With Instagram being the ultimate staple on your smartphone, you must be eager to unlock its full potential. This article will reveal the seven best tips to skyrocket your Instagram reach and maximize your influence today.
Increase your Instagram reach:
Why Be Active On Instagram?
Instagram is ultimately a free service that can place your brand, your company, or even just your images and videos in front of millions of potential customers, colleagues, fans, or friends.
Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users. That is a quarter of the population of the world.
When one image or video goes viral, you can put your account in front of millions of new eyes and gain new clients, sales, etc.
7 Ways To Increase Your Instagram Reach
Using Instagram to reach your target audience means formulating a strategy and incorporating tactics that will ultimately bring your account success.
Here are seven sure-fire tactics that will increase your Instagram reach:
1. Use Relevant Hashtags
Instagram allows for 30 hashtags in your caption; in 2018 & 2019, the Shadow Ban* was making waves, but luckily it seems to have died down if you aren’t spammy.
*A shadowban is when Instagram hides your account from everyone not following you.
This is why it’s even more important to use relevant hashtags in your posts & to rotate. Instagram tends to not like you posting the same group of hashtags daily, so rotate your hashtags. Relevant Hashtags are important because they put your content in front of the people who want to see it.
So, you’ve just taken the most adorable image of a Labrador? Why would you use #lolcats as a hashtag? The more times your posts are marked, “Don’t show for this hashtag”, Instagram starts waving its red flags, and your Instagram posts engagement will go from great to trickling down to a slow drip. I wouldn’t worry too much about that, though. As long as your hashtags are relevant, you won’t receive enough of those red flags for it to matter.
The more relevant your hashtags, the higher your chances will be for engagement on Instagram.
Engagement is the name of the game for Instagram’s infamous algorithm, and if you know how to please the algorithm, you’ll be well on your way to increasing your Instagram reach.
Another reason to upgrade to a free business account is Insights. Insights show how people find your content and how well your posts are doing. This can be a great tool to see which groups of hashtags are performing the best for you and which you can dump.
What to do:
- Use all 25-30 available hashtags.
- Rotate your used hashtags.
- Only include relevant hashtags
- Use Insights to gauge which hashtags are working best.
2. Post when your followers are awake
Did you know that Instagram likes almost immediate engagement on your posts? The algorithm loves it, in fact. Generally, the posts with the best reach receive good amounts of engagement within the first 30 minutes after posting. This means that if your audience is asleep when you post, you’re going to just receive crickets in response.
If most of your audience is American, post when most of them should be awake. If they’re European, ensure they’ve had a delicious cappuccino before you wow them with your content.
This is another reason you want a business account and access to those awesome insights. Unless you plan on guessing, of course.
Insights give you clear activity times & can show you where most of your users are.
What to do: Find out when your audience is awake and active, and post your content when they’re most active.
3. Share your location to increase your Instagram reach
Location, location, location. It’s not just brilliant for holiday & real estate posts.
By including your location in your posts, you are just adding another way for your Instagram posts to be found by potential followers & fans. Simply add your location & let the magic happen.
4. Share more video content
Much like location, by posting videos, you are increasing the possibility of being found.
Another reason why you should be posting more videos is retention time. Remember I mentioned engagement being one of the things the algorithm loves? Well, Retention time is another, and this can help make your Instagram profile standout.
Videos can be used all over Instagram now, in your feed, in your Instagram Stories, and also with Instagram Reels
One of the best ways to get people to look at your posts for longer is to post videos. People tend to look at videos longer than pictures.
5. Have fun and be creative with Instagram stories
It’s storytime, Instagram Stories, that is.
Like videos, if you use hashtags in your stories, these have a chance to be seen on the explore page. You’ll also be able to connect with a larger percentage of your audience as your story displays in a different location & users tend to go from one story to the next.
This also increases the retention time on your profile which improves the rest of your content reach as a whole. Unlike regular posts, you can post 10+ stories a day. Just be careful not to overdo it, as you might get muted by some of your followers.
Instagram stories have 300 million active daily users already, which is a massive portion of the users of the network that you could also be reaching.
6. Use Instagram Carousels and Slideshows
We’re still on the topic of retention time. If videos are best for retention times, then the carousel/slideshow images are the next best thing. The logic is also quite sound & simple; more images = longer retention.
Remember to include either in the image or the caption to continue scrolling through the carousel, otherwise, people may see the first image and just continue through their feed.
It’s also best if the images relate or tell a story, give your audience a reason to stay at your post. High retention will increase your Instagram reach to potential followers and your own current followers.
7. Capture attention with captions
Now captions are one of the simplest ways to increase your retention times. All you have to do is write something engaging to get the user to comment/like/follow/save or just to continue reading and take in the details of your post.
For someone that is not used to writing this type of short engaging call-to-actions, you can always go the NatGeo way by including interesting facts and other information that the reader may find interesting about your post. You could even make journal-style posts.
Remember, the goal is to keep the reader on your post & if your caption is lengthy, there will most likely be some part that they may relate with and initiate them liking or commenting on your post, or better, following or clicking on that link on your profile page.
The best way to create engaging content is to put yourself in the shoes of your audience, what do they want to see? If you can answer this & implement these tips, whilst regularly posting, you’re sure to see your Instagram reach increase and continue to grow.