Instagram Engagement Strategies: Growing Your Audience On Instagram

1. Course Introduction: Have you recently started an Instagram page, but you're content just doesn't seem to be getting the reach or the engagement that you had hoped for. Or if you've been running on account for a while now, you audience just doesn't seem to be growing. If you answered yes to either of those questions, then this class is perfect for you. Hi guys. My name is Ethan Bridge and I am the host of the social media marketing school caucus and the guy behind the Instagram page at the marketing, even in today's Scotia, cause I'm going to be sharing with you three different engagement strategies that you can use to propel and grow your audience on Instagram. When you first start spend account on Instagram, Nobody is going to know who you are. And that means that nobody is going to just stumble across your page. The Instagram algorithm doesn't work like that. So you have to go out and seek your audience. And how do you do that? Engagement, that is why engagement is so important. And these engagement stretch teeth I'm going to teach you should be implemented. So in the first module of the course, I'm going to be talking through why in Scrum engagement is so important and how it corresponds to the Instagram algorithm. Then I'm going to talk you through my Instagram Berg journey just to prove to you the organic growth is still possible because it is, trusts me. And then I'm going to be talking you through three different engagement strategies that you can implement to grow your Instagram account. If any of that sounds interesting to you guys, I hope to see you in the next module. 2. Why Engagement Is Important: How is it going, everyone, welcome to the first module of this skill share class. Now, I first need to tell you why engagement is so important and how it corresponds with the Instagram algorithm itself. Because once you understand this, you can then cater your actions accordingly to try and work alongside the algorithm. So algorithm, it seems like a pretty complex concept. When you break it down though, it becomes pretty simple and it's quite easy to understand. So essentially what the algorithm wants to do is it wants to keep people on the platform. That's all it wants to do. When you think about it. Instagram makes money through showing ads to the users on the platform. So the longer it can keep people on the platform, the more ads it can show to those individuals scrolling through the feed, the more ads it can show, the more they can charge the advertisers. It's as simple as that. So you need to be creating content that is keeping people on the platform. And how does the Instagram algorithm know that your content is keeping people on the platform because it's getting good engagement. So this is why engagement is so important. And with your posts you have the four different engagement types. You have likes, comments, shares, saves. Now although likes and comments are these sort of things that you could, folks a phi and a lot of people think engagement groups or the best way to do it, I'm gonna say now, never ever use an engagement group. Never if your aim one, get out of it right away is a huge red flag to the Instagram algorithm. It can damage your page for the foreseeable future, if not for ever. So, get out of one right away. The algorithm is clever enough to notice these force engagement through likes and comments from these individuals and it will flag them. They are people that comment on a lot of different pages and it's normally just great post or fire emoji thumbs up. And the algorithm knows this. It's not hard to spot if your comments section is just filled with engagement types, just like this, then it's going to be flagged and your content is going to just be stopped from being pushed to a wider audience. So if you think an engagement group is a good idea to increase engagement, it isn't. I'm just gonna put that out there now is not good at o and it is going to harm your account for ever centrally. So never use an engagement group. And now the other two Engagement types or shares and saves. Now arguably the most important engagement type are saves. And let me explain a little bit why. Saves. Show the people want to come back and revisit your content. Someone has already taken the time to consume your content. So if they save it, then it shows the algorithm, right? They've already spent time consuming it, but they want to come back and consume it again at a later date. That shows that they are doubling their time using the platform just by consuming your piece of content, which then cycles back around to showing the algorithm that these people obviously spending more time on the platform due to your content. So it's going to push it out to that wider audience. It's as simple as that when you think about it. Now, that's not to say that it likes and comments on important because our comments are huge if they are genuine. 3. My Instagram Growth Experience: So my Instagram growth journey, you, his whole Many people tell you nowadays that Instagram is just far too saturated. There are 1 billion active monthly users, and that just means there is too much competition. If you were starting a new account, you've pretty much got 0 chance in groaning account organically. But I'm gonna tell you now that couldn't be further from the truth. And I am proof that that's happened in the first 30 days. Running my account, I reached one hundred, ten hundred followers. Now paid ads, all I had to do was post consistently every single day and engage pretty much as much as I possibly could. Engagement was k when it came to microwave strategy between 01000 followers without a would've done it. My content, yes, was important because at the end of the day is what people for a four people organs click that follow button if your content provides value. But I could have just been pumping out content every single day, but engaging, not really much. So and I would have got nowhere near that 10000 follow-up mug. I probably would have had 100 max and that is just through chance of possibly ranking once or twice on a couple of hashtags. And people just stumbling across there in the recent hashtag feed. But other than that, they wouldn't have been any chance whatsoever in actually growing my account. Instead, what I did was I was actually engaging with other accounts and other creators for at least three hours a day. Now is probably not what he wanted to hear when listening to this course, but when it comes to engagement and growing on Instagram, you really do get out what you put in. If you really want to add bad, if you really want to organically grow on Instagram nowadays, you have to put in the time when it comes to engagement. Like I said in the introduction to the course, when you first start an account, nobody, and I mean, nobody knows who you are. You are nobody. You've got novel authority if not created content before, if not proven yourself, and you're not part of the community. And they are all things that you need to do as a creator, originally, between 0's and 1's, 1000 followers before you start seeing real organic growth. So to do that, what do you do? You post great content consistently every single day that you engage with other creators? Pretty much all day. I was engaging for three hours a day. That is how much I do recommend to you guys. If you can't do that much because I know that is a lot. But if you want it that bad, you can do that. If not more, needs to be engaging for at least one to two hours. But I recommend strongly at least three hours a day. Obviously, some engagement is better than non engagement, so you need to be engaging as much as possible. I hope that point has hit home by now, engage, engage, engage. But it is what today's course is about. You need to be making the most. So when I first started my page, obviously, I sort of had to introduce myself to the community. Nobody knew who I was. It was the first time I was showing up in the comments sections of people's pages. So I didn't want to be too cocky. I wanted to sound like I knew I was doing. So I just had to be as genuine as I possibly could. Obviously with social media experienced in the past, I knew what I was talking about, but it couldn't go full steam ahead with 10-15. Follow its acting like around the show because I didn't no one knew who I was. And as far as they knew, I had no authority whatsoever. But over time, and it does compound, you do tend to see a rise in followers over time because people see you time and time again in the communist section first one or two times. You probably won't see any interaction with your page just for commenting on these accounts. But as you continue to show up, other people that continue to show up in this comment sections, we'll see that you are appearing, dies. What happened with me, say five or six days down a line, I started to get the ball rolling. First five days I was probably gaining about six or seven followers a day, which is better than nothing but them. Five days in ten days in that ramped up. And then it got to a point where I was gaining around 44 hours a day and then I hit 1000 followers. Eventually, on day 30, I set myself the goal of reaching 1000 followers in 30 days. I go to on day 30 and couldn't have been happier. But if you want proof of that, head over to an app called ninja lipsticks, I start tracking my account on day one, but you can head over there and you can see my follower growth over time from day one. So that is living proof. The organic growth still exist. Other accounts have done incredibly well marketing Harry brilliantly, hey, breached 1000 followers in leaves and less time. I think he did it in 20 days, but he engaged like crazy. You've gotta hurry. Needham who's now at like 78 thousand followers. Same solar strategy, but these are just people that have just been able to quit their accounts organically, no paid ads through engagement consistently at the beginning and posting fantastic content. That is all it is, is really all it is. But now, you know about my growth strategy, I'm now going to be talking you through three different growth strategies that you can implement. So I hope you enjoy and see you in the next module. 4. Strategy 1: The $1.80 Strategy: So strategy number one, and if you follow Gary Vionnet shark, you would have heard this one before. It's the infamous dollar 80 strategy. Now if you haven't followed Gary vanish OK, and you have no idea who he is, then you're probably thinking, what the hell, $1.80, what is that? But don't worry, I am going to explain it. So a $1.80 is basically this overall value you want to reach. And every single comment or a piece of engagement you have with someone that counts as your $0.02 to sense, as in $0.52, adds up to a dollar to sense as in the currency, that is what each engagement counts ads. So in order to reach $1.80, you have to be engaging 90 times a day. If you engage 90 times a day, every single day, and I mean every single day, you can't just do this every now and again. You will see phenomenal growth. But this engagement I must stress cannot be a fire emoji, great post exclamation mark. Nothing along those lines. You may as well not be commenting at all if you are engaging on that. Trust me, people do. On my page, I take no notice whatsoever. I don't even reply most of the time, no-one's going to click on to your profile because you're not interesting. You're adding no further value to the post whatsoever. Don't post at all. If you're going to do that. Instead, you need to be genuine. You need to take note of what the people have been talking about in that piece of content. You need to talk about something like this. Hey, this was a great post about topic, whatever they did, I particularly liked your point. You made about blank something that you have picked out from the post. You can then put that into the comment section there. And then you can go, in my personal experience, bloody volleyball, I did this that shows that you have really, really consumes their content. And then you are adding further value that might increase your chances of getting a pinned comment as well if you have been on in Scrum recently, this is a new thing that they have introduced. Pinned comments are when creators can actually pin three comments to the top of the comment section. So there are three favorite comments and they will show up at the top of the Comments section that every single person that comes and look at that post. So if you were being completely genuine with your comments and providing as much value as possible, then you increase the chance. So not only are you gaining exposure, food, just commenting in the first place, you have that chance of actually being a pinned comment. And as a result, you make an even more page views. Especially. Imagine if you've got pinned to Gary Viner, juxtaposed his 8.7 million followers, something around that range. You would have the opportunity to be exposed to millions of people just through being pinned on his post. So be as genuine as you can if you're engagement. Know far emojis, no strong arms, no great posts, No, I love this pure, genuine engagement. That is why you see the results. That is where you succeed and say that's the dollar 80 strategy. You need to be commenting or engaging whatever you wanted to, at least 90 times a day, every single day. That is 90 times naught point naught two, your $0.02 dollar AT that dollar 80 strategy introduced to us all by the man himself, Gary vanish. Ok, so that was the first strategy you could implement if you didn't like that, Don't worry for tomorrow for you. So let's jump into the next module where I give you strategy number two. 5. Strategy 2: The 10 x 2 Strategy: So we are now going to be talking about strategy number two. And I like to call this one the ten times to strategy because you're going to be following ten different things on two different topics. Now, that may sound confusing right now, but let's jump into my computer. Well, I can tell you a little bit more about the strategy and actually walk you through how to do it. So the ten X2 strategy, let's dive in. The ten X2 strategy may sound like some complete gibberish cheer at the moment, but don't worry, I am going to explain it. So the ten accounts for the fact that you are going to be following ten different things in each of these two categories you see at ten x t2. So you've got creators and hashtags. These are your two different categories. And within each, you are going to pick out ten different creators and ten different hashtags. Now, you may be thinking, okay, where do I find ten different creators in my niche? If you look at my niche, for example, I am within social media marketing now you only need to know one big created within your niche to begin with, to then find others. So I know for a fact, Dave, tell us, is a big creator within the social media marketing niche at the moment, a 152 thousand followers. So he's a great person to engage with. Because if I get as pin comment, monopolies pieces of content or I get highlights, I go to the top of the comment section, then people are obviously going to be exposed to my page. So he's a great person to begin with. But if I click this down arrow here, you can see other people that are closely related to his content. Now I already follow all of the other big pages. But this for you, if you don't follow them already woke, show up with all of the other larger created within your niche. No, I know personally the other creators that are large, as I mentioned, so I've already noted these down in my notes sections. If I head back here, you can see here I've got Dave, tell us the hurry Needham marketing Harry, Danielle Allen, crystalline Incas. And I can just click through on all of these and when I need to engage with them, all, it takes us a click. It takes me through to their page. I can engage accordingly. So actually having doing different creators noted down saves a lot of time. You can just click on one, engage twice, click on the next, engaged twice, and go through by step. So a good way to find all the web links is obviously to go over on the Instagram web page and do this. You can then copy and paste them into your notes, which will then obviously go onto your phone if you are on iPhone. And then you can just click through on the link. And it will take you when you're on your iPhone to the page on the app that you need to go to. So that is how you find your creators. So you can see I have ten different creators listed. So when I went to engage with my ten different creators, I will then just click through on those. Now Hashtags. Do the same for hashtags. Now, to find hashtags, again, you can just go onto people that you follow and you can see which hashtags they are using. I know Lucas here is a quite a large creator and my name, if I click on More, I can see the hashtags that he uses. Obviously, if I go on these hashtags, there will be other content creators with him when nature, I can engage with those hashtags. And those hashtags will be great for growth for my account. So I can just copy and paste ten different hashtags within which he is using as a great way to find hashtag group in your niche and those which you engage with. So again, what have I done? I've headed over to the webpage for each of these hashtags, for example, social media expert copy and pasted that link, headed back to Word. And there we have, we have ten different hashtag links. So now we have or ten different creators and ten different hashtags. Now what does the to stand for? The two stands for the fact that each time we engage with either one creator or one hashtag, We are going to engage two times, two times, so that we have, we have ten different creators, we have ten different hashtags. And each time we engage, we're going to be engaging twice. Ten x two. So now how do you structure this piece of engagement? Now I split up into different timings. So what am I won't engage with the ten different creators. And then at ten, the hashtags, 12 creators to hashtags for creators, you get it. And it's nice to break it up between these two hour chunks because it doesn't then fill is tedious. If you were to just sit here and engage for hours upon hours upon hours, you would just get frustrated, you'd get bored. Your engagement will become lethargic and it just wouldn't be as effective. Whereas if you split it up into different sections, every time you come back to engage, your feeling refreshed and you're ready to engage with value and genuine engagement. So I split it up between two different hours. But if you can see here, we are having eight different periods where we're actually doing this. And within those eight different periods, we're engaging 20 times. So that totals a 160 pieces of engagement within a day. Now, ties way more than the dollar 80 strategy that I made before. But it may feel like much less, and it may be much less strenuous or new because you already have these processes in place where you've got everything is saved and you can just click through. So this, I would probably say, is more effective than a $1.80 strategy because you're getting 70 more pieces of engagement per day. And it may not feel like you're putting in as much effort because you're doing it over a more prolonged period of time. So there you have it. A ten X2 engagement strategy. This is one of my favorites. So it's definitely one that you should be implementing. 6. Strategy 3: The 3 Hour Split : So moving on to strategy number three, the final strategy that you guys can implement as your engagement strategy. And this is just a three hour split. As I did mention at the beginning of the course, you should be engaging for at least three hours a day. So this is the strategy I actually used to getting to that 100 photos and 30 days. So I know for a fact this one works. The other two definitely work because they have been used by other creators and they have been proven. But this one is a phenomenal one. I completely enforce it because it worked for me. So but will likely work for you as well. But it's basically a three hour strategy. So our number one, this is going to consist of outreach to new accounts. So like this strategy number two, this could be going on to new hashtags and scrolling through those hashtags and commenting on lots of different creators, lots of different posts that have created content for that hashtag that is reaching out to a new account. Or you can be going on to the followers of big creators just go into their following feed because obviously people are following them because they've got your consent. If you pose similar content is likely that they're going to like your content as well. So you can go on to the following list and engage with content from people on their following list. Or you can go on to people on their comment section. If you want people that highly engaged with your content, see which people engage with other people's content, engaged with this. And if they then follow you, it's likely that they're going to engage with your content. They are the people you weren't following you because they are engaged followers. But this is all Outreach to new accounts. New accounts being key for the first hour. So moving on to our number two. And this is going to be engaging with people that you already follow. So people that are showing up in your feed. Now it's important to keep relationships with people that you are already following, with people that are already engaging with your content because it's no good having someone that just engages with your contempt for a week, I'm follows you or then just stops engaging. If you found someone that said, loyal follower, a loyal fan, you want to keep it that way. She need to make sure that you continue to engage with their content to keep them engaging with yours. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day, it's all about building relationships. The more you can build that relationship with someone, the more likely they are to become a Friend, friends, or people you want on social, the kids in the name, you have to be social on social media. So the more people that you can make friends with, the more likely you are going to have that loyal follower base and people that engage with your content on a daily basis. If you're posting daily that you should be, then you want to have people that do engage with you daily to maximize that return on your content. Because if you've got high engagement, that boat well with the algorithm, and the algorithm is going to push your content out to a wider query for people, you get increased growth in your audience. Or one big cycle works really well for you as a creator. And that's all because you have built a really loyal follower base with your followers. So you need to make sure that you are reengaging with people that already engaged with your content. Make sure you spend at least one hour a day, also engaging people within your feed. So now we have done one hour outreaching to new individuals. And then with our two, we are engaging with individuals that we have already built relationships with because we want to maintain those relationships. So now we have done two hours in our number three, you are going to be responding. So so within hours, number 12, you are going to be getting a lot of responses when you were engaging with a new audience. You may have been asking these people questions, they've responded. You might need to respond back. If you've been engaging with people in your feeds, again, you might have put a question, they might have asked you something back, you respond. You might have DMZ, This is where you respond in a DMZ, DEMs are everything, especially if you've got a product or service, this is where you can actually begin to sell things. I could probably make another course on examined on selling in the DMZ. But you want to actually build those relationships in the DOM. So you don't want to just be engaging with people with, if you've got a follower that consistently engages with your content on a daily basis, reaching out to them on DM. When you reach up to the one Dm, you can learn more about them as an individual that will then in turn make them more likely to become loyal fan in that engagement will continue. So you need to be making sure that you are responding to your DMZ on a daily basis. Answering those questions, finding more about your followers and just building those relationships. And then another thing I also do in this responding stage is respond to people's stories. Stories are a huge part of Instagram nowadays. Instagram a constantly testing different ways of presenting stories in your feed. For example, at the moment they're testing two separate columns, not just the one that you may be used to. So the fact that in Scrum RACI testing two columns and taking up almost half your screen where the story features shows how important they are to the platform. So you need to be using them as a creator, but you also need to be responding to stories with your engagement strategy. Turn. When you respond, obviously that sends the response as a TM. The DEM is where you build the relationship with the individual, like I've just mentioned, and then you can continue their wrong. So that rounds up the three our engagement strategy. So just to quickly recap, our number one is outreach to new accounts. Our number two is outreach took accounts you already follow an hour. Number three is all about responding. So there you have it. There are the three engagement strategies you need to implement into your Instagram engagement strategy. Now let's head over to the next module where we have the course conclusion and your project. 7. Class Conclusion & Your Project: So there we have it. They are the three Instagram engagement strategies you need to be implementing to your engagement strategy in order to propel and grow your audience. These are specially important, as I mentioned, between 0, one hundred, ten hundred followers stage as you begin to grow more organically because you may get on the suggested for you tabs page, your content may start reaching the Explore page duty in Scrum algorithm. You can slowly turn down your engagement time and focus more on the quality of your content that as what I have done as a content creator now. But as I said, from 0 to 1000, engagement is your number one priority. So I hope you have really, really learned something from those three strategies I've taught you today. And in those first couple of modules where I told you about my experience and why engagement is so important and how it corresponds with the algorithm. So now time for your class project. Now for your class project, I did mentioned an app called ninja latex earlier on in the episode. I need you to download this app first. I've got nothing to do with it. It's just a great app that you can use to review your analytics. And I want you to download it and search for your account. And then when you actually search for your account and click on it, it will tell you your current engagement re, value. I want you to screenshot that. In screenshot your value just as a reference point so that you can go back to it in the future to see how this has improved. Now, I want you to pick one of the three engagement strategies that I have told you about in today's class. Now, implement that strategy for 30 days. It took me 30 days to reach 1000 followers. If you do one of these strategies properly for 30 days, I believe that you can reach that mark to obviously some people grow much slower. Some people can grow much quicker. She might get more. You may get less, but you are increasing your chances of growing your audience because you were reaching out to more individuals. I'm not promising anything. The more work you put in, the more work you will get out. It's as simple as that. If you want to engage for more hours per day than I suggest, by all means, do you see a higher reach because you are reaching out to more individuals? But anyway, back to the point, I want you to implement one of these Engagement Strategies for 30 days, not a week. Then come back to me a week and go, oh, this isn't working. It won't because you've only been doing it for seven days. Give yourself 30 days. And then once those 30 days or up, head back onto ninja politics. See your new engagement rate value and screenshot that. Then as your course project, I want you to post those two screenshots side-by-side and tell me the Instagram strategy that you've implemented, that is your course project. And I wish you luck if you think that these tips I've told you today have given you an idea on your own Instagram engagement strategy by all means, use R. I still would love to see your results because what I've said is obviously inspired you to go off and do some things I'd like to see what you come up with and then you can come back and actually tell me your engagement strategy. And the class can actually learn something new from you. But if you did enjoy today's skill share class, I just want to say that I am the host of a podcast called social media marketing school. I will leave a screenshot here. Now if you are interested in social media marketing, I post episodes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Mondays are about paid ads. Wednesdays are about Instagram growth, and Fridays about pretty much anything. It's a lot of, uh, uh, go out on a whim episode where I just talk about something that I want to talk about. So if you are interested in social media marketing of C, that is a free resource. It's available on Apple, Spotify, Google pretty much any podcast platform to search, social media marketing, SCO, and you will find it head over there as a great resource for you guys to learn more about me and social media marketing. But if you've got any questions, we've got the, anything I've mentioned in today's class, you can even leave a discussion point or head over to my Instagram page at the marketing, Ethan, leave another screenshot and just reach out to me on a semi a DM, and I will get back to you no matter what or you could also give me updates on your engagement strategy. Let me know how it's going. I'd love to hear from you guys and get to know you a little more. But if you have made it to this point in today's cause, thank you for tuning in, and I hope to see you in my other courses.