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In recent months we have seen how Instagram Engagement is declining. According to a report prepared by Jumper Media, engagement has been reduced from January 2018 to January 2019 from 2.6% to 1.2% today.
This is causing brands to be fuming and wondering how they can return to the engagement they had enjoyed in the early years of Instagram’s operation.
In this post we will see the reasons why this change has occurred and some tricks to be able to improve our results.
What is Engagement?
Before I start seeing what’s happening on Instagram, I’d like to review the definition of engagement.
For a brand, there are several important parameters within Instagram such as, number of followers or posts posted in a certain time frame, but what really matters in order to get results is Engagement.
We can find several definitions, but to me one that I like, I have found it on the blog of the social media analysis tool Metricool:
When referring to engagement rate on Instagram, we are talking about the degree of loyalty on the part of your followers on this social network.
Metricool
It’s not about the number of fans you have on your profile, but the degree of engagement,interest and interaction your followers have with your photos, videos, Instagram stories or content.
There are different ways to measure engagement, as you can do it based on the number of followers, depending on the number of inter-features, etc… The important thing is that you always use the same formula.
As in this post we are talking about the change in general engagement in brand accounts, we will use the formula based on the total number of followers:
For example in this post of the famous Spanish influencer Maria Pombo published on May 15.
The influencer had gotten 5 days later 81,935 like + 217 comment. With the million followers that the Engagement of this post has at the time would have reached 8.21.
Reasons why the change in Instagram engagement is occurring
Several are the reasons why this relationship we had a few months ago has changed.
1. Algorithm
- The famous Instagram Algorithm has been modified so that users see before the content that according to the social network is more relevant to them.
- This change has made the three most important points for Instagram since the end of 2018:
- Interest. The social network gives increasing importance to the content that is published and the interest that it may generate in users.
- Timeliness . The algorithm is favoring the novelty of the publications, so it will show before a post that has been published recently, than one published days ago.
- Relationship. The interaction with users is remembered by Instagram, and will teach them before our post, if we have interacted with them in any way through tags, comments in our feed, or in Stories through stickers,surveys, questions, etc..
2. Saturation of our wall
Since Instagram was born there in 2010, growth has been exponential and today there are more than 1 billion users in the world and more than 15 million in Spain, which makes users more and more accountful, so brand posts are becoming increasingly difficult to see.
We must also add the appearance of advertising on our wall through Instagram Ads, which also adds difficulty to get posts relegated to lower positions. More than 2 million companies are active every month as advertisers on Instagram.
3. New social networks
The emergence of new social networks, also make our users spend time outside of Instagram.
A clear example is the social network Tik Tok (formerly Musicali,) which is hooking millions of users, mostly teenagers, all over the world. In 2018 it has had a 407% increase in downloads.
Facebook has responded with the launch of Lasso,which will be able to play its videos on Instagram Stories. It is about to see who will gain this pulse, or whether the two networks will coexist by dividing the time the user spends with their device
6 Tips for Improving Engagement
As we see, more and more distractions that the user has to see the posts, but it is not all bad news, here we propose some tips to improve the engagement of your users:
- Post at the times when your audience is most reactive. With the importance of recency in the new Algorithm, study what time of day you have the best engagement and don’t hesitate to post at those times.
- Use Stories. The engagement of the videos is getting higher so the relevance of using Stories is getting higher and higher.
- Trending Topics. Inserting tags or mentions of events that are currently taking place will make your posts reach new potential customers.
- Use quality photos and videos that make a difference to your competition.
- Create original and genuine content. As we mentioned above, there is more and more competition trying to reach our target audience, so original and differentiating content will make you create a closer relationship with your customers.
- Use all Instagram utilities. Questions, Countdown, Surveys, etc… This way we will generate more engagement with our customers
And finally, you can always turn to Instagram Ads to improve Instagram engagement
Finally, we highlight the ability to invest in Instagram Ads, as it will be the way to make sure that our posts will be among the first posts of our potential customers.
Instagram Ads offers you the possibility to reach all kinds of customers through its multiple formats, photos, stories, videos, collections, etc.. It also allows you to create audiences based on interests, gender, age and many other variables, so you’ll be showing your ads to your target audience.
Are you ready to let new customers into your e-commerce?
