4 ways to revamp your Instagram for the New Year
Whether you’re a content creator, blogger, social media influencer, or you’re starting your own business, an Instagram presence is a very powerful marketing tool for just about anyone these days. And there are always ways you can improve the content you’re posting, as well as your overall profile! To help, we’ve got some tips, tools and apps you can use to revamp your Instagram for the New Year.
4 ways to boost your Instagram presence in 2020
Post meaningful content
This should go without saying, but you shouldn’t post anything to your Stories or to your Feed that isn’t meaningful. (Think, would YOU engage with it?) In other words, don’t just post to post. Not only will you risk losing engagement, but you also risk losing followers. Think about your audience and the message you’re trying to convey before you post anything, and make sure each post has a purpose. If you’re stuck and can’t come up with anything, ask your followers what they’d like to see more of, or look at older posts that had high engagement to generate more ideas. Consider the top reasons why posts are engaging -- they’re educational, informational, entertaining, inspiring and/or have an emotional appeal.
Use hashtags in the comments
Although there has been some back and forth on whether hashtags are effective, there are many studies that show that using hashtags on Instagram results in better engagement and discoverability from accounts that don’t follow you. In fact, a study earlier this year from Brandwatch proved that posts with at least one hashtag resulted in 12.6% higher engagement. That said, if you’re going to use more than 3-5 hashtags per post, you should consider posting the hashtags in your first comment instead of your caption; this comes across as less spammy to your followers. Hashtags in comments will still show up when users search that hashtag across Instagram.
Pay attention to engagement
There are many third-party services out there that provide in-depth analytics on your posts, but Instagram has a fairly thorough analytics system on the app itself called Insights. You can look at a broad overview of your audience and overall post performance, as well as the details on an individual post to see things like how many profile visits resulted from that particular post, how many new follows you got after that post and where users found your post from (from Home, from Hashtags, etc). It’s important to pay attention to these analytics and check them often, as you’ll see what type of content does best on your Instagram and what your followers like to see the most. This can be a great source of inspiration for new posts!
Schedule your posts
Scheduling your Instagram posts helps you organize all of your content at once, which can save you a lot of time. There are lots of different social media scheduling tools out there, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Later is also one that’s worth checking out, as it’s Instagram specific and gives you a preview of your scheduled posts so you can see what your Feed will look like before your posts are even published. This is a great way to make sure your Feed is visually appealing and ensure you aren’t posting too much similar content too close together.