Happy May.
By now I’m sure you are aware of what a powerful tool social media can be when its potential is maximised, but did you know Instagram releases yearly reports on how to generate the best engagement based on over 100 million posts.
This month I’m going to break down this report and tell you what this information means for you and your business.
The Instagram Report
The Instagram Engagement Report report breaks down 9 different categories of engagement but I’ve broken down the factors I find most important into just 3 easy and quick to understand sections.
Engagement
Video content is the most engaging format of content, based on likes and comments, followed by carousel posts, and Image posts come in last place, however, it's a tight race.
Tagging and Mentioning other accounts is also important and the more accounts you tag, the higher your engagement is.
Mentioning someone in your post, notifies that person and they might check out your post.
Tagging someone in a post is done as a ‘tag’ on the actual post not in the caption, they’ll be notified but the post will also appear in the ‘tagged’ section in their profile so unless they remove it, your post can be seen by all their audience too.
Captions
The length of your caption does not matter too much, what does matter, is that you include one. But use the caption as an opportunity to get your brand voice out there, tell a story and be personal with your captions. 20 characters seems to be the optimum but not by much, a longer caption still performs almost just as well and if it gets a story, your personality or brand voice across then you may see better results anyway. It’s also interesting to note that including an emoji in your caption boosts your engagement, you don’t need to go emoji crazy as one seems to be enough but it does make a difference.
Hashtags are vital and boost a posts performance significantly. The most popular hashtags are love and photography. Instagram always was and still is image based so these make sense. Globally the more hashtags the better, 11 or more seems to be best but you can include up to 30, just make sure the hashtags you include are relevant to your post and your target audience, have a mixture of broad and niche hashtags but the best performing hashtags are actually from niche sectors so make sure to be creative and specific with your hashtags.
Time
Evenings are the best time to post, between 6pm and 9pm is optimum. 5pm is the best for the UK possibly because thats when most people finish work? however engagement rates stay high until midnight, followed by 2am, followed by 1pm, possibly a lunch break social media scroll?
It sounds obvious but can often be forgotten, remember to post at the optimum time for your target audience, if you are not targeting people in the same time zone as you, be aware you may be posting in the morning for you but it is evening, optimum posting time, for them.
Next Month I’ll be talking you through my top mobile editing apps for images and videos.
Get in touch by emailing me at contact@mollymcguinness.co.uk.
I look forward to hearing from you as working with small businesses is my passion.
If you have any suggestions for future blog posts or need any quick advice, please feel free to contact me with your suggestions or questions.
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