How to Increase Instagram Engagement

Instagram engagement is a calculation that shows what percentage of your followers interact with your content. This accounts for likes, comments, saves, or shares on a particular post in relation to your overall reach. Although it’s sometimes overwhelming to always be considering social media metrics in your marketing efforts, engagement plays a big role in building your library’s Instagram community. If you keep a few of the following tactics in mind, you’ll be sure to have more engaged followers on one of the most popular social media platforms.

Story Stickers

When creating stories for your Instagram, utilizing the different stickers options will encourage viewers of your story to interact or magnify your reach to people who might not normally follow your content. Poll stickers, emoji sliders, questions or quizzes allow story viewers to reply or weigh in on the topic you’re posting about. Polls or emoji sliders are a fun way to get people to participate without having to take the time to type their own response. Once people vote, you can share the results on your story as well. Stickers like location, mention, or hashtag will magnify your story beyond your followers because stories can be found through those sticker tags. Another great way to use stickers is with the link option. If you recently posted a blog or want to share a link to your website, although Instagram doesn’t support hyperlinks in post captions, they do via stickers. Sharing a story with a link will make it easy for viewers to tap and visit that link.

Reels

Posting videos or Reels to Instagram is a huge opportunity for growth. The Reels feature has its own tab on the home feed navigation bar and makes these videos more likely to be discovered by people who don’t follow your account. Editing Reels in the Instagram app allows you to add stickers, create fun transitions, and use trending audio to make your videos stand out, which will of course increase your engagement. 

Shareable Quotes

Instagram users love to share quotes that resonate with them to their stories, and the more inspirational or relatable they are, the higher chance they’ll be shared. Creating a quick graphic of your favorite book or author quote in Canva could be a great way to post new content that will drive engagement. Another current trend is repurposing a tweet or a thread into an Instagram post. You can simply screenshot the text or put it into a Canva template for a more stylized look.

Carousel Posts

Carousel posts are a great way to break a lot of information down into bite-sized posts or graphics. For example, if you have a long infographic, try sectioning it off into multiple 1080 x 1080 pixels graphics so followers can slide through it in a carousel. Carousel posts allow you to share up to 10 pictures, videos, and text graphics all in one post. These types of posts often surface in users’ feeds more than once, which increases the opportunity for likes, comments, and shares.

Hashtags

Hashtags are more about casting a wider net with your reach, but reach and engagement typically go hand in hand. The more people you reach, the more chances for higher engagement! Hashtags do require a bit of legwork, so we suggest you do a quick refresher on the How to Hashtag Like A Pro crash course first. Once you have a handle on which hashtags are most relevant to your library’s content, start incorporating 5-10 per post.

All of these ideas are specific to growing engagement specifically on Instagram. However, a good tip to keep in mind when sharing content on any social media platform is to create a persona for your library and try to stay true to that persona. Personable content really resonates the most with social media users and will activate them to engage. They can tell when you’re not being genuine with the content that you’re sharing and that’s why it’s important to always listen to your audience. Post at the times they’re engaging with your content, note when particular content performs better than anticipated, and try to have fun with social media. Share behind the scenes videos on your stories, do an “AMA” (“Ask Me Anything”) with some of your staff members, share memes if they’re relevant. All for the sake of engaging with your followers!