Instagram virality can be a natural by-product for marketers, who combine an understanding of algorithmic desires with devotion to the customer's content experience.
Instagram crawls content to determine popularity, value, and relevant posts for an individual or audience segment. Thus, the algorithm controls what is visible to Instagram users.
With Instagram's degree of control, what is a content marketer supposed to do? Turns out you can make a big difference once I've learned to grow New Earth Knowledge project to 60,000 followers in just over two years.
@Instagram controls its algorithm, but that doesn't mean @mjbecker_via @CMIContent @corpv said: powerless content marketers. Click to Tweet It consists of two things: enticing your followers to take action and optimizing your content for discovery.
Inspire the desired behavior of your followers
I identified a five S approach to solving what the Instagram algorithm rewards:
- Speed – the number of actions immediately after publishing
The massive amount of likes, comments, and shares within the first hour or two of a post appearing online shows the algorithm's value and popularity. Encourage your audience to react with a story announcement your . Announce your scheduled post before it goes live. Set expectations to drive a view and response. Consistency can be your best friend here.
- Story shares – how many people recommend your content on their feed
There are a few things you can do to increase story shares and submissions. 1. Included call to action Ask others to share in the comments. 2. Ask other accounts targeting your audience, especially those with at least 50,000 followers, to share your posts to their stories for 24 hours and topics. offer to do the same for them.
- Send – how many people send your post to friends
Ask a simple question. Just write something like this: “Send this message to the person who really needs to hear it.”
- Save – how many people hit the ribbon to archive your posts in their gallery
There's no shortcut to getting people to save your posts other than creating informative and/or entertaining content that motivates viewers to submit your posts to their saved folders so they can can easily return.
- Interactive social – comment, reply and like
Immediately after posting, add a comment that includes information you didn't share in the caption. Make sure you reply to any remaining comments on your post. This simple task doubles your total comment count. You can also ask others to tag friends in comments (for example, “tag the most important person in your life) and pin the most popular comment to the top.
I don't have an official source or citation for this conclusion, but my experience leads me to think it's likely true: Algorithms like to show a lot of emotion in post comments. Although you don't want to instigate or become aggressive, you can be witty, curious, and provocative.
Instagram revolves around the 5S: speed, sharing, sending, saving and social interaction, said @mjbecker_via @CMIContent @corpv. Click to Tweet To understand how a post is performing, tap “view insights” below an existing post. The revealed metrics show what the algorithm is designed to prioritize – likes, comments, shares, and cumulative engagement.
While the five-S approach is helpful, it's not all you can do. AI-driven algorithms monitor the actions users take on a post. For example:
- Being human enlarge on your post and on a specific area of the image?
- Are people Screenshots of the post?
- How long Are individuals on your posts?
- Is it human? pause in stream to see your post?
- As a user expand comment to read the topic?
- Are users clicking to see your profile from your stream of posts, stories or comments you've made elsewhere?
- Are users clicking “others” to view? who else liked post?
You can strategize with your content by designing content with these not-so-popular goals in mind. For example, people like to zoom in on posts that include people (namely influencers or celebrities) and places (the nicer the better).
Strategically design your @Instagram content so people zoom in, take screenshots, view profiles and more, say @mjbecker_via @CMIContent @corpv. Click to Tweet To encourage longer time spent, create experiences instead of just posting photos . indicates a big reveal at the end, prompting the user to keep watching. Longer footnotes can also be useful for this.
While you focus on how to engage your audience to make your posts more engaging on Instagram, you can also set up your content to be structurally appealing.
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Optimize pages and posts for discovery
Instagram is more likely to elevate posts to the top of users' feeds and get stories to the top leveraging technical best practices. Here are three factors to consider:
- Use best post sizes for engagement. Posts that take up a lot of screen will work best. The ideal ratio is 1.0 80 by 1,350 pixels (4:5 ratio). The image is slightly longer vertically than horizontally and takes up the entire screen in the feed.
Square posts draw the user's eye away from your content and entice them to keep scrolling to the handle's content for better visibility.
- Time for your post to join. Statusbrew reports best time to post on instagram for engagement is 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays in your primary audience's time zone. Of course, you can spot another best time based on your audience, industry, purpose, etc. Pay attention to your engagement levels. analysis to help make your timing decisions.
- Publish with ideal frequency. Most of the major brands post at least once a day to always take care of you. While consistency is more important than how much you post, set a pacing goal of 5 times per week.
From a content discovery standpoint, posts are also best placed to be found by a wider audience using special tags and delimiters. Tactics used include:
- Use unique hashtags, emojis, and fonts. I like to use fancy text generator to stylize and create more details in my captions. Emojis add flavor, while hashtags add context and discoverability.
- Add alt text for organic search and tag others to be found by similar audiences. Include key word or two into your alt text the same way you would for blogs or web images. You can also tag relevant larger accounts in your posts. Both tactics will help expand your reach.
- Add location, CTA, purchasable ingredients, or other details. The additional relevant information in the post helps the algorithm understand who you are, where you are, who you are targeting, and what you want those people to do. All of that data increases the odds that it's promoting your post more often than people using the polling method, hoping for a big hit.
Make your own advertisement
Finally, in addition to urging followers to help amplify your Instagram content, you can do the same. Among direct promotional activities:
- Share your articles by direct message with other accounts. As soon as you post, use the send arrow to send a mass (individual) message to others likely to interact with the content.
- Cross-stimulate by sharing Facebook posts and embedding them in your blog. Post direct links to your Instagram posts in relevant Facebook groups. The embed code of a post used on a website (ideally high ranking) can also serve as a vote of confidence for Instagram.
Game 'gram
The Instagram algorithm doesn't exist to make your content stand out just because it's good. Instead, its goal is to show people they're most likely to be seduced in the moment based on their behavior throughout the day, and to keep them immersed for as long as possible in the platform.
By keeping that in mind – and actively working to address that understanding – your Instagram content stands a better chance of being discovered and growing in popularity.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
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