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11 Ways to Upgrade Your Instagram Game

If you have a business, chances are you’re on Instagram. It’s one of the fastest-growing social networks, hitting 1 billion users in 2018, and counting! But not every business is using Instagram to their highest potential. Here are 11 ways you can get on top of your Instagram game.

 

  1. Use Stories for engagement, and Feed for conversions. This just means Stories are the best way to connect with your existing follower base, and your Feed is your best bet for attracting potential new followers. Be sure to tailor your respective posts to target each specific audience – use Stories to allow your followers to keep up with everyday updates, and Feed to pique interest and hook new followers in. 
  2. Hashtag thoughtfully, not randomly. If you just carelessly tag the most popular hashtags, your posts will get lost in a sea of millions of other posts. Use specific hashtags to best attract your unique niche audience. You can even use third-party resources to find the best, specific hashtags for you: try Hashtagify or Hashtag Expert.
  3. Strategically like other posts in your specific hashtags. This way, you’ll grab the attention of people interested in the same niche. You can even follow the users posting in your hashtags to show you’re really interested.
  4. Add emojis to boost interaction. According to Quintly, emojis lead to 47.7% more interactions on Instagram. But don’t overuse them! Try to limit your emoji usage to just one or two per post, otherwise, it could get annoying.
  5. Make sure you tag your location for both Story and Feed posts! According to Simply Measured, location-tagged posts lead to 79% higher engagement
  6. Save your own posts to collections to beat algorithms. Saving posts signal importance/relevance, so your posts will seem more important to Instagram’s algorithms and prioritized on your followers’ feeds.
  7. Share your own important posts to your Story. But only a few important ones that you want to prioritize, otherwise your followers will expect to only see your posts on stories! You can strategically tease your post in your Story without showing the full post to lead your followers to the actual post.
  8. Increase caption readability. No one really wants to read a long, blog-length post on Instagram. Use plenty of line breaks if you have more than a few sentences of information to share, so your followers don’t get overwhelmed by walls of text.
  9. Use custom fonts on your Story to make them stand out! Everyone has access to Modern, Neon, Typewriter, and Strong, but using other fonts will help your stories stand out from the crowd. Try Typorama or Font Candy.
  10. Get creative with your Story. Try coordinating font colors to colors of your image and using stickers and GIFs!
  11. Beat the 30-hashtag limit. To really reach as many people as possible, you can tag 30 in the caption, and 30 more in the comments.

 

With these tips, Instagram has the potential to help your business reach unprecedented new heights of follower engagement. Have these tips worked for your business? Let us know!

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