Instagram has caught the eye of marketers everywhere. It’s relatively new, at least compared to old standbys like LinkedIn and Facebook, and is growing at an incredible rate. It boasts a monthly active user base of more than 600 million, and on top of that, has one of the highest engagement rates of any social media platform.
That makes Instagram especially attractive to marketers trying to better connect with their audiences, but anyone who’s spent time managing an Instagram account knows that those engagements don’t just unfold naturally. You have to earn them, but if you’re not familiar with the advantages and customs of the platform, you might feel lost when you’re just starting out.
So how do you get more engagements, including likes and comments, on Instagram? Try these strategies:
1. Use strong, solid colors.
Your first job is to stand out from the crowd. All your users will likely be following dozens, if not hundreds, of other people and brands — many of whom they’re close to. Cutting through all that clutter isn’t easy, but if you don’t do it, you’ll never grab customers’ attention, let alone earn their likes.
According to a study by Curalate, images with blue as a dominating color tend to get 24 percent more likes than any other color. But images that are dominated by a single color almost always outperform those without one. Make sure that most (if not all) of your images feature shades of one strong color to help them pop out of the newsfeed.
2. Use calls to action.
Just as happens with any other online marketing strategy, if you want to see results, you need a strong call to action. Your landing page is only going to get conversions if you tell your users what to do (whether that’s signing up for an email list, buying a product or submitting information).
Instagram operates by the same principle; if you don’t give your users a clear call to action, they’ll be much less likely to do anything. For example, if you want your users to go to your site, give them a good reason to (you’ll have to…
