Whether you’re just starting off on Instagram or you’re a seasoned professional, getting new tricks up your sleeve can both spice up your posts and save your time.
Building up an audience is crucial to growing your business on Instagram, and constantly engaging your audience with various Instagram hacks is a skill that you can acquire at any time. Inspiring your audience, establishing trust, and introducing your brand can significantly prompt success in engaging your audience.
But how do you generate more engagement with your audience on Instagram, especially if you don’t have a lot of extra time? That’s where we can help with some smart Instagram content marketing strategies.
Instagram content encompasses the two categories of textual and visual content. Therefore, you need to work with high-resolution images, eye-catching designs, informative infographics, and thought-provoking yet interesting captions and tests for your feed, stories, and reels.
When all of these are piled into your content marketing basket, you can put an attractive and engaging feed on display, and these Instagram hacks will help you get there more quickly and easily.
Instagram Feed captions
Initially, we will focus on how to create great Instagram captions. As modernists, we look for simplicity and minimalism because there are too many things to concentrate on during our daily lives.
In other words, we are already suffering from a shortage of time that we prefer some peace of mind while doing leisure activities such as checking Instagram. Here are three tips to have a great caption to boost your Instagram engagement:
Inserting empty rows
Are you planning to write a long caption for your post? Well, you can; but you should keep some tips in mind.
First, only 125 characters of your maximum 2,200 caption characters are displayed. If your audience finds it attractive or informative enough, they will tap on ‘More’ to keep on reading. Hence, as a copywriter or Instagram content writer, you should capture the attention of your first 125 characters.
Secondly, when writing a long caption, give some space to your caption readers. Do not write a lot of sentences without inserting empty rows. Too much text without empty rows is extremely boring to the eye no matter how interesting the words are. Keep the readability of your caption high by adding some empty rows.
When you need to add a line break, paste these invisible spaces in the next line. The spaces are inside the brackets.
[⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀]
Take a look at this example by @fitness_recipes and pay attention to the rows:
Adding special characters
Special characters can be emojis or even some well-placed punctuation. Again, you take one step closer to safeguard your text from being neglected by using special characters.
In addition, it helps you to personalize your brand and create higher engagement and better interactions from your audience.
According to a Quintly study, captions with special characters such as emojis get a higher engagement rate in comparison with the ones that don’t have them.
Regarding the content you are sharing, you can use a wide variety of emojis relevant to the main concept of your text. On the other hand, unrelated emojis to your text results in a poor response from your audience because they make them confused.
Take a look at this example by @makeupbymario:
Using different fonts
Whether you are writing a short or a long caption, using different fonts can be an attention-seeking trick for your posts. Add variety to your text by using bold, italics, or stylized fonts.
This is especially useful when you want to draw attention to a specific word or phrase in your caption. For instance, if you want to make a call for a new giveaway, you can use a different font to highlight the Free Giveaway. Or, you can invite your followers to attend your events. While Instagram unveiled new fonts for Stories in 2020, you still need a tool for unique fonts in captions, so try boldtext.io or igfonts.io.
Here is an example of using a different font in the caption, plus utilizing empty rows, from @Emplifi:
Instagram Stories
As you already know, Instagram can also elevate your business and sales with its stories feature. Though they’re generally available for only 24 hours, you can save them as highlights and keep them accessible forever.
Each highlight can include up to 100 stories and you can create a beautiful highlight cover and add visual influence to your Instagram feed.
Debuting in 2016, Instagram Stories have become increasingly popular with the platform’s users. In fact, according to Socialbakers data (now Emplifi), brands post more stories than regular feed posts.
So, not using Instagram stories for promoting your business means you’re simply missing out, and hacks that can take your stories to the next level are easy to implement. You just need to try its many features such as stickers, hashtags, locations, polls, countdowns, etc. In addition, you can use other Instagram features such as Live or IGTV using Instagram IGTV strategies.
Nevertheless, key things about Instagram stories hacks should be met. For instance, you should create a content schedule for your stories and keep up with it regularly so that your followers expect you at a specific time(s) of the day. This is remarkably good for keeping them engaged with you.
A number of Instagram stories apps can make story posting and design easier for you. Remember to check them and choose the best based on your needs.
Instagram Reels and Guides
Two new Instagram features became widely available for users in 2020: Reels and Guides.
Reels are the platform’s answer to TikTok – similar to how Stories were its answer to Snapchat. The feature became available in the US and 50 other countries in August, and many brands immediately started experimenting with the new tool. It’s still too early to say how Reels is fairing against TikTok, but it’s clear that the platform will continue to support it so it’s important to know how to use Instagram Reels.
On the other hand, the Guides feature was originally available only to creators who were focused on health and well-being. Since then it’s become more widely available in English for all users in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, with further expansion on the way.
Instagram Guides are a way to promote specific posts around a theme or topic, and for a brand, this is a great way to highlight specific product releases or to curate its favorite posts. For influencers, the possibilities are nearly endless with things like top places to visit, best croissants in the city, or favorite products you just have to try.
Content inspiration
In addition to Instagram follower apps, you can use other ways to increase your number of followers on Instagram. One way is to test different types of content to see what your audience responds to.
Of course, creating engaging content for your Instagram account needs time, energy, and endeavor. You also need a good source of images and free templates. However, the essential part of any content marketing strategy is to have worthwhile ideas.
Finding great royalty-free images
Do not have a rich source for photos? Fed up with copyright limitations? Well, there are several solutions.
One of the most popular is Unsplash, a professional bank of free photos that can be used without violating any copyright rules. All you need to do is to search the website and search your keyword for which you want a photo. The result will be loads of high-resolution free photos.
Similar sites include Pixabay and Pexels. If you’re looking for something more off-the-wall, Gratisography is the place to go for unique, free images.
The takeaway
By implementing these tips and hacks into your Instagram content, you can easily boost your engagement while showing more of a brand personality on the platform. Not all of these will be the right option for your brand or audience, so it’s important to test them out and follow the results – not your gut – in order to cultivate the best relationship with your audience.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
