Beginner Instagram bloggers often encounter the problem of low audience coverage. It seems that they write good posts, and they record stories continually, but their audience is not growing. Why is this a problem? Today we discuss Instagram algorithms and ways to increase visibility to the audience.
The audience of Instagram is more than one billion people as of. It is quite a lot, although it does not compare to the audience of Facebook or YouTube. At the same time, the platform holds a powerful position among the most visited social networks in the world. What’s even more interesting, Instagram’s audience tends to mature, with the average age of visitors falling into the 25+ age range. Advertising revenue on Instagram is more than $14 billion. This good revenue is driven by user activity, which is why the platform is so attractive to advertisers.
Users who have chosen this platform for promotion are constantly fighting for audience retention. The more time they spend on their accounts, the more bloggers can monetize advertising, products, or services.
Difficulties and Pains of Instagram Bloggers
For any Instagram blogger, coverage is vital because it is both about selling advertising and selling their services or products. It’s worth saying that Instagram can completely block coverage for accounts on topics such as:
- Nudity
- Smoking
- Alcohol
- Violence
- Appearance Alteration
- Medicine
- Click baiting, scamming, pranks, etc.
- Unoriginal content
These are not beneficial themes for users, and even more so, they can be destructive. Therefore, the platform tries to prevent the promotion of these topics.
However, in addition to such overtly negative connotations, it can still be difficult to increase or shift the reach of certain content. This article discusses what exactly influences a good reach on Instagram and how you can improve it.
Recently, the official Instagram website published a post that explains how Instagram’s algorithms work. The platform has officially decided to lift the veil on how it works. There are a lot of terms and explanations, so we’ll highlight the most important so that you know precisely why your posts and stories are not being watched and how to fix this situation.
7 Ways to Increase Visibility
Instagram collects information about the post, the creator of the content, the user, and how the user interacts with the content creator.
Instagram values posts and stories. The most recent and relevant are shown above. How many people liked the post? What is the post about? If a user is passionate about a specific topic and likes or saves it, Instagram will suggest similar ones.
Be a great Instagram user
Many of the points above are nicely summarized in this last point, even if it is a little vague.
Sharing, showing appreciation, quick replies, and other genuine, positive behaviors are rewarded by social media algorithms. Furthermore, they often tried to discourage abuse and hacking.
It seems to me that being a great Instagram user will lead to an increase in organic reach over time. That includes:
- Engaging your followers with relevant content (whether it’s informative, inspiring, or entertaining)
- Quickly responding to questions about your posts
- You should thank people for their comments
- Engaging with other people’s profiles and engaging with their posts
Understand The Algorithms
A smart Instagram feed works according to certain principles. So the platform necessarily studies all social signals, such as likes, views and shares. Next, it explores the length of time a user spends on a particular post or video. Finally, Instagram examines the structure of your posts to reveal their clarity and usefulness to followers.
Another important metric that can help increase your reach is the click-through rate. It’s essentially the percentage of your audience paying attention to your posts. Conventionally, Instagram shows your content to 10 people and then looks at how many of them paid attention. Therefore, two elements are important here: the headline and the image, attracting and holding people’s attention.
The use of hashtags and geotags also allows for a slight increase in audience reach but is not a fundamental indicator.
Don’t forget about algorithms that calculate the topic of your account and match it with users’ interests. Be consistent, but do not forget about diversity, use topics of related fields with your case.
Targeted advertising affects reach if the targeting is aimed at engaging subscribers.
Stay Tuned For Updates
Reels
Even though this format is relatively new and not available to everyone, it attracts visitors. They can use an icon to go to reels from a feed or stories. As a result, people spend a considerable amount of time in reels.
Swipes
They removed swipes for a reason. Most likely, stories are about to change, and as a hunch, we can assume that they will move to a tick-tock format – vertical. The vertical content format is the most viral at the moment.
60-Second Stories
Trends will be new. To keep the audience longer with Instagram’s stories, the videos won’t be split into small pieces anymore. Besides, a blogger will be able to tag other accounts and locations to his/her post.
Encourage Followers Engagement
Instagram evaluates how long users hang on to a post. That’s why it’s essential to invest in both text and visuals. In terms of visuals, photos with a story, images that put our imagination to work are perfect. If these are still posed photos, focus on unusual poses or facial expressions. Another option for a visual is a photo with different types of processing.
If you have an online store, you must take high-quality photos. This is because when a person chooses a product on the Internet, he/she needs to consider all the details, every little thing. As a result, the buyer will look at the photos longer, and the account, in turn, will get more coverage due to the extended focus of attention on the image.
If a person likes the post, one will click through the profile. The more often a user interacts with your account, the better. But this interaction should be mutual. The content creator should reply to the readers in comments and direct, like their posts. The Instagram algorithms calculate the interaction history of your account with your followers.
So, that’s the kind of content that gives it great reach.
Make The Most Of Instagram’s Features
Carousels
A carousel is another way to hold users longer on a post. You can add more photos, continued text from the post to the carousel.
Captioned Videos
When a person scrolls through the feed, the video starts playing automatically but without sound. That’s why it’s important to add subtitles to grab a person’s attention.
Comments
To get users to leave comments, you should analyse the content they are interested in. Keep track of trends in your subject as well as in related ones. Then, if you catch your audience’s interests, there will be plenty of comments under posts, even without calls to action.
Saved
Instagram’s algorithms encourage likes and bookmarking. So, if you want a lot of savings, you need to get focused on helpful content. Create a variety of checklists, tips, advice, infographics, cheat sheets – anything you can save and share as freebies.
Use Software To Optimize
No matter who you are on Instagram – a blogger or a company – you need to know about the basic promotion and analytics tools that can help optimize your account and improve metrics for growing your audience reach. Here, we will not advertise any service, but we will talk about software trends, their variety, and usefulness:
Photo Processing
On Instagram, they greet you by “clothes” – high-quality and skillfully processed photos are of paramount importance. When a user goes to an account and sees attractive pictures, he will more likely stay on the page to read the posts.
Text Processing
So far, no application will write texts for you. But there are plenty of apps that will check them for errors and divide them into paragraphs nicely.
Video Editing
Instagram can’t do without video and images. Use special software for convenient and high-quality editing. At the same time, don’t forget that your unique voice can help outperform your competitors whose videos seem to be made professionally.
Icons For “Featured”
A list of valuable tools can include icons for Instagram. Of course, you can also make them yourself, but you can use special tools.
Covers For Instagram Posts
With the help of special services, you can easily create a cool banner yourself.
Auto-greeting New Subscribers
It is common now to greet new Instagram subscribers following the politeness rules. You can write who you are, what you do, what you offer, and why the subscriber should stay with you in a greeting message.
Late Posting and Crossposting, Uploading Pictures From Desktop
Scheduling content for a week or two, even a month in advance, will help you free up your time. So, don’t miss out on the opportunity to use services for deferred posting.
Creating A Multilink
You can only add one link to your profile. But which one? If you have something to offer to your followers and you don’t want to limit yourself to just one link, check out services that allow you to add multiple links to your profile at once.
Comment Monitoring
Needless to say, how important it is to respond to your followers’ comments on time. Especially, if you’re offering something to them, use a comment tracker to make sure you don’t miss a single comment.
Reviewing Statistics
You need to do analytics to understand how well your posts are getting in, what time it’s best to publish them, and how active your followers are. Important account indicators are easy to pull out with the help of certain services. By the way, you can also use them to scan other accounts, such as bloggers from whom you are going to buy advertising.
Checking Accounts For Scamming
Bots do not buy products, do not like or comment on posts, and are of no use if you don’t consider bloggers who sell advertising at a higher price. Well, you risk paying money for air. How do you quickly check an account for bots among your followers? First, upload it to one of the dedicated services.
Focus On Quality, Not Quantity
A considerable amount of content from one author can decrease your reach, it happens because users get bored. Secondly, you can’t produce high-quality content every day regularly, which means there is a tendency for the quality of posts to deteriorate. Don’t chase the quantity of content. Quality is essential. Instagram will selectively show your posts in the feed, which means that it may not get the coverage they deserve.
Analyze Your Audience
Besides, making money, the primary purpose of Instagram is to show precisely the content that will be interesting to users. Therefore, interactions are very important for Instagram. Users should study the content as long as possible.
Most Instagram users are solvent young people, so the platform is actively used for marketing promotion.
To adjust the content and presentation for users, an analysis of Instagram’s audience is carried out. The social network itself offers tools to assess key indicators. However, only business accounts (pages associated with Facebook) have access to this information. For more in-depth analysis, third-party services are used.
You need to analyze the number of subscribers and percentage of bots, engagement, conversions and sales, and audience demographics.
Studying your subscribers is a must for every commercial account. It helps to make the right decisions on promotion, increase coverage, and spend fewer resources on it at the same time.
Audience analysis will allow you to identify the preferences of your target audience, choose the style and format of communication with subscribers and choose the right account design.
Final Thoughts
When your audience interacts with you, it’s not just some likes someone has given you or even a subscription; it’s the long-term history of the relationship between you and your followers that matters. Instagram analyzes how long a person has been following you, how often s/he reads your posts, likes, comments, how much time s/he spends on the account, whether s/he reads the posts or just looks at the image, and swipes up. The current relationship with subscribers and users is taken into account. Is he or she interested in what you’re writing about at this particular moment, this week, or this month?
If Instagram’s algorithms assume your post might be interesting, then it suggests it and expands reach. Having followers isn’t only important, but you must have a quality interaction with them. From this, we can conclude that it’s not the number of followers that matters but a quality audience interested in what you might be posting.
Instagram algorithms don’t show many posts from the same author in a row. If you want to gain coverage by quantity rather than quality, that’s the wrong way to go. How do you move to the top with this information?
- Capture with visuals and text.
- Interact with the audience wherever possible.
- Don’t chase the quantity, but take the quality.
- Don’t cheat; create content from the heart and for the people.
Don’t buy subscribers and comments, forced advertising, contests, or giveaways because an audience that comes this way won’t stay for long.
