Reach is not great on social media and seems to worsen weekly. However, you can always make improvements.
Beyond just having organic posts, you should also be running paid ads from time to time or consistently, depending on your business.
Is it time you brushed up on your skills or outsourced to a professional so you can make your business search friendly?
An optimised strategy
It should go without saying that you want as many eyes as possible on your content and your business. You want your content to appear on Instagram in as many places as possible, such as suggested content and the explore pages.
To improve your chance of being discovered, your need to optimise your posts. You need to work on providing what the algorithm is looking for.
Instagram – Determines what the post is about and decides who may find it interesting within their algorithm.
Here are some tips to increase your discoverability and have an optimised strategy.
Descriptions: Ensure your descriptions include relevant key terms about your business. The search feature allows search via keywords, hashtags, and accounts now.
Your profile: Ensure that it is also optimised with key terms people are looking for when they want to find your business.
Hashtags: You can still use up to 30 Hashtags on each post or story. Make sure you add them under your description and not in the comments. Best practice has changed.
Alt text: You may have noticed in the advanced settings that you can add alt text to your post. Currently, Instagram will auto-generate this for people who need to hear descriptions as they cannot see or read them. So rather than letting Instagram auto-generate, you can write it yourself.
Consistency: Arguably, the most important of all the tips is consistency. The more you consistently share what you offer, the more opportunity Instagram’s algorithm has to learn who you are and what you offer. Instagram can recommend you more often to others on Instagram who they feel would be interested in your business.
Are you worried about engagement?
Did you know that statistically, engagement is INCREDIBLY low, so you may need to lower your expectations too? As you can see below, these are the average engagement rates for posts published by business accounts.
Statistics:
The Instagram explore page is viewed by 200million accounts each day
200 million users visit at least one business profile daily
70% of shopping enthusiasts turn to Instagram for product discovery
Wednesday and Thursday are the busiest days for engagement. However, all weekdays are more active than the weekends. With users averaging around 30 minutes each day.
Fun Fact: Pizza is the most Instagrammed food, followed by sushi.
So what are you going to do to improve your results on Instagram?
If you would like to outsource your social media marketing, contact Kelly at My Sassy Business.
