Are you new to Instagram for your business, or not getting the reaction you were hoping for? Engagement is important – actually, no, it’s crucial, otherwise, you are wasting hours of your time for nothing! How many positive reactions your posts generate, how many shares, likes, clicks, and comments you receive dictates how many people see your post. There are over 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million daily active users on Instagram. So, the question is, when, and what to post on Instagram to get the best reactions?

Here is some useful info from the Delivered Social team on what to post on Instagram for the best reactions:

Location, location, location

Firstly, did you know that posts with locations get 79% more engagement? Location tagging is an excellent engagement building tool and helps you put your business on the map – literally! It can improve your reach, aid geotagging and ensures that your post is in the feed when users browse to look at a certain location on Instagram.

Follow the 80/20 rule

The 80/20 rule is a guide on how much content should be entertaining and inspiring your audience (80%) versus selling to your audience (20%). Hard selling will turn your audience off!

What to post on Instagram: image is always important

Use a high-quality image. Be consistent, use the same filters each time. Be creative with light, composition, and colours.

Make sure your images are the content your followers are interested in

Use your Insta Insights

When thinking about what to post on Instagram, remember some key questions. Who is your audience, your customer ‘Avatar’? Where do they live? How old are they? Male/female? What time of the day are they engaging? These analytics are available with a business Instagram profile, accessible via the insights tab. This can help you see how your posts are performing, tap into the correct audience for your business, improve post engagement, impressions and reach.

Schedule your posts

Being consistent with your posts is essential and there are tools to help you do this, such as Hootsuite. It means you aren’t chained to your phone or laptop, freeing up your time. Test different times see what gains most reactions – Instagram Insights can help you with this. Major brands post on average 1.5 times per day, so this is a good guideline to follow – but remember quality is better than quantity!

Video always works when wondering what to post on Instagram

Video posts receive 2.1 x more comments than image posts on average and have the highest overall engagement rate (38% higher than image posts). Why not try IGTV? This is the new Instagram video app, which allows longer videos.

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Hashtags

When choosing what to post on Instagram, don’t forget the hashtags! Using hashtags does not increase the engagement rate for posts, but does make it more discoverable – apparently 11 is the magic number to use. Why not try best-hashtags.com, or hashtagsforlikes.co to guide and inspire you or look at the hashtags your competitors are using?

Stories

Stories started out as a simple add-on feature, but are now a crucial feature on Instagram. 46% of all content on Instagram is coming from Stories. So perhaps consider stories not posts. Give your audience a glimpse behind the scenes of your business. Add sound on stories, use stickers and for more interaction include polls, questions and countdown features.

Inject some humour

Finally, sometimes life is too serious and we all like a bit of lighthearted humour in our hectic, stressful lives. Instagram is a place where humour will go down well with your audience, so why not add some funny videos or photos?

You may also be interested in this too for ideas on ideas to refresh your Instagram approach……..…..11 Content Ideas To Refresh Your Instagram Approach!