Is organic engagement on Instagram still worth your time?
You’re immediately searching for the “YES” or “NO” answer, right? With new platforms popping up, gaining popularity (ahem, TikTok) you might be wondering if dedicating your time to organic engagement on Instagram is worth it.
The answer: 100%, YES — but you need a solid strategy behind it.
Whether you’re in the beginning stages of building your B2C business, or you’re just wondering if the algorithm changes have made it impossible to build a community, engagement on Instagram is still worth your time investment. If you don’t engage, otherwise known as “post and ghost”, your followers will take notice. quit engaging with your content and that means less eyes on your new product, service, offer etc.
But, how do you engage with your community effectively without going down the mindless scroll rabbit hole? (bet you didn’t know we were lyrical geniuses too, huh?)
Set Your Intentions & Set A Time Limit
We recommend rotating through different forms of engagement throughout the week (yes, you’ll be doing this daily). For example: On Monday you could send DMs to 10 different people who’ve engaged with your posts heavily in the past two weeks. On Tuesday you could dive into your locational hashtags and leave thoughtful comments on 20 new accounts that don’t follow you.
Each of the engagements we mentioned above fall into the category of “outreach” and don’t count towards responding to comments/dms that you currently already receive on your posts. You should be responding to those as quickly as possible.
Each day (M-F, respectively) when you sit down to engage with your community, set a time limit. We recommend setting aside at least 15-20 minutes to engage on behalf of your business. Keep in mind that this isn’t about leaving comments on your friend’s birthday photo — this is about being an active member in the community your trying to build around your brand.
Should you use one of the 1234783 companies that advertise automatic engagement?
That’s a HARD no, and yes they’re still out there — even though Instagram is doing a great job at cracking down.
None of these services comply with Instagram’s terms of service or speak their API love language. Plus, you don’t want to trust a bot to leave a “thoughtful” comment, do you?
Now that we’ve covered how our Engagement Specialists handle client accounts, we’re going to share 5 ways we perform active outreach on behalf of our clients (2 we previously mentioned above):
Send DMs to 10 different people who’ve engaged with your posts heavily in the past two weeks.
Dive into your locational hashtags and leave thoughtful comments/questions on 20 new accounts that don’t follow you.
Search hashtags that your ideal client/customer will be using (ps: these hashtags could have absolutely nothing to do with your business) and engage with their content.
Reply to Stories of the current people you follow. Engagement isn’t limited to in-feed posts anymore.
Share user-generated content on your feed OR in your stories, and creating a conversation around that image/graphic/video.
Are there any topics you’d like to see Insight Social cover in future blog posts? Let us know in the comments of this blog post!
Interested in working with Insight Social?
Social Media is A LOT. Like, A LOT, a lot. Between keeping up with daily posting, creating original + engaging content, interacting consistently with your audience, running targeted Instagram + Facebook ads, responding to DMs, managing influencer relationships, and all the other things - it can be a full-time job keeping up with it all. Not to mention that by the time you’ve done your daily marketing tasks, you’ve still gotta run your business and keep up with the hundreds of operations happening with that.
That’s where Insight Social comes in. With over 25+ years of combined experience in social media management, content creation, and influencer marketing - you can rest assured that outsourcing your social media marketing to us will help your business grow like never before. You’ll finally be able to enjoy the freedom of working on your business, and not in it.
We get it, letting go of something as important as social media can be a little scary - that’s why we offer a free 20-minute discovery call to make sure that we’re a good fit. We will go over everything we can (and can’t) do, answer any questions, and give you some “insight” as to what action steps we can take to .help you meet (and exceed) your goals.
Click here to schedule your free 20-minute discovery call today!