Instagram to promote your business you probably already know about engagement but it is also important to know how to optimise it to boost your business on Instagram.
Why is engagement on Instagram important?
Engagement is important because it is one of the ways that Instagram sees your page and posts and decides how relevant or important they are to other users. Boosting engagement will mean that your posts will be shown to a lot more people and ultimately to the right people.
But what about the Shadowban?
It can be quite difficult to push engagement on your page especially due to Instagrams ‘Shadowban’. Instagram use this Shadowban to filter out content that is either deemed as spam or offensive. This is all well and good but you can sometimes get caught by the shadowban even if your content is not spammy or offensive.
How to avoid the Shadowban?
Some ways to avoid this happening include; avoiding using the same hashtags on every post, this can be quite annoying as you will find that you establish a good set of hashtags that work well for your business but Instagram sees this as spam so try to switch it up a bit with each post. Try not to use hashtags that are used on posts that violate Instagrams community guidelines, if you do use any of these hashtags then Instagram will not show your post in any of the hashtags that you have used on that post. Don’t use bots! It might be tempting to save some time and use a liking or commenting bot on your Instagram but this will most likely get you shadowbanned. Instagram knows when these are being used and they certainly don’t like it.
How can I boost engagement?
Once you have mastered avoiding shadow ban’s you then need to look at how you can boost your engagement on your page. One thing that will help to boost your engagement is looking at the time of day that you post. Using the Instagram insights, look at when your users are most active and make sure to post during these times. This will increase the chance of your users seeing and engaging with the post. It is also a good idea to use a scheduling tool to pre-plan when you will post. Tools like Hootsuite & Later allow you to schedule posts so that you don’t manually have to post each time. Using this will make sure that you are posting regularly and this, in turn, will get your users engaged. You can also simply engage with other users and accounts and this will encourage them to engage with you.
Overall boosting engagement will mean that Instagram shows your posts higher on peoples feed. This will then mean that more people see your posts and ultimately boost engagement even more! Instagram is such a great tool and if used correctly can really help to promote your business.
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