Is your Instagram engagement down? If yes, you are not alone. This is one of the most common problems of Instagram users. It’s challenging for businesses to maintain high engagement rate and ensure beneficial social media presence for their brand. There are multiple things you could do to fix it. I love sharing my tips with you and help you get where you want to be when it comes to SMM.
How to determine it – is your Instagram engagement down?
Running diagnostics and reading your analytics frequently is the easiest way to determine if your engagement has decreased. You could calculate this manually but there are free online tools that could give you the numbers within seconds. So, is your Instagram engagement down? Phlanx has a nice Instagram engagement rate calculator that is free and instant. Simply enter your Instagram handle. As engagement rate is dynamic, you don’t need to check this too often. It’s enough to keep an eye on it on a weekly basis and compare the numbers. Keep a diary to easily determine how is your engagement doing over time. Calculating engagement rate every week would give you a realistic view on how your posts are performing.
Why is my Instagram engagement down?
Sometimes we see an obvious decline in engagement and it’s time to act and get things back to normal. Here’s why your engagement could go down:
- You’ve gained a significant amount of new followers that don’t engage. Engagement rate is calculated on the basis of the number of followers you have – it is the total number of interactions your content gets, divided by the number of followers you have, multiplied by 100 (to get the number in %). It’s only logical that your engagement is lower when your followers are growing but they don’t engage with your content.
- Your best posting times have changed. Posting during peak hours is essential for your engagement. With time, these hours and days of the week might shift. Especially when seasons change or when there are holidays. In addition, when you gain new followers their locations and active hours on the platforms are various. All this brings a change into your best posting time frames
- Decrease in hashtags reach. For most people hashtags are a hit or miss and there are weeks that we miss more often than we hit. When your hashtags do well, this could translate in significant engagement. But if we miss a few times in a row, we notice a visible drop.
How to increase Instagram engagement rate?
Now that I’ve covered how to determine if you have a problem and what’s the reason for it, it’s time to give you some tips on how to solve it. Getting back on the horse is tough, but so are you. You can do it! Just follow my lead.
- Get rid of inactive followers. There are softwares that do that but it’s not recommended to use them as Instagram detects this type of ”robots” acting on behalf of your account. You can do this manually. Go to the account that isn’t active but is following you. Block them and then unblock them. Now they are not your follower anymore. Please restrain from intense bulk actions even when doing this manually. Keeping your account safe is a priority
- Post during peak hours only. Keep an eye on your analytics and always post during the rush hours on the platform. This time frame is unique for each account and is determined by the activity of your own followers. Be flexible, and shift your posts when you have the best chance to be seen by most people.
- Update your hashtag strategy. If you notice lower engagement rate for the past week, analyse your hashtags insights for each of your posts and compare it to previous posts. Often your answer lays there. If that’s the case, rethink your hashtag strategy. Find out what has worked well for you before and act on it again. Be aware of banned hashtags or hashtags that sound like they belong to your niche but they actually don’t. Choose hashtags in a size that’s within the reach of your performance and always bring some fresh ones and rotate them.
Follow up and ensure your success. SMM done right
Once you acted upon it, it’s essential to follow up and see if your work and efforts actually made a difference. Instagram is all about being flexible and doing what works best for your account. There is no such thing as ”one-size-fits-all” approach when it comes to SMM.
I hope this is something to help you tackle the challenges Instagram throws at you. If you are hungry fore more inside information, check my take on the topic of Instagram growth service – it’s short, informative and gives some actual answers. And if you are considering Influencer marketing, knowing more about Instagram web viewer is a great way to start.
