With Instagram already having more than 800 million monthly active users, out of which 70% follow at least one business, it has become the social media of preference of small businesses. However, as many brands have discovered, it is simply not enough to publish interesting content because you need your followers to engage with you by liking your posts, commenting on them, and sharing them. If there is a lack of engagement, it is very unlikely to translate to more website traffic generation and have an impact on conversions. Some useful tips for boosting your engagement:

Publish Interesting Content

Followers are flooded by millions of posts that are uploaded every day and unless your content is really interesting and stands out from the rest, it is unlikely that your followers would stop by to engage with you. Attempt to tell a story with every picture or video that you post for better involvement. If you are clueless about the sort of content that your followers like, find out what your competition is doing and try to go along the same lines but in a better fashion to earn free Instagram likes. Instead of relying on just your own resources for generating content, it may help to hire professional photographers or content editors so that you can post top-class content.

Use the Right Hashtags

In the world of Instagram and many other social media, hashtags are the only way that followers seek out content that is of interest to them. With the flood of Instagram posts that every follower faces, more than 70% of the content goes unseen. Therefore, it becomes all the more necessary for you to include the most relevant hashtags so that your posts can be more easily discovered by users. Ideally, all your posts should have anywhere between three to seven hashtags. While you should include that hashtags that are most common in your industry, you should also try to identify those that are less common but relevant all the same to increase your chances of being discovered in the search results. Try to see if you can use trending hashtags with your posts to take advantage of the sport in the interest.

Engage Actively with Your Followers

Engagement is a two-way process so instead of just sitting back and enjoying the likes and comments by your followers, you should actively interact with them by thanking them, and giving value-added responses to their feedback. Also, go ahead and visit the page of your followers as well as other users and start liking their content and initiate a dialogue with them. When these users see an active interest displayed by you, they are also liable to follow you back.

Conclusion

Among the best ways of boosting your engagement level is to feature user-generated content on your page. Followers can be encouraged to contribute photos of how they are using your products or solving their issues and you can feature them in your posts. Conducting interesting contests is also a good way of keeping your followers locked in.