Best Instagram Practices for 2021
Your engagement has decreased lately?
Well, you’re not alone. After Instagram recently underwent some major algorithm changes, which had users pleading for the chronological feed to return, creating engagement suddenly wasn’t only about the size of your following.
In this blog post, we share some of the best practices to manage and boost your Instagram account, even with the ultra-smart algorithm in place!
Your Feed In 2021
Instagram states there are a few key factors the algorithm uses when pushing feed content, these are:
Interest
Recency
Relationship
Frequency
Following
Usage
What does this mean for you?
Knowing your audience will help create true interest around your content.
Spend as much on the app as it will increase your chances of being noticed and boost overall engagement.
Interacting with other users/content will, subsequently, increase activity on your page and help form relationships.
Be consistent, try to post a minimum every 2 days.
We have found that one of the most important factors is, WHEN you are posting content to your feed. Different brand categories can have different “high activity windows” for optimal engagement, Later.com explains the best times to post in 2021.
Your Stories In 2021
Posting Stories frequently is the best way to keep your brand at the forefront of a users mind, as long as your followers are experiencing your stories your content will be pushed to them as that relationship builds. Using stickers is a great way to get your followers involved in your content and by evaluating your number of Sticker Taps, you can determine how engaging your content is.
Useful Tip: Sharing your Feed content to your Stories is another great way to ensure your posts are being seen by your followers.
Your Reels In 2021
Only the biggest successes for Instagram in 2020, the Reels feature allows users to create and share 15-30 second video clips alongside music. As a brand, this is a great tool to engage with different audiences to showcase your product/service or some sneaky BTS. Now, we are yet to be informed on how the algorithm works, but we can suspect it to be similar to that of TikTok. Your Reels explore page is likely to be influenced by who you follow, your location and viral content. With that being said, try using viral/trend music for your Reels to create interest.
Useful Tip: Share your Reels to your Stories and Feed to give your followers a teaser & to expand the reach!
Managing Your IG Account
A great start would be to create an account for a scheduling app (our clients use Later & Buffer). Once you’ve done that research some hashtags that relate to your brand/service to put in your captions, try to have a balance between popular and niche. More on how to you hashtags on this blog post. Now, what we recommend is putting some time to plan and create ±15 high quality Feed Posts for the month ahead with captions. This will mean that all your IG content is ready in advance to put straight onto your scheduling platform, whilst creating a more aesthetic feed for your brand image. Scheduling content is a real time saver and will allow you to stay consistent as a brand.
Now you can go ahead and engage with your users. Half an hour to an hour before you post, you should engage with your followers and comment under their posts, but only comment if you have something authentic to say and if you actually like their post. Avoid leaving just emojis and write at least four word comments. This way, Instagram will think that you and the person whose posts you are commenting under are 'friends' and have a strong relationship, and will put your content in front of them.
The first hour after uploading a post is the most crucial.
Instagram will first show your post to your 'advocates' - the people who engage with your content the most (give you the most likes and comments).
If your biggest fans react well to your content, Instagram will push it further and further and show your post to even more people. It might even put your post on the explore page.
Share any post that you put on your grid on your story straight away so it increases the first hour engagement.
Jenna Mitchell