7 Easy to Implement Ideas for Engaging on Social Media

There’s one word that strikes fear into any content creator on social media – algorithm.

It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to get your social media posts seen by an audience. How are you supposed to get your content in front of more people without paying for ads? The answer - it all comes down to your engagement rate.

Good engagement rates help you to beat the algorithm, boosting your followers and giving your account more success. So, how exactly can you start increasing your social media engagement?

There are many effective ways to enhance your engagement rates, especially on Instagram. Here, we reveal our top 7 easy to implement ideas for engaging on social media.

1. Ask Questions and Use Q&A Boxes

The question and answer box feature on Instagram Stories is a great way to encourage your followers to engage with you. There are many ways you can use this feature to interact with people. One way to interact with your followers is to make a fun quiz, determining how well your followers know you. For example, you can ask “what’s my favorite day of the week’ or “how long have I been using Instagram’.

You can also encourage your followers to ask you their most burning questions to answer. You can then share your response to stories for your entire audience to view:

There are also multiple Instagram challenges that you can get involved in, such as asking your audience to submit a date and choosing a photo from your camera roll to post:

A few alternative suggestions for using your question and answer box on Instagram include:

• Asking for content ideas or feedback - not only does this help you engage with your audience, it also helps you to build a library of content for your Instagram account.
• Ask your audience for recommendations for a new book, recipe, skincare item, music album etc.
• Make a multi-optional poll - the poll feature only allows you to give two answers while using the question and answer box enables you to give multiple answers for your audience to choose from.
• Do a question and answer session on a particular subject - ask your audience for questions on a particular topic that you know there is interest in. This could be a trending topic related to your account theme. For instance, seasonal fashion items.
• Ask me anything - open up your questions to anything that your followers want to ask you. Questions are confidential so this gives you the opportunity to answer a wide range of queries from your audience.

2. Make Use of Story Features

Stories have an abundance of features to help you engage with your audience. Ideally, you should be using story features at least once per week as they will significantly increase your engagement. Here are a few story features to help engage your followers.

The swipe up feature

If you have at least 10,000 followers, you can make use of the swipe up feature. This is an effective way to encourage your audience to take action, whether you want to promote your latest blog post or share a trending news story.

Promote your latest feed post

The pesky Instagram algorithm means that many of your followers may miss your latest feed post. A good way to get around this is to notify your followers via Instagram Stories. By blurring your post image out on Stories and using a sticker or hashtag sticker, you can encourage your followers to check out your new post:

Use polls

The poll feature is a powerful way to engage with your followers. You can create traditional polls which boast a question followed by two responses or you can use an emoji slider to create more response options. This idea from wedding blog, The Knot, showcases how you can easily incorporate this into your Story feed:

3. Save and Highlight Your Best Stories

Stories only show on your account for 24 hours. Save your very best Story content by adding them to your highlights. This allows your future followers to view your best content, as well as helping them to engage with your account.

Your highlights are posted to the top of your feed:

To save content to your highlights, open the story you wish to save, tap highlight, and add to a current highlight or save it to a new one. You can organize your stories into highlight themes or categories, giving them covers to help users find the stories they are interested in.

4. Make Use of Live Videos for Real-Time Engagement

Live video content is effective for allowing you to connect with your audience in real time. You can use live video to conduct a question and answer session, make an announcement, conduct free training, share a special event, interview an expert or do a behind the scenes look at your life/work.

You can also do a joint live video with another Instagram user to get in front of each other’s audience. Remember to let your followers know in advance of your live video plans as this will boost the number of viewers for your live video session.

5. Reply to Comments and Like Your Audience’s Content

One of the easiest ways to engage with your audience is to reply to their comments on your posts. It shows your followers that you’ve read and responded to their comments, making them more likely to leave comments in the future.

You should also like your audience's content, as well as following hashtags within your niche and interacting with other users' content. This helps you to attract new users to your account, especially if you’re looking to collaborate with brands.

6. Use Instagram Reels

Instagram Reels are a way to create and share short videos on the platform. As one of Instagram’s newest features, they’re highly favored by the algorithm, helping you to engage with your audience and get seen by other users.

Videos on Reels are 15 to 30 seconds long, accompanied with music. There are many ideas for the types of videos you can create. Essentially, you want to consider your niche and the topics that are popular with your current audience.

Here are a few Instagram Reels ideas you can implement:

• Tutorials
• Behind the scenes look
• Before and after
• How to video
• Introduce yourself
• Morning routine
• Fashion looks
• Product reviews
• Food recipe
• Challenge
• Keep fit

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7. Work with Brands

Working with brands you already use and adore is a surefire way for your Instagram to gain more engagement and followers.

With Insense, you get to join a growing community of content creators who collaborate with some of the top leading brands. Furthermore, you can discover collaboration opportunities to grow your account and earn money.

Our community enables you to find brands that match your lifestyle. Plus, you can work on a wide range of creative content, from product reviews to unboxing videos and imagery.

Begin using our easy ideas for engaging on social media

Now you’re aware of the best ways to increase your engagement rates on social media, you can start to implement these easy ideas. If you want further inspiration for engaging with your followers and growing your audience, get ideas from our community of creators.