This is reposted from facebook…
What’s up, everyone?
So after seeing the response, we got from the previous value bomb i thought of addressing the next big issue everyone is facing right now. That’s a decline in engagement rate lately.
Instagram Judge the post by the following things to get you more reach. ( In priority)
Watch time of the posts:
So posting igtv videos not only helps in one way but two ways. One way is ig wants to push igtv and ig also wants to push the content that gets a lot of watch time. Same as youtube.
Most of the people think likes and comments are most important but they are not. Yes, they do play a good role in getting you good reach but not when compared to watch time and saves. And also if a post gets a lot of watch time with no likes its a flop. But 90% of the times this dont happen and it will only happen when you mislead people to make them watch till the end.
Igtv video, Normal videos, Infographics, Album content both in images format and video format gets us a lot of watch time. Capitalise them and see the immediate results.
So Goal is to get all types of engagement possible from one single user. Imagine a follower spending 1min on your post, liking it, save it for the future while sharing it to stories. Its like wildfire for the algorithm. And that’s the viral formula.
So next time when you post, Ask your self how much time a user is going to spend on the post and only if you think that’s good enough like 20sec+, post that.
Saves :
This is why infographics are performing great these days. Be it business niche, fitness niche or a beauty niche you can find infographics and post them. Pinterest is one of the places where you can find some untapped infographics in your niche but you need to get them redesigned as the dimensions of the pictures in there will be different.
Pinterest content works nicely as it is new to IG. IG favours new content than reposted content. Not like it will kill repost content but it will give priority to first time content.
Infographics give you two types of engagements mainly. Saves and watch time. So more the engagements the better. So from the content, you got 2 types and from the caption, you can get likes and comments or tags by asking them in a creative way.
So a total of 4 engagement types from one user on an average. So it adds value and it also gets us good reach when compared personal picture or a quote.
Tags in comments:
So it’s 3rd best we can get. And more than engagement. we get more exposure from these tags. They can potentially follow you and buy from us too. ( i mean the person who is been tagged)
So Goal is to post the content that gets watch time, saves and asking them to tag their friends or someone in a creative way. Jay Shetty, price_ea does this all the time.
Ex: Tag your 4 friends if you agree. Tag that 3 entrepreneur friends that would benefit from this. Tag and help me to spread the word.
Comments
Same like tags post the content that gets us good watch time, saves and asking them to comment on something.
Again they are two types in here. Long comments and short or emojis. IG favours the posts that get the comments with 4+ words. But we can’t ask people to comments 4+ words or something as its too much of favour and
So asking simple stuff like Drop 
If you agree, Drop if you are someone who does this all this time, Drop if you are willing to change in 2019
Shares to stories and dms
Story reshares and sharing post in dms is one more engagement that’s important and you can keep rotating your call to actions in captions from asking to tag, asking to comment and share with friends. But first, give priority to tags and comments in captions and occasionally use a call to actions for shares.
Ex: Share this post to your stories and inspire your friends, Share this post with 4 Best friends who you resonate.
Likes
So now dont think likes are not even important. In my opinion and experience if you follow all the above & Below tips no matter what you will get likes.
More Tips to revive or increase your engagement rate:
-
Refer to the hashtag strategy in my previous post and use 30hahstags each time.
-
If you are reposting or recreating the content, post only best-performing posting that is already proven to work in some other page. Go to any page and see the likes and find the post that gets 5-10x than a normal post in that page and now redesign or repost that image. Also, dont lose the momentum by posting low quality or less engaging content at any cost. If you get 5k likes for 10posts and get 2k likes for next post, ig will lower the reach for next post no matter what. So be consistent in posting quality content.
After all, IG had surplus content unlike tiktok, so being good to IG and posting good quality and engaging content is the only way to stand out these days.
-
Reply to every single comment you get. This is the chance to double your comment number. Say you got 10 comments. Replying every comment now will make that count to 20 and algorithm will push your post as it will just count no.of comments but not by you or your follower.
You can even start a conversation in comments to get replies from that follower who left a comment so that you can 3x your comments now. -
Replying dms and post stories(5-10) will drastically increase your reach as an algorithm will push your posts to the people who interact with you and watch your stories first and then rest. These people who watch and talk will engage with your content too. So this again helps to rank in hashtags and explore.
-
Dont buy Bot followers to increase the followers. If you did in the past delete them. The way the algorithm works are it, ig shows your posts to certain % of people first and compares engagement of that to previous posts and if its less than avg it will punish your reach and it will award you if it’s above average and the initial set of audience will have 50% of the followers that generally interact with your content and other 50% will be variable. So if it shows your content to bots which won’t interact with you, your engagement in the initial round will be down and it will affect you drastically. In the long term, if this happens so many times. Ig will kill your reach permanently.
-
Follow the shoutout strategy in the previous post when you feel like engagement rate is not picking up even after so many efforts. And post after just accepting the requests. This will push your content first to the followers you accepted and as they freshly been accepted ig wants to know whether they like your content or not and posting very viral content at this point of time will be huge plus in long term. Do more research on the post and spend a good time crafting it.
-
All these tips will work if and only if the content is great. These tips will help you to fuel the fire but not for creating the fire .
Ps- Hope you got some value from the post. If you got something out of this post let me know in comments and also do let me know which topic you want me to cover in the next post.