Get improved Instagram engagement with these latest insights

If Instagram is your go-to for connecting with fans and peers, these new insights into the platform could prove invaluable to your marketing and social engagement!

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

No one can be great at every social platform so it’s better to pick one and get really good at it in order to get the best performance. That usually means you’re going to go where most of your fans are already. If that’s Instagram for you, then you’ll find these latest Instagram insights from Sked Social and Social Insider after analyzing over 100 million posts should help your engagement. Here’s what the study found.

• During the first half of 2020 when the pandemic was raging, the Instagram engagement rate saw a notable increase. Since that time it has fallen back to around 2019 levels.
• If you want higher Instagram engagement, use its Carousel feature, especially if your account is under 5,000 followers. However, if your following is higher, you’re better off choosing video. The thought is that Instagram is pushing more Carousels to user’s feeds.
• If you want more Likes, then Carousels are the way to go as they get more of that engagement type than any other media.
• If you want more comments, video posts across all profile sizes get more.
• Believe it or not, shorter captions of up to 10 words are what users prefer to interact with, especially when combined with Carousels. Any more and the engagement actually goes down. That being said, for videos captions with more than 30 words or more work better.
• People don’t usually interact with the same post more than once, but they will interact with other posts if they like the first one. The social media rule of 7 applies here, in that it might take as many as 7 posts viewed before someone Likes or comments.
• Size matters when it comes to Instagram accounts. Accounts that have a following above 100K and rely on a lot on videos have a median number of comments that are 4 times larger than the smaller ones.
• Profiles under 5K have the highest reach rate, and carousels have two times more potential than video for them. A straight up image post is the next best option.

These Instagram insights tell us that if you’re serious about the platform, we should all be using Carousels more, but also observe the caption length in order to get the best engagement.