Get more followers on Instagram guides: Here’s a trick that I use for my ecommerce businesses. For every product and product category for my stores, I have done the research to see which are the most popular Instagram hashtags around those product categories. I came up with 15-20 popular hashtags for each category of products I sell, as well as a base of 5-10 popular tags that describe my brand and product offering overall. Finally, I also created a list of popular local specific hashtags that relate to my brand. I can easily open my Evernote and copy my standard brand, product and location specific hashtags to post with each photo. Some Instagram scheduling tools also let you save caption templates that you can use to store your hashtag groups.

However, the days of buying thousands of followers, likes, and views and then raking in big dollars through influencer outreach are long gone. In today’s world, there are lots of tools available to brands that can help them figure out what percentage of someone’s following and activity is fake or botted. That’s why you need free views and interaction from real people! We’re talking about real users who frequently use Instagram and actually have something to do with your niche of content.

With a long-term partnership, a brand can build stronger affinity with the influencer’s audience. With regular collaborations, the audience will soon start to build trust in your brand, just as they have with the influencer. So it’s important to not only find the right influencer to partner with, but to also build a collaboration project that resonates with their audience if you want to gain more followers from your influencer marketing efforts. Check out how fashion micro-influencer Danielle Ward of @littlefashbird regularly partners with clothing brand Warehouse. Her long-standing partnership with the brand means that her followers are more welcome to seeing and engaging with her partnership posts.

Beyond adding the appropriate hashtags and using the best filters, you should also be considering the timing of your posts. A targeted approach is to analyze what has and has not worked for you in the past. By visiting IconoSquare’s optimization section, you can get a detailed analysis of your posting history vs. engagement. This report will also highlight the best times of the day and days of the week to post. The dark circles indicate when you usually post media. The light gray circles shows when your community has been interacting. The biggest light gray circles represent the best times for you to post.

So with a shift in how we measure engagement, it’s only natural that we change how we try to improve engagement on our feeds. It’s not just about likes anymore — Instagram engagement is going to become a lot more holistic in 2020! To help you improve your Instagram strategy, we’re sharing our best strategic tips to boosting engagement on your posts, videos and stories.

You won’t see much success in increasing traffic to your blog by ‘dumping’ information on social media, in fact, you might even be ‘filtered’ by Twitter for not interacting enough (see Twitter post for my horrible experience of this). To recap: use these social media scheduling tools to help plan and manage your shares (and time) but don’t forget to engage with your audience. I quickly realised that there is very little point in publishing poor quality photos on any social media platform, especially Instagram. I saw a significant increase in Instagram engagement when I began editing photos (using Lightroom) and only sharing my best images. I plan my grid on Planoly. The app lets me upload images and move them around until I get the perfect composition.