When it comes to Instagram (and social media in general) it can be tempting to focus on the follower counts. Many of us have moved past that and look at engagement rates (whatever that means). Is a like worth the same as a comment? How do you judge the value of a comment? Surely, a fire emoji isn’t the same as a long detailed response from a follower.
Keeping your followers engaged reaches far beyond receiving a like or comment. In this post we will look at some of the best ways people can engage with you on Instagram and how you can use the platforms range of features to build a closer relationships with your followers.
Instagram Stories
Remember the days when Snapchat was the king of stories? Well those days are gone, Instagram took stories and turned it into its crown jewel. Now, with an abundance of features, stories have created a hub for creator / follower interactions that exceed the like and comment features of the feed.
Stories stickers allow you to do everything from tagging other pages and share other account’s posts to running polls and share music via Spotify. This combination of features allow your audience to engage with you in a myriad of ways. The most obvious way is for your followers to interact with your question and poll stickers but the wide range of features allow far more than this. The ability to share other people’s content and tag them in stories makes it easy to highlight your followers work. And, of course, they can share your posts too.
Shop Tags
When it comes to interacting with your business it is fair to say a purchase is generally better than a like. Thanks to shop tags Instagram users can explore your product range within the app before making a purchase from your website. That’s definitely better engagement than a heart emoji in the comments. Using shop tags is a far more frictionless solution than driving people to the link in your bio to send them to your website and is likely to become common place as user behaviour continues to adapt to the feature and become used to see images of products with shop tags.
Direct Messaging
Through Instagram you can talk directly with your followers one and one with direct messaging. This is possibly the highest form of engagement or interaction with a customer and it is completely native to Instagram. The new message sticker in stories also allows people to join chat groups in direct messages from a story post. Whether you are simply answering customer service questions or helping people with wider issues the ability to for people to reach your business directly within Instagram opens up opportunities for meaningful interactions and engagement between yourself and your followers.
Unfortunately the term “engagement” has somewhat lost its meaning where social media is concerned. And whilst the trend of “meaningful engagement” is on the rise even this term seems to have been somewhat limited to likes and comments but there are so many other ways people can engage with you and your business on Instagram and other social platforms.
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