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Hi, my name's Katie Steckly. I'm a social media marketing educator and a YouTube creator over at youtube.com/katie. Engagement is the most significant factor in the success of your Instagram strategy. You can post beautiful content multiple times a day every day, but if nobody is engaging with it, it really isn't going to be moving the needle on your business. In this video, I'm going to be sharing 3 strategies that you can use to start to increase your engagement and grow on Instagram.
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In my opinion, engagement is all about building relationships. This isn't just about the vanity metrics of the number of likes or comments you have, because that doesn't translate to real customers. Engagement is about getting to know people and spending time talking with them online. The best way that you can build these relationships. It's just simply by spending time with your existing followers. The first thing you can do is reply to every single comment that you get on your posts.
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Try to develop real conversations in your comment section, instead of just having very surface level responses. In addition to replying to comments on your posts, go out of your way to engage with your followers. Take a look at who engages with you most frequently and go over to their profile. Like their photos, comment on their posts. When you get brand new followers coming in, send them a DM and welcome them and let them know that you're happy to answer any questions they have about whatever you're an expert in.
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Don't be shy. You have to put yourself out there and be the first one to send that message. I know it can be scary, but it is so worth it to start building those personal relationships with your followers. Engaging with people who already follow you is very important for increasing your engagement rate. But engaging with people who haven't followed you yet is very important for growth. For this to be successful you need to have a very clear idea of who your ideal audience is, so that you can go out and engage with them wherever it is they happen to hang out on Instagram already.
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You could find them through hashtags, tagged photos of an industry leader in your niche, in the comments of posts by industry leaders in your niche. Or if you have a location-based business and location tags. Spend time browsing through the kind of content that your ideal follower might be creating, or also might be engaging with, and then engage with the people that you meet there. Finally backing up, all of this relationship building work with data is so important so that you can continue to post the most engaging content possible.
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Take a look at your Instagram insights over the past three months. Look at what posts got the most comments, likes, saves, or shares, and try to ask yourself why that might have happened. You can do this by going to your Instagram profile, tapping on those three lines in the top right-hand corner, and then tapping on insights. If you go to the content section of your insights, you can change the timeline to either one week, one month or three months. I recommend looking at three months because it gives you a wider look at all of your content and you can see what the general overall trends are.
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And then you can organize it by comments or likes or saves or shares. Once you do this, take a look at these posts. Look at the imagery. Look at the caption. Look at the hashtag and ask yourself, what about this image made my followers stop and tap the like button? What about this caption made my followers write a comment back? If you can find trends among the content that has been engaged with the most by your audience, and then use those same concepts to make new posts in the future, you'll be able to just continually increase your engagement.
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See if you can find any trends among your most engaged with content, and then try to reuse those strategies and your future contents that you can continue to get a higher engagement rate. Instagram engagement really is all about relationship building. Start with your existing followers, get to know who they are, spend time engaging with them on their profiles and in the DMS, and then branch out and start to get to know people who might be in your ideal audience that are hanging out in other places on Instagram, and then round out your engagement strategy by using insights to back up the kind of content that you're creating so that you could optimize your engagement rates.
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Good luck with your Instagram engagement and thanks for watching.
