Instagram Tutorial: How to Increase Brand Engagement

Discover tips for high Instagram engagement and grow your brand online, with expert advice for navigating likes, shares, and creating scroll-stopping captions

Whether you've got one or 100,000 followers, an important part of growing your brand on Instagram is building up an engaged community. Encouraging followers to interact with your brand can help you build trust and reach wider audiences.

Vix Meldrew (@vixmeldrew) is an expert at understanding how the right content on Instagram can boost brand awareness and sales for businesses. As the founder of Grow and Glow—a digital community and education platform to help online business owners create stand-out content—she’s worked with big-name brands such as Microsoft, Paypal, and Pinterest.

Instagram’s ecosystem may be ever-evolving, but here to help you navigate the changes, in this Instagram tutorial Vix shares some of her top tips to make your page stand out from the competition. Watch the video below and read on for more.

1. Likes

Are Instagram likes as important as they once were? This answer isn’t so black and white. As you don’t always get to see the number of likes on people’s Instagram accounts anymore, people are judging content on likes less and less.

However, you do still need an influx of likes for the Instagram algorithm to recognize you as a user worth catching the algorithm wave, so encouraging likes is still something worth doing. Vix says this means creating scroll-stopping content to make followers stop and like is a must.

2. Captions for comments

You can also catch the Instagram algorithm by increasing the level of engagement on your Instagram posts. This means thinking about your Instagram caption carefully before posting them so that people engage and comment back.

Vix says that, as a rule, captions need to tell a story, or offer advice to keep the conversation going from your followers, rather than followers simply leaving an emoji or like. This can be done through a hard call to action, which could be a strong statement and a question to see if your followers agree or disagree, or a soft call to action, which could be a statement, fact, observation or an open-ended question.

3. The value of a share

Shares help you gain followers. Vix’s biggest tip for this is to keep in mind that on Instagram, people save content for themselves, but they share content for their followers.

She explains that people often share valuable content that sticks in their mind, so if you make this sort of content, you’re more likely to see your content shared to new followers—who are then more likely to engage with your page and become new followers.

Did you enjoy this tutorial? If you’d like to learn more about discovering your niche and creating engaging content, check out Vix's course Building a Personal Brand on Instagram.

Discover more top social media marketing tips

To learn how to boost your brand presence online, explore all of Domestika’s online social media courses, and read on for more resources to improve your digital marketing strategy.

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- Learn how to showcase your professional creative brand with these free photography, video, and marketing tutorials for Instagram.

- Discover simple and effective methods to grow your business online in this online digital marketing course by business and marketing coach, Alice Benham.