How to increase your reach on Instagram

Let’s talk about how to improve Instagram reach. We will also talk about increasing engagement because if the rate is high it's a signal for the IG algorithms to show your content to more people.

Despite the new Instagram algorithms, posting time hasn’t lost its importance. A good moment for posting always helps to increase organic Instagram reach. Post when most of your audience is online to reach more people. 

In a business account, it’s way easier. The Insights available in it, which is an advanced analyzing tool. It provides information about when your followers are more active. 

Day time is known to be the best for posting. But it's not the one-size-fits-all posting time. Account owners still have to dig into the statistics. 

If the organic reach improvement is necessary in a Personal Instagram account, users need to experiment with the posting time. Write on a paper or in a device notepad when you post. Analyze what day and hour the engagement rate is higher. Of course, the method takes much time and effort, but the it works well.

Video content is becoming increasingly popular. It is not only pictures anymore which are in demand on Instagram. People love short videos. Still you must work on their quality to have them watched.

With Reels introduction, it became easy to boost your Instagram reach organicaly. You deffinitely should add such videos to your profile. Hundreds of users will see them!

But what about posts? According to the studies, pictures get more likes and comments than videos. But image approach is not an option for everybody. Purely photo content is not applicable to some projects. 

One of the News Whip’s researches revealed that photos do generate more likes in an account. But videos get twice more comments than the hearts.

No one is able to say for sure if pictures or videos are more valuable on Instagram. But there is a certain thing. A user has to make more effort to leave a comment, than to like. Thus, content with more comments is the priority for range algorithms since it encourages users better. 

As we said above, if your goal is to improve reach on Instagram, then you should aim to improve your engagement. The best way to figure out what works best for you — photo or video — is to peek at your IG Insights or experiment. 

Try different ways to make your Instagram posts engaging: try different visuals and topics, add music, add long and short captions, hashtags etc. In Insights you will see what works best for your account.

Polls and raffles are a social media marketing classic. It consistently gives good reach on Instagram. The magic is in motivating and direct call to action that is supposed to be useful for the account. But the questions and raffles should be really interesting and easy to do for the users.

Let’s look at the good examples of engaging people in the activity:

You may want to pin a comment under such Instagram posts. For example, pin a user's comment with the best story. This can inspire users to write their own story. Or pin your comment with prize draw terms.

Stay within reasonable limits to have raffles consistently raise your Instagram account engagement. One successful campaign doesn’t mean you should run another one the next day. Users quickly get bored with the contests and questions. So do it rarely, but suggest really good ideas. 

Many SMM beginners face the question. It’s difficult to control a big number of participants. There are a lot of services that make it easier. Comment Picker — to give just one example. This is an automated service that picks a comment and checks whether the user meets all the contest conditions. You just need to set them.

But you can use any alternative service you like. 

Crowdtap reported that user-generated content is 50% more trustful. And it is 35% highly valuable for the audience. Publications made by a commercial account itself are usually associated with advertisement. 

So, we highly recommend to built friendy and honest relationship with the target audience. It’s not that difficult to encourage creating user-generated content. Post creative works and reviews from the subscribers, provide discounts for posts with your products. A brainstorm helps to come up with lots of good motivations.

Who doesn't know how to add Stories nowadays? Those should read our article on how to post a Story in less than a minute. Stories are very popular and stimulate audience activity. They are placed at the top of the feed, so users are bound to notice them.

Popular Stories are an extremely positive signal for Instagram algorithms. If you succed to engage users, you are likely to increase reach. Encourage their interaction with polls, questions, surveys and other great ideas. 

These are the idea for your inspiration.

We asked subscribers a question and then posted the replies in Stories. 

The recommendations are obvious but worth mentioning. You won't arrive at great marketing results without advertising on the internet. And it is nesessary if you want to increase reach on social media.

Yes, Instagram ads are expensive. But it is affordable even with a strictly limited budget. Understanding your audience and target marketing knowledge will make the expenses reasonable and the ads effective. Then, even a small amount of money suffices to get better organic reach on Instagram. 

Users see great amounts of content every day. If you exhaust the audience with gigabytes of dubious Instagram posts, it results in a low reach rate. Users get used to you, like and comment less. Engagemend dropping is a bad signal for Instagram. You are shown to peopel less often. 

Posting a few really interesting photos is always better than overloading Instagram feed with mediocre images. If you share photos rarely, your followers anticiapate them like a holiday. It’s similar to informational fasting. 

If you feel the urge to post every day that is hard to resist, we recommend using your enthusiasm and energy for working on the content qulity, not making a new photo or video. Qulity stndards seem to increase every day, you can't post "any" picture anymore if you want high engagement and reach.

Instagram demands unique content. If the social platform is used for promotion, forget about cross-posting and copying the content from the other platforms.

The posts in your profile should be a total match to the audience's expectations. Remember: vivid visual images are appreciated most of all here.

Following trends is the only way to get users be active in your account. A business should try all the available formats and tools. For example, many forget that new arrivals can be demonstrated in Stories. In the feed posts, the goods can be shown as a carousel of astonishing pictures.

Post about popular events to be in trends.

Another tool to increase organic Instagram reach rate is a live stream, which is also unreasonably ignored. Live video doesn't have to be long. Going live for several minutes is enough to show something really funny or interesting. Live video is direct communication with your audience, which raises the account's credibility and engagement. What's more, such streams have a priority in the users’ feed. 

In a broad sense, Instagram promotion is a race for the maximum organic reach on Instagram. Creating content, communication and analyzes with users are only tools in achieving the main goal. So, you should think about promotion optimization.

Using various services for automatization is an essential base for benefiting in social media. Now we have different tools to schedule posting, run a contest, spy on ads of  your competitors and monitor their social accounts, and other ones. With them, you’ll have enough time to create worthy content. 

Now you know how to increase organic reach on Instagram. It’s not as complicated as it might seem at first sight. Choose any method to start with. Try them all.