The main factor for successful promotion on Instagram is vast reach, which is closely associated with user engagement. Engagement is the total number of social media users viewing posts and stories and interacting with them. Business account owners and bloggers are concerned about this metric directly affecting their profile visibility and income. Your audience needs to be keenly involved in activities offered in your profile so that your page can grow and develop.
Unfortunately, engagement has its peaks and valleys. While you hardly post each twenty-four hours, you can easily shoot stories multiple times a day. This text will read about memes, various interactions, quizzes, games, and how free vector images relate.
Tagging and Mentioning
You can probably start with the feature that many do not consider an effective way to increase engagement, and they are wrong. Mentioning an account has one huge advantage: the likelihood that the said person/company will view the stories tagged, which will lead to a report on their pages.
People get interested in an account marked and click on it, causing mutual promotion. If an opinion leader mentions your story, the level of trust in your profile will increase, which means the number of your followers is likely to rise too. Reposting stories across Instagram profiles can also grow into further cooperation (or something smaller, such as a discount or another pleasant offer). If done correctly, mentioning and tagging result in more interaction on your and the tagged page.
Asking Questions and Giving Answers
The Yes/No poll is the most understandable and popular tool. It requires not only viewing a story but also actively interacting with it. Attaching a poll to your post will increase users’ interest since they will want to return and see the statistics after a while. You can add the icing on the cake with the help of detailed or funny formulations and unhackneyed answers, which will appeal to users.
Another favorite tool for bloggers to increase engagement, the Question sticker, is 80 characters long, giving you and your subscribers quite enough space to share your thoughts and ideas. Although initially created for users to question an account owner, it works both ways and allows you to interrogate subscribers. The most interesting answers/questions can be published within the following stories, thereby showing your loyalty to the audience and generating more content ideas.
The Quiz sticker has as much potential as Questions and Polls but added gamification. You can run your small trivia show by inventing a question related to your story (or vice versa) and giving a maximum of 4 answer choices, with only one correct. Thanks to the game element, the tool attracts many users while educating, entertaining, and collecting feedback.
The Emoji Slider sparks interest in followers and triggers actions to increase user involvement in your story. With this cute tool, you can understand how much subscribers like your content or learn their opinion about anything you want, including your product, services, or brand. Make sure to choose the background and emoji that will be easy to style in tune with your content.
Playing Games
When it comes to games, this is a great interactive experience. The main principle behind the effectiveness of gamification is that it makes users tap on the screen as the story goes. And this, in the end, is an interaction letting the Instagram algorithms know that the content is interesting for followers.
A funny solution would be to attach an entertainment option with a picture, which changes in a split second.
Users will need to click on the screen and pause the story to assemble the image.
Another option is to find a difference between the two stories.
Stories with interactive content provide a better reach than those without it.
Note the main thing: the quality of interactive content and its aesthetic design are crucial.
Inserting Helpful Content
Offer your audience a choice of mobile wallpapers and fine pictures and share them in your story for users to view and use on their own. If you think this is for designers only, you are wrong because anyone will be glad to share a good wallpaper design. Add some flair and connect creative vector images to cool quotes for more inspiration.
In Wrapping Up
It takes some time and effort to improve engagement with Instagram Stories, and different interaction methods will work for different profiles. Some are based on creativity, others — on humor or aesthetics. Each page has its focus and target audience. But the main rule remains universal: the more people interact with your content, the more they trust you. And if you have a commercial page, it is more likely that they will become your clients.
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