How to Improve Customer Engagement on Instagram

Leverage creative content, strategic post planning, and Instagram’s analytical tools to increase audience engagement.

Creating a strategy for your business Instagram account

If you want to develop your business on Instagram through social media marketing, a planning strategy can increase user engagement, grow your followers, and connect you with customers. However, successful Instagram use requires more than just finding the right day of the week to post images. Success depends on optimizing your content, posting frequency, and how you use analytical tools.

Follow these steps to create workflows and an Instagram planning strategy that will increase your audience engagement and help you grow your business.

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Step 1: Determine how often you want to post on Instagram

When structuring a social media planning strategy, it’s important to balance quality and quantity. In the world of Instagram content, quality always trumps quantity. If you’re too ambitious and try to create a post every workday, the overall value of your content could drop. However, if you focus only on quality, you might not post enough content.

Decide how much content you want to create

The resources you have available determine the amount of quality content you can realistically create. You may have lots of creative content ideas, but you need a budget and time to create it, publish it, respond to comments, and analyze metrics.

There are three main Instagram content channels to consider: Instagram post feeds, Instagram Stories, and IGTV. The type of content you create will depend on your business type and the goals you want to achieve on Instagram. If your business is an online store, you’ll likely create original content including product photos and lifestyle shots. If your time or budget is limited, consider sharing posts or images created by your fans. Determine the best day and plan to post at least once a week to ensure fresh content appears in your users’ feeds.

Come up with content for Instagram posts

Once you’ve set the time and budget parameters for your Instagram strategy, start brainstorming content to publish.

Plan to create diverse content: A balanced mix of photos, videos, collages, or GIFs will generate greater interest from your target audience. If you rely too heavily on one type of post, you risk losing Instagram followers. Tools like Adobe Spark can help you quickly create eye-catching graphics and videos for your audience.
Create content for each Instagram channel separately: Content you post in Instagram Stories should differ from your regular Instagram posts.
Think about topics you could cover as part of regular series: Series like “Motivation Monday” can focus on your company mission or your goals – or your audience’s goals – and can add a timely element to your social media channels.

Step 2: Select the best time to post

Once you’ve clarified how much time you can dedicate to creating Instagram content, you can start exploring when is the optimal time to post it. Finding the right time to post for your target audience is the best thing a company can do to increase interest in its content. The Instagram algorithm favors new content in user feeds, so if you post new content when most of your audience is online, your chances of appearing in their feeds increase. Posting at peak times increases your reach and can lead to more likes.

Explore Your Specific Instagram Audience

Because each account has a unique audience across different time zones, the ideal time to publish posts will vary for individual businesses. Knowing your followers is key to success. Perhaps they browse Instagram during their morning coffee, during a lunch break, or throughout the work day. If you have a business account, you can use Instagram Insights, Instagram’s native analytics platform. This platform provides data on your followers’ behavior and actions. You can find out their location, age, and when they are active online. Based on this knowledge, you can easily create a content calendar and schedule posts at specific times.

Experiment with Different Post Publishing Times

If you don’t see immediate success, try using Instagram’s scheduling tool to test different posting times and monitor whether you make progress. If posting early in the morning doesn’t work well, try other peak times. After a few weeks of posting, check whether timing significantly affected your engagement rate. You may find that certain types of posts perform better at different times.

Step 3: Create and Schedule Your Instagram Posts

Make full use of the knowledge you’ve gained about your audience and create and schedule your content in advance. Planning ahead ensures you’ll have quality content ready at the best time to publish, and gives you room to create creative and thoughtful posts.

Create an Instagram Aesthetic

When creating and planning content for Instagram, it’s important to look at your post plan as a grid, not as individual posts. When your followers click on your profile, they’ll see your content in columns and rows, so don’t forget to consider the overall look and impression you want to make. All of your company’s content should work together. One way to ensure that all team members use the same color palettes and style guides is to use Adobe Creative Cloud for Teams. Creative Cloud libraries allow your team to share resources, make collaboration easier, and help ensure your brand maintains a consistent style.

Write Better Instagram Captions

The key to a great Instagram caption is trying to inspire your followers to take a specific action. Whether you want them to buy your product or click a link in your bio, a creative and clear caption can help you achieve that goal and improve customer engagement. Coming up with interesting captions can be difficult, especially if you’re writing them in a rush. Instead, create all the captions for a given week at once, when you’re in a creative mood.

Optimize Your Instagram Posts by Adding Hashtags

Hashtags are an effective way to increase the reach of your Instagram posts, but remember to use them strategically. Copying and pasting the same huge list of hashtags at the end of every caption is not a good idea. Remember: quality beats quantity. Do research and find out what hashtags your competitors and audience use. Also consider creating your own fun branded hashtags. General, widely-used hashtags can make it easier to find your content, while unique hashtags can attract people’s attention.

Step 4: Analyze Metrics and Improve Engagement

Your Instagram content planning strategy will evolve over time. You may need to regularly change tactics or creative styles to keep your content fresh, but every adjustment should be strategic and based on facts and data. Regularly check Instagram’s analytics tools and create a monthly report to help you track your progress over time. By using regular reports, you can more easily see what’s working on your company’s page and confidently improve your strategy going forward.

Thanks to creative social media content, strategic post planning, and structured overviews, interest in your company on Instagram will certainly increase. However, don’t let up in your efforts. Remember that your Instagram strategy is just one part of a comprehensive marketing effort. Support your business by creating a complete content marketing strategy that will guide content creation for all your digital channels.

Creating outstanding social media content requires creativity and the right tools. Consider using Creative Cloud for Teams – get a membership through which your team will have access to all the applications you need to quickly create engaging animated GIFs, social media content, and amazing photographs.